marinus18

That is not good. I mean how can you trust her if she doesn't trust you? Also did she explain exactly why you shouldn't move so much in church? And what about that money? Did she try to trace where you spend it on and why?

That whole idea of discipline this way is just really foreign to me. My dad spend most of his time working so I was raised almost exclusively by my mom. She treated rearing as really a skill and she was not afraid to be firm and punish us though she was against corporal punishment. However she treated bratty kids more as a sign of incompetence by the parents than softness. Spanking is the same as she treated it as lazy parenting. Something you use because you are not willing to put in the effort to understand it better. My mom felt that if you had to resort to spankings it meant you already failed somewhere earlier down the line. When I asked her about it she did say she would respect other parents who felt differently but she prided herself that she could keep everyone under control without needing to do that. Everyone always talks about spankings but that is not the only rearing technique available. I think you should have different consequences for different things. For example making a mess means cleaning it up. If for some reason the child is truly not able to clean their mess up then they need to be given a chore that demands a roughly equal amount of labor. Not playing nicely is best dealt with, with a time-out while they are looking at the others having fun. A technique my mom used for mandatory chores was to have 2 chores in our free days, a big one and a small one. If we whined and complained about the chore it's value would be halved and if we did the chore out of our own initiative it counted as double. So if we did our small chore ourselves we only needed to do another small chore instead of a large one. However if we whined about it then we needed to do another tiny chore as well. Equally so with the large chore, if we whined we needed to do another small one while if we did it ourselves we could skip the small chore altogether. Also mom would make it very clear how much time we wasted whining and also name up several things we could have been doing during that time instead. If we had done something bad that our mom couldn't think up a reason for then she wouldn't do anything until she understood why. She could push pretty hard but she would get our reasoning out of us one way or another. Usually when she did our reasoning was pretty stupid and she would really point that out to us. However in those sessions the emphasis was on the reasoning. We were also allowed to talk back if we did so in a calm manner and what we said made sense. She would listen to backtalk but she wouldn't listen to whining. Punishments are mere a reinforcement to get the kids to pay attention. They shouldn't be the end goal. Punishments with me were very rare. Only when we refused to listen. I remember her also being very transparent in her rearing techniques. Often explaining them to us. After all if we had to explain our actions it was only fair she would have to do so as well.

My mom's solution to that was educational. Swear words often have complex origins and she had a rule that we weren't allowed to use words that we didn't understand. So if she heard us say a bad word she would question us rather we knew what it really meant. With swear words we never did so she educated us on it. That really took all the fun out of it.

Bedwetting with me mostly stopped at age 5. Which is actually older than all of my siblings (I have 3, all of which are younger). Though when I was 8 it suddenly started again which confused my mom greatly. After all why would I wet the bed? It's quite cold and uncomfortable. She eventually bought me pull-ups out of necessity since the mattress was starting to get really damaged. My little brother was still in diapers and my little sister was still wearing pull-ups to bed. However the idea of them laughing at me never even came up. In many stories you see the siblings laughing or trying to use it as blackmail but that thought never even arose. They were mostly uninterested and my second younger sister was really my older sister. She mostly was sharing in mom's confusion. They did install rules like no drinking after 7 and always go to the toilet before bed. She never treated those as punishments and mostly just as annoyances since it meant she had to be involved in my bedtime more. I also didn't like the pull ups because they felt awkward and it took me a while to get used to them. However I did grow to like them and I think this is where my love for diapers originated. The bedwetting went on for around 4 months before disappearing as quickly as it came. We kept pull-ups around for another 2 years in increasing sizes before mom felt confident enough to stop buying them. However the mattress protector was kept all the way until I left the nest. When I turned 15 and got an adult sized bed we also bought a fitting mattress protector. It worked wonders for my dust allergy and was also useful against sweat stains. My point is that with me it was treated as a purely practical problem. The idea of punishment or that it was even humiliating never came up. I mostly treated all the measures as just obnoxious.