Brain Food for Pioneering Spirits: for twenty years, German law has guaranteed every child the right to a violence-free upbringing — yet a UNICEF study cited in this room finds many adults still consider a slap appropriate, and the room traces a direct line from that normalization to a sobering statistic: one in three women in Germany has experienced violence from a man. Dr. Yasemin Yazan, Jürgen, Marc, Sabine, Vera and Erdal dig into what actually counts as violence in parenting: the belief-forming power of a throwaway insult or pet name, neglect as one of the most severe harms a child can suffer, whether failing to intervene against bullying is itself a form of violence, and Erdal’s striking image of violence as “a plant that never stops growing” once it takes root in someone. The conversation also pushes into less visible territory: financial dependency between partners, custody conflicts children absorb, and where ordinary house rules end and something more troubling begins.
Note: This session was recorded live in German as part of the Deep Talk Club, so the video above is German-language audio only. What follows is an English translation of the conversation, lightly edited for readability — the back-and-forth between the moderator and participants is preserved, but the original timestamps and speaker names have been left out.
Today the room continues with violence in parenting, looking at one question in particular: how does violence shape a child’s development? That’s the question on the table this morning, under the umbrella of Power & Violence — and there’s real curiosity about the different angles the group will bring to it. As always, everyone is warmly invited to join the conversation live and see where it takes us, both in content and in insight. As a quick reminder, the room is recorded throughout and published afterward, so joining counts as consent to that. There are three simple room rules: a first and last name, a profile photo, and at least one sentence in the bio. Anyone who’d rather stay anonymous, or can’t speak right now for whatever reason, is welcome to use the chat instead — and if something there fits the conversation, it will be picked up. So: violence in parenting — what comes to mind, and how does violence shape a child’s development? What are the first impulses that make you want to jump in?
One participant wanted to reach a little further back before answering directly: for twenty years now, every child in Germany has had a legally guaranteed right to a violence-free upbringing. It’s written into the civil code — corporal punishment, psychological injury and other degrading measures are prohibited. But before answering where that leads, he wanted to come back to something he’d learned from a fellow participant, Jürgen: get clear on the terms first, or the discussion drifts somewhere else entirely. So the real first question is: how do we even define violence? There’s a UNICEF study on exactly this. And if you ask the room, point-blank, how do we feel about violence against children — he’d bet the room is 100% unanimous: not okay, not even worth discussing, violence against children, against young people, against anyone, in any form, is not acceptable. And yet that’s exactly why this topic matters so much today, because despite genuine progress, many adults in Germany still consider corporal punishment appropriate — and corporal punishment includes a smack on the bottom, a slap in the face, and so on. There was a study earlier this year on exactly where that leads: violence against children and young people. One in three women in Germany has experienced violence from a man. Because that’s where it leads — if you’re raised with violence, in whatever form, and it’s normalized as a way of resolving conflict, then one of the downstream effects, among others, is that one in three women in Germany has experienced violence firsthand. That was meant as an opening into the topic.
Picking up on that: does violence in parenting actually look different, or take different forms, from violence in general? The room had already worked toward a definition of violence more broadly and touched on several aspects of it — so is this something distinct, requiring its own definition, or are the same forms at play here as in any other interaction or relationship?
Asked directly, one participant offered a spontaneous definition: violence is simply something the other person doesn’t want. Not power — and it’s worth separating the two, because of course there’s also power over one’s children, in the sense of “you’re going to bed at eight” or “you’re going to school.” But for today, to keep it simple: violence is when I cause someone pain or harm — psychological harm, physical violence — and when I use my strength, including my physical strength, against a child who has nothing to counter it with.
So there’s corporal punishment on one side, and the psychological dimension on the other — which the room had already opened up earlier when discussing the concept of violence more broadly: that it takes different forms and expresses itself differently. And there’s also a bridge here to the point about women experiencing violence — though of course it isn’t only women; men experience it too, perhaps an even more taboo subject. One key thread running through all of this: someone who has experienced violence tends, as a rule, to go on to use violence themselves. With that, the floor went to another participant, Jürgen.
Jürgen wanted to add another layer to the point already raised about being precise with terminology — this time regarding the word “parenting” or “upbringing” itself. He suggested that the way violence is exercised differs, on a meta level, across the two main spheres where upbringing happens: the school context, and the non-school context. The non-school context is, for example, upbringing by parents or close family. School has a certain structural advantage here, in his view: alongside what the civil and criminal codes define as violence, almost every German state has additional guidelines for educators on addressing and preventing violence and abuse — professional guidelines that carry weight for that profession. As far as he’s aware, no equivalent guidelines exist for parents outside of school. And he thinks that distinction matters for the broader question of what actually counts as violence: some parents still believe a smack on the hand today isn’t violence, precisely because there’s no regulation and no public education telling them otherwise. That was meant as his opening contribution.
Building on that: it’s worth looking explicitly at psychological violence, since the conversation so far had mostly circled around the smack on the bottom. But even where that’s absent, there are countless ways to exercise psychological violence in parenting — sometimes entirely unconsciously. So it seemed worth pausing on exactly which aspects come into play there, and what the actual consequences are.
One participant said that sentence from the civil code — about psychological injury counting as violence — had really struck him. Looking at the topic, of course everyone here is against violence. But once you really sit with it: a psychological injury is also violence. He couldn’t recall a specific instance, but he’s sure it has slipped out of him too — telling someone “you’re stupid,” or “I’m so annoyed with you,” or worse, “you’ll never manage that,” or “you’re not like your sibling.” That’s where it starts: becoming aware of it, because only awareness makes change possible — when someone has to justify themselves in that moment, that’s already an act of psychological violence. But if the terms aren’t on your radar, if you’re not aware of what you’re actually triggering in the other person, it just gets absorbed as an ordinary part of everyday life — “it’s not a big deal, everyone does it.” What genuinely shook him in that study was this: once you accept psychological injury as violence too, violence isn’t some rare thing happening somewhere out there — it’s happening in a huge number of families across Germany. That’s exactly why the study exists. Violence isn’t confined to families we have nothing to do with, families with some strange social situation — it happens everywhere, including among people we know. Because a psychological injury is violence too.
Absolutely — and insults were just one example. There are also labels, some of which cut well below the belt, all the way up to pet names used pejoratively. The line for where violence begins is already quite thin here. And it also depends on the child’s own experience of it — one child might perceive the exact same thing very differently from another, which matters too. What’s interesting is that these labels, insults, pet names and so on happen between adults as well, in all kinds of relationships. So what actually makes the difference specifically in parenting? Is it just as bad, worse, less bad? How should we even look at that?
Before answering, one participant wanted to bring in an example he’d only just thought of — something he’d lived through himself and never thought twice about until reading it referenced in the UNICEF study. As a small child, maybe four or five, whenever he hadn’t done something he was supposed to, his mother would tell him the rag-and-bone man was coming — or, depending on the region, “the black man” — and that if he didn’t clean his room, or whatever it happened to be, the rag-and-bone man would come and take him away. In his own case it didn’t leave him deeply afraid, but he did think about it. The UNICEF study, though, found that when even more frightening figures are invoked — a monster coming to eat you, someone coming to take you away — it can leave very long-lasting effects on children, with serious consequences. And these are often just sentences that slip out casually. The explanation given was one we need to keep reminding ourselves of: children experience the world completely differently from adults. What we might dismiss as a silly, throwaway remark — not meant seriously at all — children experience as an entirely different world. And it’s genuinely hard, as an adult, to put yourself back into that world; if we could, remarks like that probably wouldn’t come out at all.
That’s a fascinating point, and it triggers another thought: we tend to think of violence as an action — something done, whether verbal or physical. But the question that comes up is to what extent failing to act can itself be a form of violence in parenting. There’s a concrete example here: for several weeks or months now, one participant’s son Elias has felt bullied by classmates at school. It’s weighed on him heavily, to the point that he was actually counting down the days to the last day of term — not because he disliked lessons or had any issue with teachers, but because of his classmates. And whenever teachers were brought in and something was said, it might get addressed briefly, but nothing really changed, and the situation never actually improved for him. Even now, into the school holidays, it’s still on his mind — he’s already thinking about how it’ll play out at his new school. So the question is: is failing to intervene — not acting — itself a form of violence, or does it support violence in some way? Is it violence at all, or is it simply looking away, watching, allowing it to happen?
That took a moment’s thought for one participant. It’s not something he only observes in that one situation. On one hand, the bullying his friend’s son experienced is really about not feeling like you belong to the group — being excluded from it. And that can happen within a family too: phrases like “you’re not my daughter anymore” are also a form of exclusion from the group. That fear of exclusion is deeply human. And yes — people, himself included, tend to take the path of least resistance. On a tram, say, he isn’t sure he’d physically intervene; he might call for help on his phone, but he’d be afraid to get into a physical confrontation, partly from things he’s witnessed or read about — he can’t prove how many people are carrying a knife these days, and so on. He genuinely doesn’t know how he’d react if it came to physically stepping in to help someone. But he also has to be honest with himself: looking away is itself a form of taking on responsibility — of supporting what’s happening by not stopping it. He was grateful for the question, because it’s made him think more about his own behavior in public and how he might intervene going forward, so he isn’t complicit in the violence even when he isn’t the one committing it.
Jürgen picked up the thread, tying it to the still-open question: does it make a difference whether these dynamics start with a child, or emerge later in life? In his view, neglect is one of the most serious emotional or psychological interventions into a child’s development there is. We know from developmental research that the first four to six years are when a child’s capacity for emotional competence is largely formed — and part of that, for him, is the formation of basic trust: the process of a child learning, and then having it confirmed again and again, that someone is there for them in the moments that matter. Whether it happens outside school or, later, within it, neglect is an extremely serious intervention in a developing person’s growth — one that, according to many specialists in the field, can be very difficult to undo later in life, because it strikes at the root of our character and emotional formation. Neglect, in his view, is one of the cruelest parenting tools there is, and he includes in that definition a deliberate exclusion, a withholding — for instance, a withholding of love.
That’s a fair and important point — and it’s genuinely hard to say where it begins and where it ends. The room had touched before on the different limbic layers, from a brain-research perspective, and noted that certain things are already being stored during pregnancy — not consciously recallable, but present nonetheless. The first years shape these limbic layers in very different ways depending on what gets stored, and those roughly first six years carry particular weight; the older a child gets, the more those imprints, while still changeable, become genuinely difficult to change.
Following on from that: it matters, then, when a teacher, parent, or other caregiver enacts neglect — whether through withholding love or simply not caring enough — because all of that feeds into whether basic trust can form at all, or whether a child is left feeling, in a sense, psychologically abandoned. With that, the floor turned to another participant, Erdal, thanked for his patience in waiting to speak.
Erdal said the topic stirred up a great deal for him. Listening to the story about Elias, he found himself thinking both of his own childhood and of raising his own son. His son is unusual in that there is remarkably little violence in him — and, as a direct consequence, he struggles badly with violence or bullying directed at him from elsewhere, because he simply has no framework for where it comes from. He’s such a kind, empathetic person that he couldn’t imagine inflicting something that unpleasant on anyone else, and so he’s far more shaken by the mere fact that such things exist than actually wounded by them personally. What Erdal tries to teach someone like that is: at the end of the day, you are responsible for getting yourself help — whether you break through it yourself or with support from others — but you cannot simply endure it forever. He’s started telling his son, quite directly by now: you can’t assume there are no jerks in the world. That’s simply a fact, and they will act on you. He knows there’s no fight in his son, that he doesn’t want to fight — but one way or another, life will eventually force him to stand his ground, verbally or physically. There’s no getting through life without some form of confrontation, however much that might go against his son’s nature. His son understands the argument intellectually, and has plenty of evidence from his own experience that it’s true — but Erdal senses he’s still holding onto the hope that he’s done meeting jerks for the rest of his life, and Erdal is gently trying to teach him that isn’t the case.
The second point Erdal wanted to raise: children who experience violence, or learn it as a coping mechanism, find it extraordinarily hard to unlearn later. It’s as if violence lies dormant inside a person, simply waiting for a chance to surface once it’s been planted there — like a plant that never stops growing, that keeps expanding wherever it’s been rooted. That’s why he considers any form of violence inflicted on children essentially unforgivable: because you have to assume it will accompany that person for their entire life. And it makes no difference to him whether it’s physical or psychological — if anything, he’d rate psychological violence as more severe in the long run, because physical violence eventually fades, while psychological violence stays.
That challenge — the point Erdal raised — is exactly the hard part. It’s easy to say a child also needs to learn how to cope: to learn to ask for help, and also to learn to help themselves in some way. But if asking for help means telling an adult, and nothing actually changes, and it just gets brushed off with “well, they need to learn to deal with it” — that’s precisely the question: when is it actually necessary to step in, how is it really being handled, and what does it take, in that moment, to avoid leaving lasting psychological harm?
The conversation then turned to Sabine. Her eldest daughter started school very early, which was good for her in some ways, though she wasn’t quite physically ready for it, and she kept going up to her class teacher for a hug. When Sabine and her husband asked the teacher whether that was really okay, the teacher told them: every child needs what it needs, and as long as Christiane feels she needs a hug, she’s welcome to hug me — that’s completely fine with me. Sabine isn’t sure how many teachers would say that; this one was genuinely excellent, and the need faded on its own before long anyway — that was just the beginning of what she wanted to say. The other point: earlier in the conversation, a few of the phrases we say to children as throwaway lines came up. The problem isn’t that it’s just one sentence — it’s that when it’s repeated, it becomes a belief a child internalizes, one they may well still be wrestling with as an adult. And we’re probably not even aware, most of the time, that we’re causing that kind of harm. It isn’t inflicted with a stick, it isn’t violence in the obvious sense — but it lies dormant in someone forever. And if it’s never worked through, it just stays there.
Exactly right — and that’s where the medium- and long-term effects come in, which is worth returning to shortly.
Marc wanted to respond directly to Erdal, referencing something he’d heard from a psychologist just the day before, and to push back gently on the word “jerks.” That mattered to him — it doesn’t mean he accepts what they do. He’d heard an interview with a psychologist the day before, discussing, among other things, what had happened that summer at public swimming pools in Berlin, and the psychologist explained exactly how that kind of behavior develops: there are group dynamics at play, and simply put, some children have learned violence as a pattern for resolving conflict. To be clear, he still despises violence and doesn’t support it in any way — but to actually understand the process, some people have learned, through violence done to them, that violence can be a way of resolving conflict, and they justify their own violence on that basis. The important thing for him is not to let that turn into the belief that these people are simply bad, full stop, without understanding that they’re simply applying learned patterns. Then the real question becomes: where does the root cause lie? And the root cause is that all of us need to take responsibility and act — exactly the question already on the table: how do we push back against violence, what kind of parents do we want to be, how do we treat our own children? Simply writing people off as bad has a cause behind it too. No one, in his view, is born a fundamentally bad person — people become what they become through the experiences they have and the behavior they end up mirroring. Still, he understands the son in the earlier story completely — fortunately, he clearly had a very different experience growing up. Can he really be happy growing up in a world like that? That’s something Marc wishes for everyone. But for him, it’s important not to make blanket judgments — he’s learned a great deal from other participants about looking at root causes: why we behave the way we do always has a cause. That connects back to unconscious bias and to the belief systems Sabine raised: if you’re taught from early childhood that you don’t discuss things, that the stronger person simply wins or is right or gets their way, you absorb that, and you then have to relearn, including in how you discuss things with others, how to take responsibility differently. In his own view, that isn’t how conflict resolution works for him — because by law, no one is permitted to enforce their interests through violence.
On that note, something else worth pausing on: parenting is also a form of socialization, and socialization doesn’t only happen through caregivers — it also happens through school, through classmates, and so on. That’s an influence that shouldn’t be underestimated, including how sensitive it is. In the earlier example with Elias, the classmates involved are also around ten years old themselves — meaning they’re very often not acting consciously, or deliberately trying to cause harm; they’re still developing themselves, and often genuinely can’t yet judge the consequences on the other side, or the scars it can leave. All the more reason to keep returning to that dialogue. And then comes the next challenge: the parents. This has come up before — having served on a parents’ council for years, one participant has repeatedly observed parental behavior that made her say, more than once, to teachers and educators, that working with the parents is often genuinely more exhausting than working with the children. Because here too, the question is how parents react when you try to open that dialogue — do they become defensive? Children also, quite naturally, tell different versions of events. Who gets believed then — your own child, or the “other” child, defended or stood up for in that moment? All of these are aspects that come into play here. Sabine had more to add.
Sabine shared another story, one her son had told her recently — she’d already heard part of it through another channel, but this involves a more distant friend of her son’s. He was out with friends at a dance-school graduation ball and afterward walked home alone. His friends intercepted him — or really, mainly one friend did, but with an entire group in tow — and forced him to strip naked; he walked home like that. He doesn’t want to name the friends involved because he’s afraid to. And that, Sabine thinks, is exactly the problem: he’ll carry a lasting psychological scar from this if it isn’t worked through somehow. Her son told him, straight out, that he’s hanging around with the wrong people and should distance himself from them. But she doesn’t know these people personally, so she can’t really say who they are — only that it happened right in their own neighborhood, not somewhere distant, and it shook her. When she discussed it further with her son, he said, well, he is hanging around with the wrong crowd. But how far does “the wrong crowd” really extend? Isn’t some of this already happening among children generally?
On that point: you could say “wrong crowd,” but there’s also a much milder version of the same dynamic that shows it isn’t necessarily about a particular friend group at all — it happens among children generally. When someone goes to a teacher or tells their parents something, they get immediately branded a snitch — something many of us probably remember from our own childhoods. That alone is often enough to stop children from telling teachers or parents anything at all, simply because they don’t want to be seen as a snitch by the other kids. So even much smaller mechanisms are already at work, quietly used to exert a kind of control — genuinely interesting to observe in this context. With that, another participant, Vera, joined the conversation.
Vera wanted to return to the parent-child relationship, or parenting itself, because that’s the origin — or at least a major influence — of the violence that later shows up among children, or violence generally. Parents who use violence against their children as a disciplinary tool, or in everyday life, are very often expressing their own helplessness. Sometimes parents are simply overwhelmed by raising their children, facing conflicts they don’t know how to handle themselves. She doesn’t want to condemn these parents at all — quite the opposite: she thinks they need more help and support in parenting, and quite possibly support for themselves as individuals too.
Marc said he needed to think further about an idea raised earlier: that our lives, our behavior, are already shaped within roughly the first five years. The challenge he sees is this — if you spend twenty years growing up having learned, not as some vague fate but as a genuinely internalized lesson, that violence can be a way of resolving conflict, then it becomes incredibly hard to shift. You’ve learned it, it’s anchored in you. And then someone comes along and says, “look, Marc, what you’re doing is wrong” — but you learned it that way. Becoming aware of that, understanding why we act the way we do and how we even got to this point, takes more than simply offering a counter-argument and saying “that’s wrong.” What actually helps is someone saying, “I’m here to support you through this.” That’s where patience is required — where we all need to look at ourselves — and when we see violence, to think about what we can actually do about it: talking to people, wherever it comes up in everyday life, staying alert to it. Simply telling someone “that’s not good” is, in his view, far too simple, because the person doing it usually doesn’t even see it that way — they learned it, and in their mind, what they learned is what’s right. Our brains evaluate that way: whatever has worked, we keep doing.
Language plays a role here too — things like aggressive behavior show up, especially in children, partly because they haven’t yet learned other ways, and don’t yet have enough language to express themselves differently. Language remains hugely important in the teenage and adult years as well. That’s one added thought. And there’s more to it than just the direct effect — experienced violence leading to violence as a conflict-resolution pattern in turn. There are entirely different dimensions worth examining too, when we look at consequences. What happens to self-worth? Sabine had already raised the point about internalized beliefs. What happens to trust in other people, and to self-confidence? What effect does it have on relationships — whether at work, or in personal relationships within family, friendships, or partnerships? There are all kinds of effects here that can play out, and they’re often far less visible than the straightforward chain of violence leading to more violence — a genuinely important aspect not to lose sight of.
Sabine wanted to respond to Vera’s point about getting help when there are problems. The real problem, she thinks, is judging that correctly in the first place. Once, at kindergarten, a teacher asked whether they wanted to seek help from the city for their young son. Sabine looked at her, stunned — they didn’t need any help at all, and that kind of situation always comes back to her when she hears things like this. Who actually decides whether someone needs help? In the end, people have to reach that point themselves — recognizing “I feel powerless here, can someone help me?” And cultural background clearly plays into this too. A typical German upbringing probably looks different from many other upbringings. If a German-based educator tells a parent they should seek help — what cultural background does that family come from, and does that framing land as genuine help, or does it step on toes hard enough to actually hurt? She fully agrees with Vera that support should help — but the actual step of seeking help is, in her experience, a very difficult one.
On that point: as already raised, who decides? The second question is whether people are even aware they’re overwhelmed and should be seeking help in the first place. And then there’s a third significant factor: some people are surely also afraid to seek help because it might mean an institution like child protective services getting involved. Anyone who’s dealt with child protective services or similar agencies knows it’s not exactly a walk in the park. So there are several different aspects genuinely at play here.
Marc had a thought connected to the room’s title, “violence in parenting” — what about violence in a relationship? Do I unconsciously exercise violence over my partner? Germany still largely follows the traditional pattern where 87% of the better-paid professions are dominated by men, which also means financial dependency. And when someone is financially dependent on another person, that person holds power over them. He hears this often enough among people he knows — when the conversation turns to a woman considering leaving her partner, she’ll say, I’d love to, but where would I live? Could I even survive on my own? That, too, is a form of violence that isn’t visible to outsiders — no one has bruises — but it’s still violence that can be exercised over how someone behaves toward their partner, simply because the man is so often more powerful within the relationship than the woman.
That would sit a little outside today’s focus, since it doesn’t directly concern parenting — though since partnerships had just come up, it’s worth noting another angle here too. We tend to think of “parenting” as something direct — I do something with the child, in that sense. But there’s also a form of violence that can be exercised indirectly — through, say, divorce and the conflict that comes with it, or even ordinary everyday arguments between partners that children witness and absorb. Doesn’t that also represent a form of violence? In that case it isn’t directed at the partner, but transferred onto the children — for instance, by saying “you want a new phone, you want a new bike, you want to go on holiday with your girlfriend — you can only have that if you do such-and-such.” That’s also a form of violence: enforcing my demands through leverage, even without anything dangerous involved. It isn’t violence visible from the outside — only visible through what the child on the receiving end experiences.
Perhaps it’s worth distinguishing, then, between direct and indirect violence here — finding a term that captures that distinction well.
Vera wanted to push back gently on Marc’s point. On the other hand, she said, some of what he described are really just ordinary parenting methods — expecting a child to, say, take the trash out, or contribute something to the family rather than only making demands. She wouldn’t necessarily call that violence, she said honestly. And on what she’d said earlier, she’d had Sweden in mind, where family support workers visit every household once or twice a year, regardless of who they are or what social background they come from — simply to keep an eye out and offer a hand if a conflict comes up, so people know: I’m here. On a related note, her own son Elias had told her recently, “Mom, kids have rights.” She laughed and told him, yes — and don’t forget, kids have responsibilities too. That was the first thing that came to mind.
Sabine found what Vera had just said really interesting, because there’s often talk of parenting “losing its grip” a little these days. And it really is difficult, because she thinks children are raised differently today than she was, and differently than her own parents were raised — there’s a generational shift built into all of this. She fully agrees with Vera: a child should contribute their share. But will they do it willingly? Probably not. “Take the trash down, the —”
— she continued, finishing the thought — “…or mow the lawn,” or whatever it might be. If anything, a child is more likely to make demands than to offer their contribution. What was said earlier about “floating” — giving without expecting anything immediately back — she finds genuinely lovely. They’re actually planning to take in a host child for a year soon, as a way of paying something forward after receiving similar support themselves. Recently a woman came by to look at their house and get a sense of them as a family. Sabine admitted she was almost a little nervous, wondering what exactly they were being evaluated for — but in the end it was a pleasant conversation, and the visitor really just wanted to make sure the child would be coming into a stable, orderly home. That made Sabine think that’s probably similar to what a social-services home visit looks like too — just checking in. A genuinely difficult topic overall.
On that note, it’s worth opening up the laissez-faire side of parenting too — there are studies showing that the opposite extreme, not as a counterpoint to violence exactly, but “no orientation, no rules, letting everything slide,” doesn’t work either. In one case it went as far as a child taking a piano apart. So that isn’t a solution either. And here too we can connect back to brain research: people need orientation, people need rules, routines, structures — to find their footing and to feel at ease. That applies to children just as much: giving orientation, setting rules and so on is generally already done. The real question is what happens when a child doesn’t follow the rules. Does it have to come down to sanctions? That’s worth examining too, because we often default to working with sanctions — which brings us back to moving away from something versus moving toward something. Perhaps because many of us were raised that way ourselves, we tend to lean toward threatening sanctions. Then the question becomes: what do I do if it still doesn’t happen anyway? What’s the actual solution, and how far do you take it? That’s where things can escalate. Whereas if I instead push toward a “moving-toward” approach, I may achieve far more — though it takes a lot of practice to keep steering focus toward that instead of toward avoidance backed by the threat of a sanction.
Marc thought this raised an important point about communication. Thinking back to his own childhood, he still dislikes receiving orders even today. If he was told to do something, it came as “you have to mow the lawn,” “you’re going to mow the lawn today,” “you’re mowing the lawn today” — just as an example. What was missing was the conversation: no one ever explained that we live as part of a community, and that a community only works if everyone contributes. Something like: “I don’t want you going off to work yet, so today I’d like your contribution to our little community to be helping out, so the rest of us can take care of other things — your contribution today is the lawnmower.” Those conversations never happened; it only ever came as an order. As for sanctions: he once talked with a psychologist who told him children have a strong sense of fairness, and he’s absolutely in favor of sanctions — but they must never be handed out in anger, or out of helplessness. If a child does something and I sanction them on the spot, the child doesn’t actually understand it. The psychologist’s explanation was this: in a calm moment, while playing with the child, while the child is cuddled up close, that’s when you explain — “listen, I want you to understand this: if we need such-and-such from you and you don’t do it, here’s what happens — step one is this, step two is that, step three is this, step four is that.” Said that way, in a warm, connected moment, the child takes it in and understands it. And then, if that situation actually arises, the sanction has to follow through — otherwise you lose credibility, and the child can never actually learn from it. What’s truly damaging, the psychologist told him, is when children don’t know what sanctions will follow at all — and when the sanction comes out of anger or helplessness. Then the child just feels misunderstood, thinks “my parents are being unfair,” and can’t make sense of it. So yes to sanctions — but the child needs to know in advance when they’ll apply, and they must never be handed out in the immediate aftermath of something happening, but explained ahead of time, in a moment of genuine closeness.
That’s easy to say, one participant replied, but much harder in practice. He offered two examples — one showing what a “moving-toward” approach can actually look like day to day, and one showing why sanctions aren’t always so simple. Years ago, there was a time he wanted some peace and quiet to relax, while Elias badly wanted to talk to him and tell him things. In that moment, he thought about what to do, turned it into a kind of game, and said, “let’s see who can stay quiet the longest.” Elias threw himself fully into it, and it actually worked for quite a while — just one small example. On the other hand, a few weeks earlier, his son’s class had gone on a school trip, and a few things happened that he and his wife weren’t happy about, which led to a conversation with their son. In that conversation, he mentioned that otherwise they’d have to think about consequences — something that, with sanctions especially, would need to actually sting a little to have any effect. He’d assumed his son was looking forward to the class trip. So they told him they might have to reconsider whether he’d go on it at all. His son’s response: “go ahead, then.” Which left the parent standing there, having to figure out how to respond. So not every threatened sanction lands the way you expect — the child doesn’t always show it actually bothers them. And when it does escalate, how do you handle that? He can well imagine that this isn’t about parents being generally overwhelmed by parenting as such — every parent knows this feeling of hitting a wall very quickly, not because of some blanket sense of being overwhelmed by raising children, but simply because, in that specific moment, you’re genuinely out of ideas. He was curious what the others thought.
Vera offered a small example from her own close circle. Her niece and her partner are genuinely warm, loving parents, and she works professionally with severely disabled people — really well trained. But her son, around six at the time, pushed her to such a boiling point that she grabbed him by the arms and shouted, “now you will finally be quiet and settle down.” She was shocked by herself, and the child was shaken by what had just happened. Once things had calmed down again, she apologized to him and explained that what she’d done wasn’t right, but that in that moment she genuinely couldn’t have reacted any other way. And the child understood that.
A question had also come in through the chat from a participant named Tobias, one the moderator found genuinely interesting: could it be a false assumption that people are fundamentally good? A fascinating question — and the honest answer is: what does “good” or “bad” even mean here? When children come into the world — as touched on earlier regarding language development and so on — a great many things simply aren’t there yet; they’re not genetically predetermined either. Children learn through observation, through interaction, through role models, and that shapes everything. When they react aggressively to things, especially at a very young age, part of that is because their capacity for empathy hasn’t fully developed yet. A lot of learning simply has to happen first. So it doesn’t seem right to say people are inherently bad or inherently good — maybe it’s more that a child, at the start, simply hasn’t been “recorded onto” yet. A comparison that’s useful here: those old blank cassette tapes people used to record onto themselves. Children arrive a bit like that — like a nearly blank hard drive, though not completely blank, since we know things are already being laid down during pregnancy. Genetics plays a role too, though we now know its share is considerably smaller than we used to assume, and a much larger part comes down to our environment, our upbringing, and so on. In that sense, we’re the ones recording onto that tape, onto that hard drive — and naturally there are the occasional “error messages” along the way, moments that need correcting. But none of that is really about people being inherently good or bad — it’s about learning, which is exactly what defines us as a species: we have a functioning brain, and we’re capable of using it deliberately, steering it, and stepping into genuine self-efficacy. Which means there’s enormous room to shape things — we’re not simply at the mercy of it all.
As the room moved toward its closing round, participants were asked for their key takeaways, or anything else they wanted to add before wrapping up.
One participant said what became clear to him, above all, is that children copy our behavior — which makes it even more important to watch closely how he himself behaves, everywhere. And on the topic of violence more broadly: violence must never be treated as normal, or as a private matter, and we all need to push back against it. He said he’d keep thinking about what he personally can do when he witnesses violence out in public, because he still hasn’t found an answer that satisfies him for how to respond to that himself.
Sabine called it a genuinely interesting topic, one that leaves a lot to think about. One thing that struck her again was how much the conversation revolved around our own perspective — but you also have to remember that today’s children are simply a different generation, and reconciling more permissive, liberal parenting with your own values isn’t always so simple. The subject of violence also stayed with her, especially given how often it comes up now — not least because, she noted, there are more conservative circles among people she knows whose approach to raising children is quite different, circles where violence is very much still part of the picture in some form, which genuinely worries her.
Vera closed with this: violence, whether physical or psychological, has no place in parenting. And thinking about violence, another word came to mind for her — overreach, boundary violation — which connects to violence too, especially when it’s subtle. She thanked the room for the space and for the thoughts it had given her to sit with, and would keep sitting with.
Closing the room, the host thanked everyone for such a rich range of perspectives and examples today, pulling the conversation in so many different directions. And there was real anticipation for tomorrow’s continuation: an expert talk with Dr. Ria Nollte on the topic of “power in the classroom” — picking up directly on today’s thread. As always, after the opening dialogue between the two of them, everyone would be warmly invited to join the exchange themselves. Same time tomorrow, 8 a.m. — looking forward to it. Take care, and see you then.
