How do you Punish your Kids?

These are my thoughts on dishing out punishment in the dojo and in life…

I see a lot of Martial Art Instructors using Push Ups as a form of punishment and it drives me crazy.  How can making someone do something beneficial be a punishment?  If your kids misbehave do you tell them to eat a healthy meal and get a good nights sleep.If their behaviour is good do you pump them full of junk food and sugar and make them play video games till the sun comes up?… Maybe you do but I hope not.

Push-Ups are a great exercise and it makes me furious to see people threatening to use them as a form of punishment.  I wonder if this comes from old army and football training routines.  If the guys do something wrong the Sergeant/Coach makes them “drop and give me twenty!”.

I want to share a story with you about my time at school (way back then) when teachers could actually tell students what to do and kids had to do it…

When I was 15 years old I had a maths teacher who was a very smart man and he was also a solid 240lbs (115kgs) of muscle.  He competed at the Commonwealth Games in Power Lifting. After the normal School day he ran the weightlifting group which was open to anyone brave enough to join in.He was a really nice guy and he taught me a lot about how to lift weights properly.

In his class we quickly realised that any misbehaviour such as talking in class, not doing your home work, getting a C or lower in any test, etc was dealt with by issuing a certain number of push ups to be done on the spot.I wasn’t a genius but I managed to get through without getting the order to 20 or more push ups.

As the school year progressed the same guys kept doing the same stupid things and kept getting punished the same way.  The only difference was that they got stronger and fitter.The maths teacher being a smart man realised that they completed them too easily so he simply raised the number of push ups required.  Some of the guys would have to do 50, 80 or 100 push ups every time, and sometimes that was 2 or 3 times in a single lesson.

I realised a couple of things in that year: 

1.       The guys that were the worst behaved were generally the bullies of the school.

2.The more they acted like monkeys to impress their friends the more push ups they had to do.

3.The more push ups they had to do, the stronger they got.

4.       Push Ups were not considered a punishment, they did them proudly.

During that year the smart well behaved kids learnt maths and the trouble makers stayed dumb but got a lot stronger physically.With hindsight I can see that he would have been better off punishing them with more mathematical home work which they would have hated (but would have learned from) and rewarded the smart kids with push ups so they wouldn’t get bullied so easily.

My main point in this article is that I want Instructors to stop using push ups as a punishment and start using it as a reward.  There are an infinite number of push up variations for you to teach your students.Show them some new ones and get them to come up with some of their own.Have a push up contest and see who can complete the most push ups of different types.Make push ups an entertaining challenge.

Recently I have been experimenting with a variety of explosive push ups that have greatly improved my ability to spring back to me feet after sprawling.In the new world with MMA fighting becoming main stream this is a great skill to improve.

So please, find some other form of punishment to hand out for bad behaviour.  Make the Push Up a friend, not an enemy.

I wish you all the best with your teaching

Regards

Aaron Perry – Author of “Martial Games for Kids”, an Instructors manual developed to assist in teaching martial arts to kids.

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