Let me write a few sentences on a large sheet of paper and throw them into the middle.
Do not make repeated threats in front of your child if you do not intend to carry them out. It only damages your authority and causes the child not to respect your word.
Do you know what is interesting about those sentences? That ninety-nine per cent of parents agree with them, and ninety-nine per cent of parents fail to keep to them.
We can preach about the uselessness of empty threats until our lungs turn blue. And still, every day, in a flash of anger, frustration, pressure or despair, sentences are released into the air along the lines of: if you do not get up and go to the bath this minute, you will not watch television for the entire holiday, you will not visit friends until you are thirty, and you will not eat solids.
The producer of that sentence is aware of the total absence of truth from it the second it leaves his lips — which does not prevent him from launching another one in the next stressful situation.
The disproportionate threat is the parental equivalent of junk food. Not exactly a healthy act, but a quick educational gap-filler in a moment of pressure.
We all threaten and fail to follow through, simply because the standards of the parenting manuals are not realistic.
That is to say, the recommendations to avoid empty threats are logical and thoroughly well-argued, and most of us perhaps manage to realise them for a focused period. But then life and its upheavals take over the plot, an unforeseen malfunction scatters the cards, and the parent throws up their hands and returns to their old ways — this time not as a novice offender but in a more dangerous position, full of a sharper sense of inferiority: the repeat offender, one who tried to break the habit and slid back.
So first of all, dear parents, forgive yourselves.
And then note the one thing that actually matters here, which is not the threat but the ratio.
A household in which most stated consequences happen can absorb the occasional absurd threat without damage; the child has ample evidence about how the system works. A household in which most stated consequences evaporate has taught the child that parental speech is weather rather than information — and no individual threat, however well-designed, will ever land again.
Which means the repair is not stopping the outbursts. It is following through on the small, boring, entirely achievable ones, on ordinary days, when nothing is at stake.