Fear Oriented Child Rearing

Fear and Child Rearing Erkal-1

Fatih Erkal
Sibel Evliyagil
Eng 102 – 105
22.04.2015

“Are fear-oriented or love-oriented child rearing techniques more effective in order to make children behave in desired manner regarding their healthy cognitive and emotional development?”

Fear and Child Rearing:
A Review on Disciplinary Techniques in Child Rearing
This paper examines the disciplinary and influence techniques in child rearing by dividing them into two categories as fear-oriented and love-oriented. Purpose of this paper is to guide parents about child rearing techniques and to provide them with a clear understanding of which kind of techniques is more beneficial and useful in order to make children behave in desired manner regarding their
Fear and Child Rearing Erkal-3

As it is said before, some kind of child rearing techniques are called fear-oriented and others love-oriented. It shouldn't be too hard to figure out the relation between love and love-oriented child rearing techniques where love is generally considered a positive emotion. But to understand the relation between fear and child rearing techniques, we need to make a definition that some disciplinary techniques try to trigger a fear in children to make them act in desired manners.
Fear constitutes a fundamental basement for these techniques and this is why we called these techniques as fear-oriented. There are many fear-oriented techniques in child rearing such as punishment, negative self-feeling, aversive stimulation, threat etc. Marwell and
Schmitt support that aversive stimulation and threat clearly involve a fearbased method (782). Another important point for understanding the correlation between fear and child rearing is reasons for why fear underlies these disciplinary techniques or
Pratt says that rewarding a good behavior provides an enjoyment which is derived from the behavior and this enjoyment reinforces the sustainability of that behavior (67). Coopersmith also comes with a supportive claim that parents who used rewarding report that their application are effective than parents who used punishment (qtd. in Pratt 67). Finally, it can be concluded that fear-oriented techniques are less likely to have long-term effects and also less likely to provide a contribution to the internal development of a child than loveoriented techniques. So we can say that fear-oriented techniques are less useful and beneficial than love-oriented techniques regarding the healthy cognitive and personal development of a child.

After we have examined the long and short term effects of fear-oriented and loveoriented techniques, it can be also beneficial to look at the public tendency towards these techniques. The public tendency always gives a good idea of considering something because cumulative choices are generally true. One person or two persons can do mistakes but hundreds or thousands of people do not. In addition, because humans are