Please Don't Punish Your 1-Year-Old For Talking

A response to that viral Washington Post article.

On Thursday, a friend texted me a Washington Post article titled “Forget gentle parenting and discipline your 1-year-old, psychologist says.” The article has clearly been making the rounds, as it now has more than 1,700 comments. When I first clicked the link, I couldn’t imagine that the psychologist in the article, whomever he or she was, would argue in favor of punishing toddlers for doing toddler-like things.

Sadly, I was wrong.

The piece described popular French psychologist Caroline Goldman’s parenting philosophy, which apparently involves sending babies and toddlers as young as 1 to time-out for various transgressions. These misbehaviors include, according to the article, “talking too much, talking too loudly, making too much noise, shouting, complaining over nothing, complaining over everything, refusing to say hello, refusing to say thank you and general emotional overreaction.”

Um, what.