Inuits know this: Teach your children not only about discipline but also how to control their anger. The Inuits are the aboriginal inhabitants of the North American Arctic, who number around 40,000 in Canada and 16,500 in the U.S. In the Inuit culture, control of anger and hostile emotion is a must. Kids' bad behavior, accidents, and failures hardly result in murmurs or measured laughter; over there, people have strong self-control of their emotions and showing any sign of anger is considered as babyish, and even foolish.
Actually, the Inuit are probably the gentlest parents in the world; they rarely yell at their children. In his book "Inuit Youth: Growth and Change in the American Arctic," Richard Guy Condon says that, in several years of fieldwork, he heard of only one case of physical punishment. “A child who misbehaves is not seen as a ‘bad child,’ who intentionally engages in culpable acts, but as a child who ‘really can’t listen’”, writes Condon.
For the Inuit, slapping and scolding are not considered as acceptable forms of kids' discipline. Yelling at a child is demeaning: it means that you are throwing the tantrum yourself, and so becoming the child yourself, teaching her or him to be angry. A really different approach than the yelling-time-out-slapping-spanking culture we are living in our violent Western countries, is it not?
Picture: Inuit Family (Wikimedia Commons)
