Creative Punishment

My labmate's husband teaches math at the middle school of one of the worst districts in town. These kids are pretty much little hellions, steal stuff all the time, get into all sorts of trouble, and couldn't possibly care less about school. Anyways, one of his students was serving an in-school suspension on what happened to be the school-wide field day. Rather than spending it in the library or wherever it was usually held, the students serving in-school suspension that day had to sit in a portable classroom module whose only windows faced all of the field day activities. My other labmate and I found this a hilarious and wonderful punishment, which got us talking about other creative punishments.

This same labmate had 2 older brothers, and when one of them did something, their parents made all three of them kneel on the floor until one of them confessed despite almost always knowing which kid was guilty. They swore that they knelt for hours, but her mom swore that somebody always confessed within 2-3 minutes.

My other labmate had the best punishment story from her roommate. He's one of like 7 or 8 kids, and whenever they fought with each other, their parents made them stand on the front lawn hugging each other for 15 minutes, and all their neighborhood friends would ride their bikes by laughing at them. Growing up in a household where we fought with each other all the time, I can say we would have HATED this, but as an adult, I think it's GENIUS. Absolutely brilliant.

Unfortunately my parents were never that creative. We nearly always got sent to our rooms. They'd forget they sent us away, and eventually we'd poke a head out and plead to be let out.

The one stroke of punishment genius I remember out of my parents wasn't even really meant to be a punishment. At some point when my little sister was about 2, or maybe not quite 2, she was screaming bloody murder throwing a tantrum over something or other, and my father just picked her up, set her on the back deck, and shut the sliding door behind him. She instantly stopped crying and just stared in total shock. It was super funny.

If I ever have kids, I might just be a terrible parent, because I would have soooooo much fun messing with them! But what's the point of having kids if you can't get some entertainment out of them??