When Discipline Becomes Fear: Rethinking How We Raise Children.
I recently came across an article shared by a teacher in Vietnam discussing different approaches to parenting. The piece mentioned some rather extreme viewpoints, such as “beating children to make them afraid” or “raising children like animals”. What was perhaps more striking, however, was the comment section. Many people argued that violence is a legitimate educational method, even offering examples of children who supposedly “became better people because their parents disciplined them physically”.
From the perspective of developmental psychology and sociology, it may be more helpful to first understand how research classifies different parenting styles and what psychological effects each of them tends to produce in children. Looking at parenting through this framework helps us ask a more important question: is violence or extreme strictness really necessary when raising children?
1. What are parenting styles and how do they differ?
Psychological research has long described parenting approaches along two main dimensions:
Responsiveness – how warm, supportive and emotionally attentive parents are towards their children.
Demandingness – how much structure, control and expectation parents place on them.
When these two dimensions are combined, four main parenting styles typically emerge.
– Authoritative: warmth combined with discipline
Parents set clear boundaries while also explaining their reasoning, listening to their children, and acknowledging their emotions. Research consistently suggests that this approach tends to lead to the most positive developmental outcomes. Children raised in this environment often develop confidence, adaptability, and the ability to regulate their own behaviour.
– Authoritarian: high control but low warmth
This is the model often associated with absolute obedience, where disobedience leads to punishment and fear is used as a tool to enforce compliance. Children raised in such environments frequently show higher levels of anxiety, lower self-esteem, a fear of making mistakes, and a tendency to avoid challenges. This parenting style is also the one most closely associated with threats, humiliation, and sometimes physical punishment.
– Permissive: warmth with little discipline
Parents are affectionate and accepting but place relatively few limits on behaviour. As a result, children may struggle with self-control and behavioural regulation.
– Neglectful: neither warmth nor structure
In this situation, children receive little emotional support and limited guidance. Over time, this can increase the likelihood of emotional and behavioural difficulties.
Viewed through this lens, the idea of “disciplining children through corporal punishment” usually falls within the authoritarian style, which research consistently links with higher psychological risks.
2. Variations of excessive strictness: tiger parenting and intensive parenting
Some people point to “tiger parenting” as evidence that strict discipline produces successful children.
However, research by Kim et al. (2013) suggests that tiger parenting is more complex than simple strictness. It often combines very high expectations with strong psychological control, sometimes involving shaming, comparison, or coercion.
Not every child raised in such an environment experiences negative outcomes, but some may show patterns such as:
❗️lower achievement than parents expect
❗️heightened anxiety and fear of failure
❗️emotional distance from parents
These findings suggest that extreme strictness does not necessarily produce the results adults imagine.
More broadly, in increasingly competitive societies many families have shifted towards what is sometimes called intensive parenting. This approach involves close monitoring, constant supervision, and sustained pressure for achievement.
This form of parenting is not necessarily violent, but it can produce similar psychological effects. Children may grow up under persistent pressure, become highly afraid of failure, and find it harder to regulate their emotions.
In China, this trend has developed into what is often referred to as “chicken parenting” (jiwa parenting), where children are pushed into excessive tutoring and relentless academic competition. The situation became so widespread that the government eventually introduced the Double Reduction Policy to reduce academic overload (Qian et al., 2023).
All of this highlights an important point: violence does not always appear in the form of physical punishment.Sometimes it takes the shape of relentless pressure, unrealistic expectations, or excessive control.
3. So, are violence and extreme strictness effective?
Violence may produce immediate obedience, but it rarely produces genuine maturity.
According to Medina (2014), when children are shouted at or threatened, levels of the stress hormone cortisol rise sharply. This reduces activity in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for reasoning, learning, and self-regulation, while activating the amygdala, the brain’s fear centre.
In that state, children are primarily focused on avoiding danger, not on learning. They may stop the behaviour temporarily, but they are not actually processing why it was wrong or learning how to regulate their emotions.
The people who claim they “succeeded because they were beaten” often represent a visible minority. We notice them precisely because they survived that environment. Those who grew up with anxiety, fear, or damaged family relationships rarely appear in those stories.
In research, this phenomenon is known as survivorship bias — when we focus on the individuals who succeeded and overlook those who were harmed.
This bias can create the illusion that success requires pain, or that harsh discipline is a necessary condition for growth.
But in reality, raising children is not about making them fear their parents. It is about helping them understand themselves, so that they can grow through awareness, reflection, and self-direction rather than through fear-driven survival responses.
