376: The Problems with Punishment
with Bryan Post
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Punishment feels like it’s working. Compliance shows up fast, and for a minute it looks like the lesson landed. But according to child behavior expert Bryan Post, that quick compliance is often the opposite of learning, it’s the brain shutting down under stress.
In this conversation, Bryan and I dig into the real difference between punishment and discipline. Punishment is force or coercion aimed at controlling, suppressing, or changing behavior. Discipline, by definition, is meant to teach. But most of us were raised to believe they’re the same thing, so what we call discipline in our own homes is often punishment wearing a nicer name.
Bryan leans on neuroscience to explain why this matters so much for our kids. When the brain is stressed, thinking becomes confused, short-term memory shuts off, and the ability to learn goes offline. That means punishment doesn’t just feel bad in the moment, it actively blocks the very mechanism a child needs to take in the lesson we’re trying to teach. And the same is true for us as parents. A stressed out adult cannot calm a stressed out child. It’s not possible.
We talk through Bryan’s simple, three-part practice, breathe, slow down, soften, and why it’s one of the most powerful tools available to us in the middle of a hard moment. We also get into why acting-out behavior is often a sign a child has regressed to a younger emotional age, how to trace our own reactivity back to its roots, and why relationship, not control, is the thing that actually changes behavior long term.
If you’ve ever wondered why the same old approaches keep producing the same frustrating results, this episode offers a different way to think about it.
Listen to the full episode now.
Every parent has had the moment: a child melts down, misbehaves, pushes every button, and the instinct that rises up is to make it stop, fast. A raised voice, a consequence, a threat, anything that gets control back. And often, it works. The child complies. The house goes quiet. It looks like the lesson landed.
According to child behavior expert Bryan Post, who has spent nearly three decades working with families navigating trauma, foster care, and adoption, that quiet is deceptive. Punishment, he explains, creates stress, overwhelm, and shame, and each of those states does the opposite of what parents intend.
The science behind this traces to neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux’s research on the stressed brain. Under stress, thinking becomes confused and distorted, and short-term memory is suppressed. A child who is punished into compliance is often too dysregulated to actually absorb the lesson behind the punishment. The behavior stops, but nothing has been learned, because the part of the brain responsible for learning has effectively gone offline.
The distinction hinges on a simple but often blurred line: discipline is defined as teaching, not punishing. Yet most adults were raised in homes where the two were treated as synonyms, so what gets passed down as discipline is frequently punishment by another name.
Much of this traces back to the amygdala, the brain’s fear center. It does not reason, it reacts, and when it senses a threat, it drives toward one of three responses: control, suppress, or change. A misbehaving child can register as a threat to an already-taxed nervous system, and the amygdala’s response is rarely calm or considered.
This is where co-regulation becomes essential rather than optional. A dysregulated adult, no matter how good their intentions, cannot regulate a dysregulated child. The nervous systems in the room have to find safety somewhere before a child can access the thinking, reasoning part of their brain. Post offers a simple entry point: breathe, slow down, soften. Deep, deliberate breathing interrupts the body’s stress response enough to allow clearer thinking to return, which in turn makes space for genuine connection instead of reactive control.
That shift in perspective extends to how behavior itself gets interpreted. A child who is acting out has often regressed to a younger emotional age than their years would suggest, driven by stress rather than defiance. Seeing a child’s behavior as communication, rather than a problem to be corrected, changes what a parent’s response looks like in the moment.
There is also a generational thread worth pulling on. Reactivity in parents frequently traces back to earlier, often unremembered experiences from their own childhoods. Slowing down enough to notice a triggered reaction, and to ask where that feeling first showed up, can interrupt a pattern that might otherwise repeat itself in the next generation.
The throughline is relationship. Once it is lost, the only tool left is control, and control has a shelf life. What holds up over time is safety, patience, and a nervous system that has learned it does not need to protect itself so hard anymore.
Punishment might produce fast compliance, but under real stress the brain’s ability to think clearly and remember shuts down, so the very mechanism a child needs to learn the lesson gets blocked in the process.
A dysregulated adult cannot calm a dysregulated child, no matter how hard they try, the only way through a hard moment starts with the parent finding their own settled steadiness first.
Behavior that looks like defiance is often a child who has regressed to a younger emotional age under stress, which means the most useful question isn’t how to stop the behavior, but what the behavior is trying to communicate.
Why punishment and discipline are not the same thing, and how the difference between them changes everything about how your child’s brain responds
How stress shuts down clear thinking and short-term memory, and why that matters every time you’re trying to teach your child something in a hard moment
Why you can’t calm a dysregulated child while you’re dysregulated yourself, and a simple three-step practice, breathe, slow down, soften, to help you get there first
How to recognize when your child has regressed to a younger emotional age under stress, and why meeting them there works better than meeting the calendar age you expect
How your own childhood reactions can show up in the way you respond to your child today, and a simple way to start noticing the pattern
Bryan Post
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The Emotional Brain by Joseph LeDoux
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376 The Problems with Punishment, with Bryan Post
Penny: [00:00:00] Welcome back, everyone. I am insanely excited to have Bryan Post with me for a conversation around punishment and the challenges, the problems, with that approach to changing behavior. I've been following Bryan for a long time on Instagram. Every time I watch a video or a talk, I'm just nodding my head in agreement the whole time. I'm like, "Yes, yes." So I'm just thrilled that we're going to have this conversation together for everyone listening. But will you start by letting everybody know who you are and what you do?
Bryan Post: Sure. Well, Penny, thanks for having me. Looking forward to sharing this time with you. My name is Bryan Post. I'm a child behavior expert, is kind of how I'm labeled. I work with all types of families, all types of children, but have primarily specialized in foster care and adoption over the last 28 [00:01:00] years. So my real interest lies in how stress and trauma impact human relationships and how that shows up in families, and trying to help families unravel those dynamics so that they can have more peaceful, more loving relationships.
Penny: Awesome. I love that you brought up relationships. I'm sure we'll get into more of that relational aspect as we have this conversation. But I think the best place to start would just be defining what punishment is. When we talk about punishment, what do we mean? And maybe how is that different from discipline? Because I think we tend to lump them together.
Bryan Post: That's perfect. It also ties directly into relationship. So punishment is the use of force or coercion to impose one person's will over another, and it's pretty straightforward. So I typically look at punishment as any behavior approach towards a child or another individual that is punitive and judgmental in [00:02:00] nature. And the contrast with discipline is that discipline is... The definition of discipline is to teach, not to punish.
Penny: Mm.
Bryan Post: And we typically discipline our children under the auspices of punishment, but discipline and punishment are not the same thing. So I'll go as far into this as you want to go, Penny, and feel free to interrupt me. But one of my scientific citations comes from Joseph LeDoux. He wrote a book called The Emotional Brain. He's a neuroscientist at NYU. And in the book, he cites that in times of stress, our thinking becomes confused and distorted, [00:03:00] and our short-term memory is suppressed. So when we are stressed, we are not thinking clearly, and we cannot remember. Now, if you measure that against punishment versus discipline, you can come to a completely different understanding. Punishment creates stress. Punishment creates overwhelm. Punishment creates shame. And if punishment creates stress and overwhelm and shame, then what it's doing is stressing the brain. And when the brain's stressed, we cannot think clearly, and we cannot remember. And if you can't think clearly, and you cannot remember, you cannot learn. So in essence, punishment actually impairs the individual's ability to learn the lesson for which they are being punished. [00:04:00] Now, the other really important part of punishment is the person who's doing the punishing.
Penny: Mm.
Bryan Post: Why do we punish? We punish because our amygdala is our fear receptor in the brain. Your amygdala does not think. Your amygdala does not respond. Your amygdala is all emotional, and all it does is react, and it releases cortisol. When the amygdala senses a threat, it has three major drives: it wants to control, it wants to suppress, or it wants to change the behavior. So when a child is misbehaving, the amygdala of the individual, usually the parent or the adult, the parent or the teacher, becomes stressed because they see a threat. The behavior is a threat, so then they want to control it, they want to suppress it, or they want to change it. So we use punishment as a direct [00:05:00] reaction to something we perceive as a threat, which in essence has nothing to do with teaching a lesson and everything to do with controlling, suppressing, or changing. Now, the reason we see the behavior as the threat is because we feel threatened.
Penny: Yeah.
Bryan Post: We feel afraid. We feel overwhelmed. We feel scared. So we want to control, suppress, and change. But we have been misled for generations to believe that punishment is actually teaching a lesson, when in fact it is arresting the very mechanisms of the brain that you need in order to learn the lesson. You contrast that with discipline. The definition of discipline is to teach, not to punish. So if you want to discipline a child, then ultimately you have to take responsibility to teach them. But because we've [00:06:00] been misled to believe that discipline and punishment are the same, what we're calling discipline isn't discipline at all, it's punishment.
It's no different than the difference between love and fear. What we're calling love in our society, from generations of negative conditioning and negative beliefs about what love actually is, it's not love, it's fear. We've grown up experiencing fear disguised as love. So what we're calling love is not love at all. It's actually stress and fear inducing, and it comes from a place of stress and fear. If you want to discipline a child, you have to take responsibility to teach them,
Penny: Mm.
Bryan Post: which means first and foremost, as the teacher, you have to calm yourself down enough to be able to think clearly and to remember, so that then you can teach your child. [00:07:00] First of all, you can be aware of whether they're too stressed to learn. Because if they're too stressed to learn, that's why I say connection over correction. You have to connect first, because the connection allows the process of regulation. The process of regulation allows for the brain to be more coherent, to be able to think clearly, and for the memory system to be turned on, to remember.
Now the child can learn. A stressed out adult cannot calm a stressed out child. It is neurophysiologically impossible.
Penny: 100%.
Bryan Post: The only way an adult can calm a child is if the adult is calm first themselves. And
Penny: Yes.
Bryan Post: step away from the podium for a moment.
Penny: I wish I had sound effects. I just want to clap and have so much applause. I'm with you 100%. This is my biggest confusion, that we are pressuring kids [00:08:00] to comply, basically. We are sending them into dysregulation. The point is to motivate and have them do things, but what it's actually doing is shutting down the access to the thinking brain that you were just talking about.
Bryan Post: Mm-hmm.
Penny: So here we are, generation after generation, using pressure, using punishment, using all of these things that the science is showing us are actually creating the opposite effect of what we want. And yet we continue. We continue.
Bryan Post: The reason we continue is because we get stressed,
Penny: Yeah.
Bryan Post: and when we get stressed, we're not thinking clearly, and we cannot remember.
Penny: Yeah, we're being reactive.
Bryan Post: Same thing and expect a different result.
Penny: Yeah. So let's talk about that then. How do we change? How do we shift from
Bryan Post: It's simple, it's not easy.
Penny: Yes.
Bryan Post: And let me tell you how [00:09:00] simple it is. It is as simple as being willing to stop and take three to ten deep breaths. It is that simple. It is that profound. The willingness to stop and take three to ten deep breaths starts to shift everything in your physiology and in your brain. However, when you experience stress, your brain goes into survival. So the first thing your brain does when you become stressed is you start holding your breath and taking ineffective, short breaths, thereby arresting your ability to think clearly and to remember. So the challenge, and what makes it so difficult, is when you are stressed and you are seeing a threat, when there's a [00:10:00] behavior, you're stressing, your thinking's confused and distorted, your short-term memory's shut off, your cellular system is going into survival.
Everything in your amygdala is saying, "I'm going to die. I'm going to die." The very thought, the action to stop and breathe, is so contrary and so foreign to what all of our cellular conditioning is doing. And so it's the most challenging thing in any given situation, to stop and breathe. Because if you do not stop and breathe, you cannot think clearly, and your short-term memory will not turn on, and you will literally feel like you're going to die. And if you're in that state, and your child's in that state, you have two people who are completely freaking out. And so you [00:11:00] have to stop and breathe.
I don't want to tell parents what to do. I want to tell parents how to be.
Penny: Mm.
Bryan Post: Because I know if I can help you be different, you will do different. And I believe there's a small, small space that we can step into that can completely change 90 percent of the challenges that parents have with their children. If I can get a parent to slow down, take a deep breath, soften, I can help them see something completely different than what they've been thinking. In fact, I call it breathe, slow down, soften. The breathing and the slowing down are tied together. You have to breathe, you have to slow down, and when I say slow down, I don't mean you're not going to get things done. I mean your thinking is going to be more open [00:12:00] and more clear while you're doing it. And then the soften is to get out of the confused, distorted state in your brain and drop into your heart. When you drop into your heart, all of a sudden you realize that number one, you're not going to die. No one's going to die. So you soften, and then you look at your child, and then from that place of clarity, that place of connection to who they are and to their story, you're able to see that they're not even at their chronological age in the moment. They're at their emotional age. Because an acting out child is a stressed out child, is a regressed child. So they're not at their chronological age. They've regressed. You've got to see that regressed emotional age, and then respond to that person.
Penny: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. We talk a lot in the neurodivergent space [00:13:00] about the developmental age. Where are their skills in this moment right now? Where can the expectation be doable, and when are we raising the expectation too high? And so we're looking at not their calendar age, but meeting them where they are, right? And understanding that they may be in a different place in the first place.
Bryan Post: Who doesn't want to be met there?
Penny: Hmm.
Bryan Post: When we're really struggling, who doesn't want to be met with understanding?
Penny: Yeah.
Bryan Post: Who doesn't want to be met with patience? Who doesn't want to be met with some kind of firm kindness, or advocacy, or support, or encouragement? Who doesn't want it? We do all these things as adults, and yet expect our children to do something completely different. We don't give our children the opportunity to express their feelings. But when we're adults, [00:14:00] we want to express our feelings, and not only do we want to express our feelings, but we expect that other person to listen to us.
Penny: Mm-hmm.
Bryan Post: We don't get given the same grace. We don't get provided the same opportunity, but that's where all healing lies. That's why relationship is so important. Relationship is the single most important thing that exists. Every cell, every dendrite, every synapse is organized for relationship.
Penny: Mm-hmm.
Bryan Post: Nothing matters except for relationship. We've been conditioned to believe that behaviors matter. Behaviors do not matter. They do not matter. A behavior is nothing more than a manifestation of stress and fear and trauma and hurt and unexpressed grief. That's all behavior is. So in reality, what we should be doing is encouraging the behavior.
Penny: Mm.
Bryan Post: Not wanting the behavior. We should be accepting the behavior. We should be thanking our children for [00:15:00] giving us their behaviors, because that's their attempt to try to express the feelings that are preventing them from healing. Because you cannot heal something you cannot feel.
Penny: Yeah, yeah. And it feels so much better, right? If we think about the two different ways we can respond, one just feels a whole lot better, but also that one that feels better is what we would expect people to do for us. We don't give the same space and grace to our kids, and it drives me nuts. If your kid is yelling and you want them to stop yelling, then why are you yelling at them? Right? You're doing the thing you don't want them to do.
Bryan Post: This is why I have been preaching this quote from Joseph LeDoux for 25 years.
Penny: Yeah.
Bryan Post: Twenty-five years, Penny.
Penny: Yep.
Bryan Post: In times of stress, our [00:16:00] thinking is confused and distorted. When you are stressed, you can't think clearly, so you do crazy things like yell at your child and expect them not to yell. You do crazy things like hit your child and expect them not to hit or not to be afraid.
Penny: Yeah.
Bryan Post: Our short-term memory shuts off. We cannot remember that those things do not work. They may help get a very short-term compliant response, or really a compliant reaction, because a response requires thought, it requires consciousness. They may get a short-term compliance, but it's doing nothing for the internal developmental regulatory state that ultimately has to mature in order for our children to go out and navigate the world. See, punishment is external, [00:17:00] discipline is internal.
Penny: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Bryan Post: We will not internalize something we feel threatened by. If you feel threatened by it, you've got to push it away.
Penny: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It's our instinct.
Bryan Post: It's instinct. It's instinct, it's natural, it's automatic.
Penny: I was just watching a talk from several years ago with Dr. Bruce Perry, and he was talking so much about relationship, that our biology requires relationship, requires it. And he was talking about how far away we're getting from that. Between... this was actually pre-COVID, even when he was doing this talk, but I think about the isolation we had with COVID, and we're on devices more than we are in person. And while that provides some opportunities, we have to remember that we need that relational aspect too. [00:18:00] And I think we forget as parents sometimes how important that is in helping the nervous system feel regulated and safe, so that thinking brain can be accessible, right?
Bryan Post: It's critical. It's critical. Once you lose the relationship, you lose everything, because you lose the ability to influence. And once you lose relationship, the only alternative is control. So then you move into control, and then you're really setting up a nasty dynamic, because every human being needs to have some modicum of control over their life in order to feel safe. So if you move into control and you start taking away the control and exerting your will over your child's will, then all you're doing is setting up a nasty cycle that may work while they're five, and it may work when they're 10, but it's not going to work when they hit adolescence, [00:19:00] because you've lost all relationship, you have no ability to influence. And it's so difficult and challenging for us as adults, because we live in a fear-based society, and our cells, our DNA, is conditioned for stress and fear. So when bad things show up, or scary things show up, the automatic thing our cellular system does is go into survival, which is the antithesis of relationship.
And that's why this work is so simple, but so difficult, because you're going against everything you've ever been conditioned to know. And that's why you come back to, you've got to stop and breathe. That's the most powerful lesson anyone can learn, to be able to breathe in the midst of stress. When you can breathe in the midst of stress, you're accessing [00:20:00] complete consciousness.
Penny: Hmm.
Bryan Post: When you can breathe in the midst of stress, you're accessing love. When you can breathe in the midst of stress, you have a direct line to God. You're infusing yourself with God, because God is love and God is consciousness, and when you're not breathing, you're shutting off that access, so you're shutting off all your power.
Penny: Mm.
Bryan Post: The most powerful person is the person who can breathe and calm themselves down.
Penny: Yeah. Yeah. I just learned yesterday that the Chinese symbol for listen includes an ear and a heart. And I found that so powerful. If we start listening with our hearts, imagine how different the whole world could be, right? But if we can just focus on that, you're talking about taking a breath, which is helping our body and our nervous system try to modulate. And then if we [00:21:00] can also have this mindfulness moment of, I really want to listen with my heart, I want to respond with my heart to this child who is in front of me struggling, not giving me a hard time, but struggling, right? How different that dynamic could be as well, that really, really sat with me.
Such a big... it seems so easy, right? But it's not easy. It's not easy to go against our biology that's trying to protect us. But these are simple concepts that we just have to continue to practice. I know that you talk some in your work also about how our childhoods as adults impact how we respond to challenging behavior, how we respond to our kids or our students or other people in the world around us. Do you want to talk a minute about how we can uncover when that's [00:22:00] happening for us, when things that were problematic for us in childhood are actually coming out in the ways we're responding to kids?
Bryan Post: Well, these things are very unconscious, because they occur in childhood, and we don't store a lot of very specific, accessible conscious memories. So all that's very unconscious. It's buried in your brain stem. And so I like to give people a really easy exercise. I call it easy.
It's not easy. It's very difficult. Even just attempting it is difficult. But we only grow through challenge. And so what you do is, the next time you find yourself being reactive to someone or something, you take those three to ten deep breaths. You ask yourself, "How am I feeling?" You breathe into that [00:23:00] feeling, and then you ask yourself, "When was the first time I ever had this feeling?" And you spend some time getting really honest about the first time you had that feeling, and it's going to take you way back further than this present moment, because any time we find ourselves being reactive to someone or something, it has far less to do with that person and that thing, and far more to do with ourselves and something we've experienced.
So if people will just try, and I'm just going to say try, because I know it's not easy, if you try, it's like practice, and it does take practice. The moment you find yourself feeling reactive, and that's upset, that's wanting to choke your child or wanting to kick them out of [00:24:00] the car or kick them out of the house or anything,
Penny: Yeah.
Bryan Post: we all know what reaction is. Take... and this is even after you react. Even after you yell and you do something you know ultimately you shouldn't have done, you can still do it. That's oftentimes the best time. Take a deep breath. You get in touch with how that made you feel. And then you ask yourself, "When was the first time I felt that way before?" And you will have an eye-opening experience if you really slow down. And then what you do is you go to your child or your partner and you apologize, and you say, "That reminded me of this situation, and that's why I got so upset. And I'm really sorry. You didn't deserve that. I'm really sorry for me, that I had to experience that.
Penny: Mm-hmm.
Bryan Post: And thank you for sharing [00:25:00] that with me. Because when that comes up again, I'm going to slow down and I'm going to spend some time listening to a part of myself that hasn't been heard before, and that's why I get upset. And then I'm going to grow in my consciousness."
And then when I grow in my consciousness, I grow in my power.
Penny: Yeah. We don't reflect enough. This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. We have to reflect to grow, right? We have to reflect to grow,
Bryan Post: That's
Penny: but we're so on autopilot that we're not stopping and reflecting enough so that we can grow. And I think it's a really valuable skill to be teaching our children as well. Imagine if they could grow up reflecting and learning these things, right? How different their experience will be when they're the adult.
Bryan Post: It would be a completely different world.
Penny: Mm-hmm.
Bryan Post: We as adults and we as parents would work on being more mindful, more aware, [00:26:00] so that we could then create a model for our children, and their little mirror neurons model us being more mindful and being more aware, and then they're going to grow up being more mindful and more aware. And that's how you change society.
Penny: Yeah.
Bryan Post: It starts with the adults.
Penny: Mm-hmm. And being purposeful. I think so much of what you're talking about is taking the time to be purposeful, because we all feel like we don't have the time, right? We're all so busy, and we don't have the time, and we have to make time for it. It just changes so much. It's worth the time.
Bryan Post: We do have the time. We're just too stressed.
Penny: Yeah.
Bryan Post: And when
Penny: Mm.
Bryan Post: your thinking's not clear, you're like, "I don't have time. I don't have time."
Penny: Yeah.
Bryan Post: But really, that's all you have. All you have is time. What you're creating, a dynamic that is [00:27:00] like the parent trying to force the child to get up to go to school, is going to create 20 minutes of conflict. If that parent would give themselves permission to slow down, to really tune in to where their child is at, maybe readjust their approach instead of freaking out and threatening and shaming, go in, soothe, nurture, be curious as to why your child is struggling to get up and go to school. And then that 20 minutes you would've spent in conflict, you condense down to five minutes. Five minutes, but five minutes is a long time. It's a long time when we're really present and we're really connected.
Penny: Hmm. And sometimes that's scary.
Bryan Post: It's so scary. See, we're back to that fear.
Penny: Yep. Yep.
Bryan Post: That fear.
Penny: Totally. Yeah. There's so much work to do on ourselves. I've been saying for years about this parenting, [00:28:00] it's like 90 percent about us and 10 percent about our kids. We're not trying to change them. We're not trying to fix them.
Bryan Post: It's the most important work.
Penny: It really is.
Bryan Post: What we should do is self-work.
Penny: Mm, yeah. Let everybody know where they can find you online, where they can learn from you, maybe work with you, all the good stuff.
Bryan Post: Sure. fear2love.com is probably my best website. There's also brianpost.com. And then on Instagram, Bryan Post Official, we put a lot of videos up there all the time, just to offer support and education and encouragement.
Penny: And they're fantastic. They're so fantastic. I really appreciate the work that you're doing. I'm going to link all of that up for everyone in the show notes, and I thank everybody for being here, and I thank you so much, Bryan, for sharing just a little bit of your time and your wisdom with us and the work that you're doing in the world. It's really meaningful.
Bryan Post: My pleasure.
Penny: We'll see everybody next time. Take good [00:29:00] care.
hey there!
I help stuck and struggling parents (educators, too) make the pivots necessary to unlock success and joy for neurodivergent kids and teens, themselves, and their families. I’m honored to be part of your journey!
I help parents of neurodivergent kids decode behavior and raise regulated, connected children through my SIGNAL Parenting™ framework — a science-informed, compassion-centered alternative to outdated discipline models. I'm the award-winning author of Boy Without Instructions and host of the Beautifully Complex Podcast. My core belief: Behavior isn't the problem, it's the signal.
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