The other day I saw a post on Facebook that I could not ignore. It was a screenshot of a Twitter post that read "School shootings happen cause nobody is allowed to hit their kids anymore. Gun control? Let's start with kid control. I was afraid to miss curfew cause my mom would throw a lamp at my head. This is the generation of 'my mom is my best friend.' Fuck that. I feared my mom."

In the comments, everyone was laughing about how kids today were coddled and telling stories about how they were whipped with belts or slapped or otherwise injured by their parents for coming home late or not following the rules.

I was not a "coddled" millennial, not all the time anyway. Many relatives had a hand in raising me because I was an unplanned special needs child, and quite a few of them hit me. And yes, I did learn to fear them. I learned to fear breaking the rules. But that did not teach me how to be an upstanding citizen.

You know what fear is? It's a primal response to danger. Its main goal is to motivate you to do what you need to survive. You have two options when you feel fear: fight or flight. Avoiding punishment by following the rules is basically flight.

Thus, fear of punishment does not instill morals in kids. It puts them into survival mode and conditions them to feel fear in certain situations, like a lab rat. But conditioning behavior is not the same as laying the groundwork for someone to have good morals.

Many studies have proven that fear of consequences is not a good long lasting way to modify behavior.

A change in behavior does not indicate a change in thought process. In fact, forcing someone to change behavior that comes naturally to them leads to resentment and even violent anger, which can lead to the kid taking out their anger on innocent people.

I'm not saying everyone who came from a bad home life will become a school shooter. I certainly never did. But children are not little lumps of clay that you can mold to your every desire. They are human beings with their own minds and their own needs and wants. Steering a child in the right direction is important, but controlling them is unethical.

What did help me was observing positive role models and how they handled situations. By watching them closely and seeing how others reacted, I saw that what they did made the world a better place and I wanted to emulate that.

One of those people is my mom. I'm proud to say that she is my best friend and that she has taught me a lot by how she acts, not by threatening punishment.

I come home on time not because I'm afraid of what will happen if I don't, but because the people I look up to in my life are dependable and punctual, and I want to be as trustworthy as they are.

I am well aware that this article will fall on deaf ears because the kinds of people who take pride in hurting those weaker than them are not the kind of people who listen to reason. But I can't stay silent when I see people celebrating and praising abusive behavior. Maybe someone who is thinking of becoming a parent but doesn't have the best role models will learn something from this article.