I was a very troublesome child of 3 raised by a single mother who had to hold down multiple jobs. She tried her best but simply could not be around enough. Our discipline was always being talked to and ''educated'' on why our behavior was bad, being grounded, not getting sweats and all the usual shit. The multiple schools I ended up transferring too tried all the modern ''techniques'' to keep me in line and none of it worked.
The dads way of doing things is not the best however I have had people during my entire childhood (including professional psychologists) using all the socially accepted punishments/techniques and it absolutely failed. I truly feel I may have stuck in a little better at school if I had a person in my life I somewhat feared.. because nothing else clearly worked on me. But that fear would have trampled on who I truly was as a person and the reasons why I was acting how I was.
School was hugely focused on academics and that suites a lot of kids, while I was more of an athlete or hands on kid. I never got wrong during physical education or in classes like wood work. All kids want to do what they like but for kids like me that meant 98% of the time doing shit we didn't like. Is it any surprise that it leads to a lot of bad behavior in children?. Do you as an adult like having your entire day dictated to you?. Not so bad if you are forced to do things you moderately enjoy.
Either way you attempt to punish they both have the common ground, they are punishments, that's why they don't work. Instead of punishment, positive reinforcement is scientifically proven to get more out of kids and adults but it requires a whole relearning of how you deal with situations. It also only works if the table is not tipped hugely as with the academic schooling system example back then (still a big issue in uk). I was running 5:30 mile at 12 year old with no training, nobody picked up on that, because it wasn't math. I could have become a gold medalist but instead became another drop out working low paid jobs for the next 15 year.
It's personal but not meant as a sob story. If your kids are good at something positive then you need to latch onto that, make it the focal point of positive reward.
If that father is telling the kid he ran good today, that kid might actually get something positive out of it. He may even start running to school every day. If he is doing that then at the very least he is not on the bus bullying other kids.
