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[quote=Anonymous]As a parent, for my specific kids I would be fine with this consequence.  If you're goofing off in class wasting your time and the teacher's time when she has to deal with your behavior, you get to "pay back" the wasted time during what should be your free time. If you haven't finished your work it's not yet time to play. It seems logical and it echos how we do things at home.

However there is now research, including from groups I typically respect such as the AAP, recommending against this. The arguments seem to be (1) childhood obesity, (2) not linking exercise or lack thereof to punishment, and (3) the school day is too long and kids who don't get to move around at recess aren't able to behave well for the rest of the day.

The first two points seem like nonsense to me and more of the coddling our (society's) kids with decreasing personal responsibility trend that I hate, but the third argument is slightly more convincing. I'm not convinced that it would be too harmful as an occasional consequence and my thought would be that if recess is that important the loss of it would make an even stronger impact on the kid and hopefully cut down on future behavior infractions. It generally worked pretty well when we were in school, from what I can recall.

However, just because I would handle my kids a certain way doesn't mean that's the best way in a large-scale setting with a variety of different kids such as what public schools are dealing with. They pretty much have to go with the recommendation of the experts, so even though I personally disagree, I think the OP's child's teacher's consequence was inappropriate for the public school setting.[/quote]

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