Popular preventative discipline programs often provide guidelines for ideal disciplinary interactions, emphasizing teachers' use of a "neutral," "soft," "warm," and/or "loving" tone of voice during student discipline. Yet the scholarly literature has suggested that there are alternative pedagogical ways of using emotional expression, including tone, to enhance student learning. For example, a long line of scholarship on African American educators (Delpit, 1996; Foster, 1991, 1997; Gordson, 1998; Irvine & Fraser, 1998; Monroe & Obidah, 2004; Patterson, Mickelson, Hester, & Wyrick, 2011; Ware, 2006) has found that some African American teachers use a direct, assertive, and strict disciplinary tone in the context of trusting student- teacher relationships to communicate high expectations and concern. Through experiments, interviews, and observations, the current mixed methods study explored how elementary students perceived and responded to the strict tone aspect of this "tough love" discipline style. Based on the study's findings, I argue that programs that deem just one style of communication acceptable during discipline may in fact be needlessly excluding diverse teaching styles and disregarding the cultural assets of the teachers who use them. [This paper was published in "Mid-Western Educational Researcher" v30 n3 2018 (EJ1192848).]