Originally posted by Greadius
I'm not going to turn this into a personal discussion.
I expected you'd avoid this question. You don't have kids, do you? If you did, you'd share your experiential wisdom as to how YOU handle these tough situations. Instead, you take potshots at well-meaning parents, calling them "lazy" or irresponsible. And you talk about not wanting a "personal discussion."
There are books available.
Or they can just ask other parents. Its not like they're the first ones to have a child who frustrates them with misbehaving.
My point is, you CAN'T learn parenting from a book, it's not that kind of learning. Books can HELP, but parenting isn't an exact science, and most real lessons in it are learned from experience. I'm NOT a parent (see, I'LL admit this), but I've talked to a few, and I also sensed growing up as the firstborn that my own parents had to pretty much learn as they went along too. They weren't always perfect, they made mistakes sometimes, but damn it, they loved me and I KNEW that. Sometimes I wish they had been even firmer than they were, because I SHOULDN'T have gotten away with some of the stupid sh*t I did growing up, which made my life harder later (example: smoking). But that was as a teenager, when they no longer spanked me, because at that age it wouldn't have worked. But they could have been firmer in other ways. But what can I say? I didn't have perfect parents. Who did?
This is EXACTLY my point. Hitting a child isn't some sort of seperate, rational decision made for the best interest of the child, it is a desperation tactic used by frustrated and angry parents. There is no time for experimentation, they were hit as a child, it is what they no, so they DO it, its a primal response, its instinct (funnel negative emotions through violence).
Sometimes desperate situations call for desperate measures. The fire situation for instance.
And also remember that the more time that elapses between an offense and a punishment, the less likely the two will be associated in a very young kid's mind. So if you go looking for the parenting book, or try in your head to devise the "perfect" punishment, you could be wasting time.
People who aren't sadistic, in some degree, don't use violence.
They're incompatible. You can't be a violent pacifist.
Spanking is not violence, no matter how much you try to deconstruct it. You can deconstruct ANYTHING to look like anything else, I've learned (I was once a liberal-intellectual type so I know ALL about this, all the tricks), so you'll need to show me more than that.
Of course it harmed you; you think hitting children is okay!
Still trying to play the semantic games. No, I don't think EVERY type of hitting of a child is okay; I think the "spanking" type of hitting is. And again, most people here know the difference, so what's your excuse?
And the fact that you agree it is no better the others serves as another example for its completely obsolete use as a punishment. Its not more effect, so why are you taking the potential risks involved for a mediocre, potential result if NOT because it was the easiest way for you?
Every time you discipline, there is always a small risk that the kid will harbor resentment. If you discipline IN THE SPIRIT OF LOVE, that risk is diminished. Which is better, a hard hit with a belt on the butt (which I would view as borderline excessive, although it happened to me a couple times before), or profound and systematic guilt trips without a hand ever laid on you? BOTH of these things, I'll agree, is where you start running bigger risks. Whereas the milder counterparts of BOTH aren't that risky.
YOU are trying to convince US that spanking is bad--I.e. you are trying to change a behavior accepted by most people. So the burded of proof is on YOU to demonstrate that it is WORSE. Acknowledge that one is no better than the other, and you haven't met your burden.
You're funneling your emotions into them. You curve their behavior because they're afriad of you. Their regret becomes anger.
It is about curbing behavior. And there are stages in normal moral development--first, we only see something as "bad" through punishment, because by default we think all actions are otherwise good. LATER, say around 8 or 9, we start seeing things as good or bad due to increasing levels of reasoning ability. This is textbook psychology. When I was 5, I don't think I would have understood reason. By 10, I did. And by 10, I was no longer spanked either.
So if we agree hitting children isn't helping to raise them, why are we doing it?
We agreed to no such thing. All I said was that, morally the two approaches were equal, and that on a case-by-case basis one may work just as well as the other, or not. Depending a lot on the child's natural development, personality, etc.
You'd be wrong.
I don't have the Time Magazine handy for the actual numbers, but they did an extensive article in researching what made a bully. I think the number was in the 90s% that their parents used corpral punishment or hit them.
What was the percentage for non-bullies? Something similar?
Bullying is a different thing from spanking. It is not done out of love, by someone who loves you, and it is meant to cause physical harm. Now if they correlated bullying to ABUSE (i.e. the drunk Dad using his fists), I wouldn't be surprised. I wonder if this study differentiated the two, or lumped them together. I'd bet the latter.
), then I guess there was some scuffling before it was broken up. His first was I guess the only punch landed during the whole thing, they got suspended for a day from school, and the kid hasn't really bothered him since.
