R Soul on 21/2/2012 at 13:36
Quote Posted by Kolya
What you mean is child abuse.
That sort of attitude belittles the seriousness of genuine child abuse.
scarykitties on 21/2/2012 at 14:34
Quote Posted by Kolya
What you mean is child abuse.
Then I ask, what method can a parent use to enforce their authority when they have no authoritative credibility in the child's eyes?
Let's say that you're at the grocery store with your 6-year-old child. The child demands a treat that he sees. You refuse. In a tantrum, the child begins throwing merchandise off shelves, screaming and crying, making an enormous scene and ruining merchandise. You demand that the child stop, but he ignores you. You threaten to ground the child, but he does not listen.
In what non-physical manner do you propose to exercise your authority on this child that does not care what you say and is causing property damage in a public place while also publicly humiliating you, further lessening you, the parent's, credibility in the child's eyes and everyone else's?
Or let me offer another scenario...
You have raised your child using only grounding and time-outs, even when the child has been unwilling to comply. Still, you've managed to make it through most of your child's life fairly well. However, now that your child is a teenager, they know that the only danger they can expect from you is an arbitrary command, such as, "You are forbidden from using the computer for a week."
What is to stop this teenager from using the computer? Certainly there is nothing to fear from you, the parent, because all you will do is beg and plead at them to obey. If you have no means of exercising your superiority, then you just have to hope that the child respects you well enough to comply and accept punishment, but if the child does not, what can you do about it as a parent?
I think that there is such a thing as a healthy level of fear for one's parents. As
The Prince demonstrates (yes, I understand the irony of trying to defend physical punishment by citing
The Prince, but that is not the point), people will obey either out of love or out of fear. Of course every parent hopes that their child will obey out of love, but not all children will be loving, respectful, and close to their parents while growing up. In these instances, fear is a strong alternative means of enforcing compliance. Is it cruel? Not if handled with finesse. This could be a fear of hearing the parent shout, the fear of greater punishment, or the fear of pain (as long as injury does not occur). I don't think that there is anything wrong with an ass-spanking to correct a defiant child.
Of course, there is always a chance that, even with spankings or such things, the child will still remain defiant. But I believe that taking care to administer the correct punishment for the right crime, using spankings and authority-based punishment when appropriate, will serve to correct
most children. There is probably a certain percentage that cannot be corrected no matter what you do.
If you have alternate theories of a means to correct a defiant child, I would love to hear it.
Chimpy Chompy on 21/2/2012 at 14:44
I'm really not liking either Kolya's misplaced outrage or Kitties' rule of fear.
DDL on 21/2/2012 at 15:03
The problem with scarykitties example of a 6-year old is it pretty much presupposes you've been allowing your child to get away with whatever it wants RIGHT up until it tries to pull a tantrum in a store, and then you suddenly bust out the slaps like a pimp.
If you're raising your child with any sense, the tantrum scenario wouldn't happen in the first place. Alternatively, if you've been raising your child in a wholly permissive environment, then the slapping simply comes entirely out of leftfield (or extreme rightfield lol) and leaves your child viewing you as bewilderingly capricious.
So it's a shit example, basically.
For the second: OMG MAH PASSWORD AM CHANGES WTFFFF MOM???!!??
It's basically that easy. Or hey, you could shoot it, I guess. :erg:
Vasquez on 21/2/2012 at 15:20
Quote Posted by Scots Taffer
Spoken like a true non-parent.
Haha, as if there was no disagreement over means of discipline among parents.
scarykitties on 21/2/2012 at 15:44
Quote Posted by DDL
If you're raising your child with any sense, the tantrum scenario wouldn't happen in the first place. Alternatively, if you've been raising your child in a wholly permissive environment, then the slapping simply comes entirely out of leftfield (or
extreme rightfield lol) and leaves your child viewing you as bewilderingly capricious.
Fair enough, but I know that, like adults, children vary in their mindsets regardless of environment. It's accepted that one's personality is shaped in part by genetics and small things that are difficult to control. There will be children that will always be obedient, children who will sometimes disobey but will accept punishment given by parents, children who will disobey and defy their parents' punishment, and children who will disobey and cannot be corrected.
The use of physical punishment is intended to correct the third category and hopefully deter the fourth.
I'll say again: punishment such as grounding depends on the child accepting the punishment or (as in the answer of changing the password) the parent having some other means of controlling the child through an exercise of knowledge or power. In the case of that teenager, what I was getting at was that the teenager can certainly get onto a computer somewhere besides at home, and what control does the parent have over the teen at that point?
The preference is for parental guidance to follow the child when the child isn't under the parent's eye, right? The intent is to modify the child's behavior, but not to merely create a facade of compliance when the parent is nearby.
Going again to the teen example, while the password method is a good answer and works at home, my point was more that, without the instillation of respect for the parent to incline the teen to comply, why would the teen obey if they had any means of disobedience as an option? I think that the respect for authority can come naturally to some children, but to others it has to be reinforced.
PigLick on 21/2/2012 at 15:56
People who smack children shouldnt pe parents. Like me.
DDL on 21/2/2012 at 16:23
Quote Posted by scarykitties
In the case of that teenager, what I was getting at was that the teenager can certainly get onto a computer somewhere besides at home, and what control does the parent have over the teen at that point?
Oh teh noes?
A) this is less convenient, especially if they have a ton of stuff bookmarked at home
B) so fucking what? I'd give 'em props for initiative.
You're not saying "NO COMPUTER USE AT ALL" because that's both unenforceable and probably pretty detrimental to their academic and social development, these days (in my day it was all fields, tin cans with string and dog heads on sticks 'n shit), you're saying "no using your/the family's computer". In other words, "if you're going to be a dick on facebook, you'll have to do it somewhere else."
And there are of course
many ways of employing that tactic short of shooting the laptop and uploading the vids.
Generally speaking, teenagers will get up to
all kinds of shit when you're not looking, and if you've managed to instill the fear of god into them so that they honestly
do behave as if you were there, even when you're not, then by god, them's are gonna be some dull, dull adults when they grow up. Still, the world can always use some more drones who do what they're told. :thumb:
TLDR version, if you're having to come up with reasons to justify physical punishment, you're probably doing it wrong in the first place.
scarykitties on 21/2/2012 at 17:19
Quote Posted by DDL
B) so fucking what? I'd give 'em props for initiative.
I think that you're missing the point of punishment. The idea is to deter a particular behavior, not to encourage sneaky means of avoiding consequences.
Quote Posted by DDL
And there are of course
many ways of employing that tactic short of shooting the laptop and uploading the vids.
I agree. I'm not saying that was the only way it could have been done. I was arguing the point that physical punishment (that is, spanking) is necessary in some cases, in particular in cases of defiance.
Quote Posted by DDL
Generally speaking, teenagers will get up to
all kinds of shit when you're not looking, and if you've managed to instill the fear of god into them so that they honestly
do behave as if you were there, even when you're not, then by god, them's are gonna be some dull, dull adults when they grow up. Still, the world can always use some more drones who do what they're told. :thumb:
Yes. Because people who have a strong moral code to the point of not needing laws in order to be deterred from murder, rape, theft, and other crimes are the
real scum of society. Go Anarchy!
Quote Posted by DDL
TLDR version, if you're having to come up with reasons to justify physical punishment, you're probably doing it wrong in the first place.
When I was 13, my parents took custody over two Native American foster children. One was my age, one was six years younger. Now, since they were foster children (and minorities, at that) given to a white family, it goes without saying that the Tribal Council wanted to watch my parents very closely to make sure that there was no abuse going on. They were strictly forbidden from any physical punishment.
Prior to living with us, they grew up in a fairly typical Standing Rock Sioux tribal family. That is, the children ran wild, the father was not present, the mother drank (and was incarcerated for murder, which is why they were in foster care), and there was a lot of genuine cruelty--such as drunken beatings.
The foster brother who was my age was very angry at first. The two of us were complete opposites, but we became friends simply by being in the same environment together. He was very defensive of his family and very angry and frustrated at his situation. He didn't care for school, had a tendency to punch walls when angry, enjoyed carrying around knives, etc.
The younger brother, in contrast, was very eager to please my parents, and I never cared for him because I saw him as a suck-up. He would do wrong things and then cover up his blame with a smile and quick lies.
As it turned out, the foster brother who was my age eventually mellowed. He found a career that fascinated him (welding) and is now making a good living off of it. He's a very hard-working and admirable man--probably a far better man than I am, if endearing trials and coming out well is any indication.
He and I had plenty of "teen moments" of trouble-making, but we both respected my parents and feared punishment (not in a traumatizing sense, but in the sense of wanting to avoid it because it was more inconvenient than it was worth).
In contrast, my younger foster brother began to develop a defiant attitude in his early teens. He stopped doing his schoolwork, began running with gang members and doing drugs, and now (no shitting, here), his life goal is to join the Mexican Mafia.
I am of the opinion that the problem here is that the younger foster brother never learned to respect authority. I do not know the reason why, but the difference between him and myself and my older foster brother is that
we had physical punishment as children, while he was sheltered from any physical punishment (he was never beaten by his mother like my foster brother was, nor was he spanked by my parents like I was) and he never had any respect for punishments such as grounding. He would break them whenever possible and was always defiant. It came to the point that, out of defiance, he would destroy property for the sake of destroying it.
One evening, I was walking down an alley with him and we stopped in an open shed to warm up a bit since it was pretty cold out. During that pause, he saw a painting someone had sitting there and, just for the hell of it, he slashed the painting with a knife. Most recently, he is on trial for defacing federal property when he and some friends put graffiti on a library.
While I may not be able to come up with good samples of circumstances where physical punishment is necessary, it seems to me that I've seen the result of a lack of respect for authority, and I believe that physical punishment may have instilled that lacking respect in order to curtail my younger foster brother's destructive lifestyle. About the only thing that could correct him at this point would be joining the Army, and they have no issue with using physical and psychological punishment (physical in the sense of forced, intense training rather than actual striking) to break one down in order to respect authority.
I think that suggesting that a respect for authority leads to brainlessness is just naive and wrong.
DDL on 21/2/2012 at 17:44
YAY ANARCHY :tsktsk:
Unquestioning respect for authority is brainless. Question everything. If it's a sensible idea, generally it will hold up to questioning. If it's stupid, it won't. Sensible ideas should probably be followed, stupid ones shouldn't.
Conflating "not being dull" with "OMG SO MUCH MURDER AND RAPE YAY" is perhaps the most ludicrous bit of hyperbole I've seen today, and I've been reading science papers.
The trick, fundamentally, is to teach children, not simply punish them. Don't hit them because they were acting like a dick in the checkout line, point out to them exactly what a dick they're being, and how much they're irritating all the other people. By all means combine this with removal of privileges, but fundamentally, you're not trying to associate obedience with fear, you're trying to associate not being a dick with appropriate social behaviour.
Unless you're on the internet, of course. Anarchy YAY :joke:
