Subject:
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Re: Corporal punishment (was rah rah, canada!
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Thu, 5 Feb 2004 12:49:45 GMT
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Viewed:
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561 times
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Larry,
I did think that Nik was a courteous young man. And I don't mean to suggest
that you can not get acceptable, even good, results in turning a child into an
adult with corporal punishment as a tool. I was spanked. I'm OK. But I do
question how might I be better if I'd been raised as an equal member of the
family. (And I recognize it as equally valid to wonder how I might be worse.)
But in doing the years of fairly informal research that I've been doing,
equality appears to produce positive effects.
I think it is appropriate to use any degree of physical force when necessary to
protecting your child's life! Whether you're restraining their movement so they
don't trot in front of trafic, knocking them down to avoid a swinging baseball
bat, or slapping them to get them out of a screaming fit before Mr. Grumpy
Terrorist shoots them in the head. OK?
But that's completely different than keeping it in your bag of discipline
tricks.
Larry, if your son suffers a debilitating injury and becomes mentally unfit,
when does your obligation to him taper off? What if someone is so bad at
parenting, that they produce an adult child who is incapable of taking care of
himself? When do his parents no long bear responsibility?
I largely agree with your estimations of the ages and percentages, but it's not
that way because of some innate, natural, inexorable, or mystic force. It's
because your fairly accurately fingered the normal child's development pattern.
And you know what? I think that part of the parent's responsibility is to allow
the child to dictate the rate at which the percentage of debt tapers off. A
normal, happy, healthy, sane child _wants_ it to taper off at roughly the rate
you suggested. One who does not, does not fit those criteria and thus has more
claim to the parents' debt, possibly forever (whether or not it is the parents'
fault).
To claim three hours of antiquing as a need is, I think, beneath you. So I'll
stick to the cookies example. Your implication is that if the child has a
tantrum after four cookies and you have in good faith estimated that more would
be irresponsible for you to provide, you should (or at least could, reasonably)
use mild physical trauma to bully them into stopping. Right? I can only take
that to mean that you believe they are attempting to manipulate you through a
cold series of calculated behaviors with their tantrum.
If you believe that a tantrum is merely a failure of their ability to cope with
socially and emotionally difficult situations, as I do, then it's clear that
beating them is completely the wrong thing to do.
It's funny, last night I was hyper-sensitive to my behavior with the kids as a
result of this thread. Kivi did, in fact, have a fit when the flow of
girl-scout cookies stopped. I hugged her and told her that I know how tough it
is to be two years old with all that emotion bursting out of you. (I don't know
how much of this she gets, but Garrett was there too and teaching him is equally
important.) She stopped crying after a while, told me she was crying (that's
one of her new things, the other being fear -- which she just discovered) and
settled down.
The final thing in your note is comparing our parenting strategies and noting
that they both work. As I wrote above, I agree. But that doesn't mean that one
is not superior. I used to think what you think, but I changed my mind. You
didn't. But how much serious thought have you given to it? Maybe lots, I know
you're a thinker, but that doesn't mean you've considered everything. But I do
know that people (North Americans and Australians, in this case) are very
resistant, seemingly from their programming, to openly consider that the way
they were raised was inferior.
I think the way I was raised was in many ways inferior to the way I'm doing
things. And I think it's my duty to my kids and to society to learn from my
parents' mistakes and do better. I hope that each generation does that. I know
I'm leaving plenty of inadequacies that my kids can improve on.
I'd like to leave you with a link. Dr. William Sears is, in my estimation, the
greatest living pediatric writer. I don't agree with him on all disciplinary
issues, but he's a great source of medical (and psychological) knowledge. I
consult his books, along with Spock, first when I have a question. I think he's
spot on with regard to disciplinary violence.
http://askdrsears.com/html/6/T062100.asp
Chris
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Corporal punishment (was rah rah, canada!
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| What follows is not my best writing... I used a lot of that up today working on deliverables for my client and for BrickFest PDX. But it's a great topic and I wanted to take one more swing before I went to bed... (...) I know Chris didn't completely (...) (20 years ago, 5-Feb-04, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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