"0:-" wrote in message
news:OfqdnZlDS7kQzuXYnZ2dnUVZ_tudnZ2d@scnresearch. com...
Nathan A. Barclay wrote:
"0:-" wrote in message
ps.com...

We are in agreement. And here in this newsgroup, aps, I have seen
again
and again, pro spankers discuss circumstances where they would spank,
and demonstrating they have extremely unrealistic expectations of
children. The idea that any child, for instance, under the age of 12
or
so, would "willfully disobey." It's nonsense.

They are following natural imperatives to explore the universe. All an
aware parent needs to do is learn how to question and investigate and
when the parent has figured out (even if wrong) some probable natural
imperative the child is reacting to, simply show them how to get their
appropriately. Wanted behavior replacing unwanted behavior.

This isn't rocket science, and no child with parents that can figure
this out is "spanked." It's too damned obvious to a parent that can
think, and is compassionate (even in the absence of exact evidence)
that the child does not need spanking to learn.

My personal experience from when I was a child proves beyond any
possible doubt that you are wrong about this.

It proves YOU, a single case, anecdotally, draw this conclusion. There are
other people out there.

Unless and until you offer compelling evidence that my experience was
entirely atypical, I'm inclined to trust my own experience over your
theoretical psychobabble. Human beings are extremely complex, so any
attempt to develop a theoretical model of how we think and react will almost
inevitably be simplistic and less than entirely accurate.

Sometimes children simply decide that
something that they've been told not to do is enough fun that they want
to do it anyhow.

Depending on age - developmental stage - they mostly do not really
"decide" anything at all. Nature is deciding. Before about 6 years old,
normally, children are responding entirely to the external world
reflexively

That doesn't mean they are never capable of making a deliberate choice, does
it?

If this were not so they would not need parents to protect them. They
could just 'decide' as we adults do, what to do next.

You're missing an important point. Just being capable of making deliberate
decisions is not enough to be ready to be an adult. Adults also need a lot
of knowledge and experience to base our decisions on. We need to truly
understand what something like "a broken arm" or "death" is instead of their
just being words or vague concepts. We need some grasp on probability - on
understanding that even a small chance of something very bad happening isn't
worth it. And we need the ability to fully understand complex
cause-and-effect interrelationships.

Children are ready to start making simple choices about simple things long
before they are capable of making the kinds of vastly more complex choices,
about vastly more omplex things, that adults have to make. For the most
part, the need for punishment arises from the need for simple, easily
understood consequences because the child isn't ready yet to live in a world
with adult consequences.

They would die in a few days without us. Because they are not fully
developed.

They are ignorant practical experimental physicists, among other things.
But they will experiment. If they do not, they risk the chance of never
developing the skills for living.

Another thing they are is human beings who enjoy doing things that are fun
for them. And they need to learn that doing whatever is the most fun is not
always acceptable.

Also, children need to be prevented from engaging in experiments that are
unacceptably dangerous, harmful, or destructive. Consider, especially, what
can happen if a child uses a baby as the subject of experiments. To some
extent, it is possible to eliminate dangers by modifying a child's
environment. But as children get older, they need to learn to start taking
responsibility themselves for not engaging in kinds of experiments that
their parents tell them are unacceptably damaging or dangerous, especially
if the children are ever going to be allowed in an environment that is not
made thoroughly safe for them.

Granted, if parents take enough time, they can often find a
way to redirect the children's choices by offering them something that's
almost as much fun, or maybe even more fun, that they wouldn't have to
feel guilty about doing. But that doesn't mean the children's
disobedience isn't willful.

It's nature. Not willful at all.

They haven't the mind to make the will come from, yet. Or we wouldn't call
them children, minors.

If you've spent much time around children age four or five, and you don't
think they have will, you are living in a state of denial. There are a lot
of things they don't have anywhere near as much of as adults - information,
experience, understanding of complex interrelationships, and such. But they
very definitely have will - as they can make abundantly clear when someone
tries to get them to do something they don't want to do or to stop doing
something they want to do.

snip

When I read your claim, I started thinking back trying to find the first
occasions when I can be absolutely sure that I willfully disobeyed my
parents - where I knew I wasn't allowed to do something but made a
deliberate choice to do it anyhow. I can come up with two situations
when I was no older than six, and possibly younger. (I know I
couldn't have been older because we moved to a different house
when I was six, but beyond that, I have no way of pinpointing my age.)

One situation involved playing with the shower curtain in a way that had
the bottom of the curtain in the tub but had it draped over the
side hanging over the outside so my younger brother and I could
put water in the part of the curtain where it sagged over the outside.
(It's kind of hard to explain.)

R R R R....No, not to anyone that was a child it isn't. You were doing
physics experimentation and nature was driving you. You only THINK you
were deciding yourself. That you were more conscious of your involvement
and engaged your mind in the exercise shows that you WERE in fact about 6
years old. That's when the brain starts doing abstract cause and effect
work, and exactly the kinds of experiments you are describing become the
rule.

You were not just doing physics, you were doing social dynamics as well (I
know my parents don't want me doing this).

A crucial time for children, indeed.

And crucial that parents handle it without pain and humiliation. There is
more than enough for most but the brain damaged child to be upset at
making a mess, or upsetting his or her parents, with being whaled on as
well.

My brother and I had been told repeatedly not to do it because my
parents were afraid we'd break the shower curtain. But I couldn't
figure out how what we were doing could break it, and I knew I
was being too careful to spill water outside the tub, so I wasn't
inclined to give up my fun and obey my parents. As it turned
out, the shower curtain did break, and my brother and I got
in trouble. (The flaw in my reasoning was that I didn't even begin
to comprehend that the place that would break was where
the curtain was held up by hooks through holes, far above my head. Now I
can recognize that the stress on the holes was vastly greater
than the stress on the part I was paying attention to as a little kid.)

Man you are describing exactly the kinds of situations I've been pointing
out.

I note that you say, "got in trouble." I presume you weren't spanked. Yet
you learned...you knew what trouble was. It did not have to be CP driven
for you to understand.

That is the case for most children.

On the contrary, until the shower curtain broke, my parents tried to deal
with the problem without resorting to punishment - and it didn't work. My
brother and I did get spanked after the shower curtain broke, althouggh that
was not the entire punishment; my parents also said they wouldn't be buying
us candy for a while because they'd be using the money to buy a new shower
curtain. (I remember being confused by that, because it didn't seem like we
usually had candy around anyhow.)

My memories after that are a lot fuzzier, but I'm pretty sure getting
spanked that one time when the shower curtain broke didn't stop me. I don't
think there was ever a case where I actually got punished when a shower
curtain didn't break. And since I didn't understand how what I did broke
the shower curtain and I'd put water in the shower curtain a lot of times
without its breaking, I didn't expect to break a shower curtain and get in
trouble if I kept doing it. And to whatever extent I did keep playing with
shower curtains that way, there was never another case where one broke as a
result.

But back to my original point of why I brought this incident up, I was
definitely quite capable of making a deliberate choice to do something my
parents had repeatedly told me not to at an age no older than six.

The other early occasion I remember involved vitamin pills. We didn't
generally have candy around, but chewable vitamin pills tasted good, and
there were times when I snuck extra ones even though I knew I wasn't
supposed to.

Do you think spanking would have made you stop sneaking "candy?"

Do all children that are spanked stop the unwanted behavior?

Not so as I've noticed. Now getting sick from eating too much candy could
be as good or better a teacher.

And there is one other thing. If children are getting into things that are
dangerous to them they are too young to understand...so why aren't those
things being secured safely by THE PARENTS?

I didn't bring this up as an example of a situation where spanking would
help. I brought it up as a case study of a child no older than age six
making a deliberate choice to do something he knew he wasn't allowed to. I
agree that spanking is of only very limited value when children can figure
out a way to do what they want without getting caught. But when there isn't
a way for children to avoid getting caught, spanking can have a much
stronger effect.

I'll strongly agree that a lot of things young children do are caused by
things other than willful disobedience. Sometimes they don't even
understand that they are doing something wrong. Other times, they
forget about rules they are supposed to obey - especially if they get
carried away with what they are doing. But the idea that children
have to be around age 12 before they are capable of making
willful choices to disobey is completely preposterous.

No it isn't. You just wrote the reasons they often do things without
willful intent to disobey.

You're missing a very important point. Consider the following two
statements.

1) A lot of inappropriate behavior does not involve a deliberate intent to
disobey.

2) Sometimes young children do make deliberate choices to disobey.

Those two statements are NOT mutually exclusive. From my own experience in
my own childhood, I can say definitively that both statements were true in
my case at least as early as age six.

I do think a lot of people - especially certain types of religious nuts (at
least nuts insofar as their understanding of children's motivations is
concerned) go ridiculously overboard in presuming that when children
disobey, it is an act of willful disobedience. I think children deserve the
benefit of reasonable doubts as to whether or not they intended to disobey.
But I don't think it's good for children when that benefit of the doubt
turns into an unrestricted license for deliberate disobedience.

Externally applied controls have limited learning potential. Engaging the
child's own self control is the ultimate in teaching, and learning.
Successfully.

When it works.

Merely choosing not to spank is not, in my view, an extreme position.
The people I regard as genuine extremists are people who refuse to
accept any possibility that spanking can ever be a useful tool - who
refuse to accept a possibility that their own opinion regarding
spanking might not be entirely on target.

Most don't come to an epiphany. Most have giving a great deal of thought
to it. Most spankers appear to not have thought about choosing spanking.
Most non-spankers have chosen often after long and difficult examination,
and argument.

The fact that a person became converted to an idea after a lot of thought
does not prevent the person from being a zealot, or even a potentially
dangerous zealot.

And that is especially true when such people seek to use
government power to push or force their view that spanking is always,
inherently harmful onto others.

That claim is not universal. What they do claim is that we cannot know at
what point spanking is and isn't harmful, and why take the risk, since
non-spanking alternatives are rarely if ever harmful, or risk harm.

I don't view that line of reasoning as extreme. I think it's dangerous to
base laws on that line of reasoning because if there are situations where
spanking is useful, and we outlaw spanking, we pretty much destroy our
chances of finding the situations where spanking is useful. But the
underlying sentiment is well within the bounds of how people can reasonably
react to the existing research.

I will point out, though, that refusing to spank does risk harm if other
approaches consistently fail and parents run out of other ideas. If you
know that not spanking isn't working, and there is any realistic possibility
at all that spanking could help get the situation under control, then
refusing to spank carries a risk.

If you are right, parents who don't spank will never reach that point. But
if I am right, significant numbers of them will - if only because they
aren't willing to take the time to research and try every alternative
available.

Counter arguments are the ones that go to extremes. Especially proponents
that publish. The idea that a child will become and out of control
criminal if farcical.

I keep inviting over the years, anyone that posts here to come up with a
short list of unspanked criminals. No researcher has ever found any such
people in criminal populations.

At http://www.geocities.com/cddugan/NoFear5.htm I found a reference to a
1991 Straus study. The page describes the results of the study as follows:
"Straus (1991) found that juveniles who had been physically punished were
nearly twice as likely to have committed theft and over three times as
likely to have hit a non-family-member with an object in comparison with
unspanked children."

I agree with you that a lot of claims made by supporters of spanking about
what happens if children aren't spanked are ridiculous. But it looks to me
like your claims about how impossible it is for children who aren't spanked
to end up having their behavior go out of control are also a serious
distortion of the truth.

Similarly, I regard people who believe it's impossible to rear children
successfully without ever spanking them as extremists on the other
side - albeit a different kind of extremists from those who take the
severity of the spankings to extremes.

I see rather a lot of the former and few of the latter.

Most people do not think spanking is harmful in all the possible
conformations of it. But they DO recognize the inherent risks.

I can drive my car at 140 MPH if I chose. And most time's where I chose to
do so I am in no danger...because nothing happened.

Or am I?

What about factors I cannot control?

This raises the question of whether the correlations between spanking and
negative outcomes are results of factors parents can't control, or are
results of factors parents can control. Consider the various risks involved
in driving 140 miles per hour. What kind of shape is your car in? How
straight is the road? How good is your visibility? How good and careful a
driver are you? Is the road limited access, and is it fenced off from
animals? Is there slower traffic in front of you? Is the road divided to
essentially eliminate the risk of hitting an oncoming car? Are you going to
try to do something else that divides your attention at the same time you're
driving?

Under optimal conditions, people could very easily view driving at speeds
far in excess of America's speed limits (if not necessarily all the way up
to 140) as worth the risk. But if you would average together all of the
different kinds of drivers, under all different kinds of conditions, driving
fast would look a whole lot worse.

Similarly, if parents can figure out the risk factors that make spanking
dangerous, and avoid or minimize those risk factors, I believe there are
situations where the benefits outweigh the remaining risks that can't be
controlled. But studies that lump wide rangers of conditions together are
essentially useless in confirming or refuting my belief.

The same goes with choosing to spank. Likely 99 percent of the time no
harm will be done.

I think I'll just not drive my car at 140 MPH, what do you think?

I doubt that I'd have enough confidence in my driving skills to go all the
way up to 140, but in a relatively new car under optimal conditions, I'd go
way past 70 if the law allowed it.

snip

Statistical associations can be a result of inherent cause-and-effect
relationships, or of cause-and-effect relationships that occur only some
of the time, or of having the same factors that can cause
one thing also be able to cause another.

Yep. And that is good enough to run world wide industries with.

There can even be other, even more complex
interrelationships. It would take a lot of additional (and much deeper)
research to make a scientifically sound determination of which is
actually
the case.

Of course. In the interests of scientific research that is true of ALL
such findings.

We don't wait for the final definitive answer to be found, because science
has discovered there really is no such thing.

Good approximations...association strong enough for practical purposes are
used in every other field...why not in child rearing practices?

Herein lies the crux of our dispute. You regard the approximations as good.
I regard them as so simplistic as to be all but useless for my purposes.

My situation is like that of a factory owner who believes he has very good
pollution controls on his factory. I'm not willing to accept studies
indicating that the average factory, regardless of whether or not it has any
kind of decent pollution controls, exposes people around it to dangerous
levels of pollution. I'm only willing to accept research that shows that
factories with pollution controls reasonably similar to mine still generate
dangerous levels of contamination.

---
I'm snipping your responses that interrupt my writing below so the context
will be clear for what I do want to reply to. Some of what I'm snipping is
your impressions based on your own experiences, which might be worth
discussing except that you have shown such an enromous bias that I'm not
prepared to trust in your ability to be an objective observer where the
issue of spanking is concerned.
---

From my experience with teachers when I was in school, I would expect
major links between spanking and insecurity to show up in cases where
parents (or teachers) are so strict that children routinely worry that
they
might accidentally do something that gets them in trouble.
The problem would be
even worse if parents have unrealistic expectations, thereby making it
essentially impossible for the children to reliably stay out of trouble
even when they are trying to behave, or if parents have a
hair trigger that almost anything can set off when they are in a bad
mood. On the other hand, if children feel comfortable that they
won't get in trouble as long as they are trying to behave, the only
time the prospect of spanking would give them a reason to feel
insecure is when they are doing or have recently done
something they know was wrong.

Now consider what happens if you average those scenarios together
without trying to distinguish between them.
Such an average gives you a causal link
between spanking and insecurity even though the link is a serious
problem only in certain types of situations.

You are giving more credit than is deserved. That would not be a "causal"
link, but a correlation.

And I'm not really sure what you are trying to say.

If you read what I wrote as a unified whole, it shouldn't be hard to follow.
To put it in terms of set theory, suppose set A contains subsets A1 and A2.
There is a significant causal link between subset A1 and result B, but not
between subset A2 and result B. If you look at set A as a whole, you see a
causal link going from set A to result B, but the reality is that only A1
produces the causal link.

Basically, I'm postulating that at least most of the feelings of serious
insecurity associated with spanking come from a specific subset of
situations where spanking is used. That subset is situations where the
people who spank are so strict, inflexible, or unreasonable that the
children have to worry about getting spanked even when they are trying to
behave. I see no reason to expect a similar general feeling of insecurity
just at being around an authority if children are comfortable that they
won't get spanked (or otherwise punished or penalized) unless they willfully
choose to disobey. But when studies fail to distinguish between the two
subsets of situations where spanking takes place, it looks as if all
spanking creates a serious risk of insecurity instead of just a certian
subset doing so.

So I don't see any reason for parents
to worry about creating excessive insecurity as long as they try to give
their children the benefit of a reasonable number of reasonable doubts.

The mindset of the punisher.

Why not give the child the benefit of a reasonable number of assurances
they are doing the right thing...that replaces the doing the wrong thing?

It's a much more powerful motivation and learning tool.

I don't see how you can give children assurances that they are doing the
right thing if they refuse to do the rright thing.

By the way, in the long term, too much security can be at least as
dangerous to children as not enough.

Really? How so?

This is ridiculous. You interrupt here to ask a question that I already
answered in my very next sentence.

If children's actions don't ever have
consequences, how are children supposed to learn to think before they
act?

Whoa whoa whoa? Who said that non-spankers contend that actions should not
have consequences?

The question is just how painful and from where should those consequences
come, and what delivery system should be used?

You are being inconsistent. When I talk about there being times when some
kind of punishment is needed, you dodge by complaining about the punitive
nature of my writing. When I talk about the danger if children don't have
consequences for their behavior, you dodge by saying that a choice not to
spank doesn't mean there won't be consequences. The reality is that when
parents shield their children from so much of the natural consequences of
their actions that what is left is not a useful deterrent, either there will
be some kind of punishment, or there will not be meaningful consequences at
all.

If punishment is useful in a situation, it is completely irrational to
reject spanking just because it is a punishment. If you reject punishment,
you're left without any meaningful consequence at all in cases where the
genuinely natural consequences are not enough. You're trying to have your
cake and eat it too. All that does, as far as I'm concerned, is make me
regard you as a person whose reactions are driven by emotion rather than by
anything resembling sound logic.

snip

I've long thought that the limits on the severity of corporal punishment
ought to depend on what a child is being punished for.

I've long thought that it should be limited by them being sovereign human
beings with a right to protection from deliberate pain and humiliation.

Did you think even for a moment what the word "sovereign" means before you
wrote this? For children to be sovereign human beings, they would have to
have ALL of the same rights as adults. Your own writings earlier in this
post show a clear recognition that children aren't ready to be sovereign
over their own lives.

Parents should have
relatively wide latitude in how they punish behavior that they can
reasonably view as exceptionally serious, assuming their children are
old enough to understand how serious the behavior is. But giving
parents the same latitude when a four-year-old spills a glass of
milk is absurd.

Your logic escapes me.

Now you are actually suggesting some 'limits' be imposed. How would you
'give' various amounts of latitude....by law?

Limits are already imposed by our laws against child abuse and governing
when social workers are authorized to intervene. I think it would be better
if the laws were restructured to put a greater emphasis on the relationshp
between the severity of punishments and the seriousness of children's
misbehavior, thereby providing greater latitude to intervene when parents
punish children harshly for minor offenses while still giving parents
relatively broad latitude in punishing more serious offenses. And when
there is room for disagreement about whether or not an offense should be
considered serious, I think parents should be given the benefit of the doubt
in determining what standards they set - at least as long as the standards
they set for their children are reasonably consistent with what they live by
themselves.

snip

I contend that logical and natural consequences, metered by parents, is a
far more effective learning tool than interrupting the child and hitting
them. The latter breaks the cause and effect link, and even the child too
young to KNOW about cause and effect needs a
backlog of experiences when he or she finally reaches their capacity
to integrate and understand cause and effect.

There is a difference between a natural consequence of an action and a
punishment disguised to look sort of like a natural consequence. My
inclination is that it's better to be honest and straightforward about the
fact that a child is being punished than it is to try to pretend that a
punishment is a natural consequence of a child's actions.

In some cases, a punishment closely related to a child's actions can help a
child understand the cause-and-effect relationship behind why the parent
felt a need to punish the child, or why what the child did was wrong, or why
something worse could have happened if the parent didn't stop the child from
engaging in inappropriate behavior. Other times, a punishment related to a
child's offense can serve a double purpose of punishing the child and
temporarily reducing the child's opportunity to do the same thing again. In
those kinds of situations, punishments closely related to a child's offense
can offer enormous advantages over more generic punishments such as
spanking.

Ironically, spanking can play a similar role in helping children understand
why hitting is wrong. I saw a story on the news a few years ago where
otherwise non-spanking parents tried everything they could think of to stop
their son from hitting their dog, without success. Finally, they spanked
him and explained that how he felt when he got spanked is how the dog feels
when he hits it. It worked. (The story was a local interest piece on the
news following a segment on 20/20 regarding spanking.)

But the less assistance a punishment provides in helping a child understand
cause-and-effect relationships, the less benefit there is in taking the time
to figure out and implement a punishment that is specifically related to the
child's offense. And a parent who makes up a punishment that's sort of
related and tries to pretend it's not a punishment is being dishonest both
with himself and with his child.

snip

In fact the definition of those terms like "punish" and "discipline," are
always on my mind in these discussions. Too often "discipline" is used by
spankers to include spanking. The word means to learn, nothing more,
unless you are using it as a noun...which wouldn't apply.

How many dictionaries did you check? All three dictionaries incorporated
into dictionary.com came up with a meaning for the verb relating to
punishment. The first was "to punish or penalize in order to train and
control; correct; chastise." You can look up the others yourself if you
want to.

snip

Nope. Not once, to my knowledge. I did myself at about age 6 though. I
simply was asked to make up for it to the druggist, someone we knew,
by
sweeping his store for a week. I still can't pass a Baby Ruth candy
bar
without a little shudder.

I wasn't spanked.

No, you were punished in a different way. But what happened to you was
a far cry from "dispensed with in a few minutes." In fact, I strongly
suspect that more than a few kids would choose a spanking over
having to sweep up for a week.

You aren't seriously going to argue that the child is the best judge of
how he or she will learn best, are you?

No. I'm making the point of how stupid it is to treat spanking as if it
were somehow magically more cruel than other forms of punishment.

What does a child know of distraction and misdirection (which spanking
does all too well).

I got to think about those candy bars every time I swept that particular
aisle.

A spanking is not a good learning tool. One "gets over" a spanking usually
pretty quickly, even a fierce beating. snip

Sometimes a long slower learning process has much more useful effect.

I agree that for something as serious as shoplifting, it's best if at least
part of the punishment is something longer and slower than a spanking so the
child doesn't put the whole thing behind him too quickly, with too little
thought. (And I'd regard a spanking on top of a week of sweeping as
overkill for a six-year-old.)

But longer, slower punishments can also have a down side. They disrupt
children's lives more, and can disrupt other people's lives more in the
process. And there is more time in which resentment could potentially breed
and grow before the punishment is behind the child.

I wasn't in pain as I swept. I was in contemplative gathering of
information. I couldn't use it very well, but the memory was strong, and
stayed with me in later years if I was tempted again.

A spanking doesn't just temporarily stop a behavior....it gives the child
an excuse to do it again on the off chance he won't be caught...which
criminals will tell you is actually quite seldom.

The only way spanking can give children an excuse to do something is if the
children are given the impression that it's okay for them to misbehave as
long as they're prepared to accept the punishment if they get caught.
Otherwise, I think your use of the words "gives...an excuse" is way off
base.

Purely in terms of deterrent effect, I don't see a fundamental difference
between what happened to you and what would probably have happened if you'd
gotten a hard spanking instead. You could have decided to take a chance of
having to sweep up again just as easily as a child who got clobbered with a
paddle could have decided to risk another paddling. Or if you don't think
one hard paddling would have been as scary a prospect as having to sweep up
again, how about more thna one?

What I'll bet really happened with you was that one or both of your parents
spent some time talking with you and making sure you understood as fully as
they could explain it why shoplifting is wrong. Then the severity of the
punishment helped drive home how serious a thing shoplifting is and, in the
process, gave you some time to think about what your parents had said. So
when you thought about shoplifting later, it wasn't just the fear of having
to sweep floors or some such again that stopped you. A lot of it was
remembering why shoplifting is wrong.

If I'm on the right track here, it was how good a job your parents did of
making sure you understood why shoplifting is wrong, and of helping you be
the kind of person who doesn't want to do things that are wrong, that made
you choose not to shoplift again, not the fact that your punishment was
having to sweep the floor instead of being spanked. Chances are excellent
that if you'd gotten a very hard spanking instead of having to sweep up for
a week, you still would have thought about getting in trouble if you
considered shoplifting again, but would also have thought about why it was
wrong and not done it. The extra time sweeping floors gave you to think
might have made a difference, but probably not enough of one to be decisive.

What would have set your parents and you up for disaster would not have been
if they spanked instead of making you sweep, but rather if they relied so
much on any kind of punishment that they didn't take much time to explain.
If all your parents did was yell at you a little about how horrible a kid
you were to steal, and then make you sweep floors for a week, would it have
had anything resembling the same effect?

If you are not laying down a learning experience that requires some fact
gathering and comparison, contemplation, then you aren't teaching. You are
just controlling..and humans are forever dreaming up ways to escape
control.

What fact gathering and comparison did sweeping floors give you that
spanking wouldn't have? What did having to sweep floors, in and of itself,
give you to contemplate, other than the fact that you hated sweeping floors?
The punishment served to reinforce your parents' teaching, and to provide an
extra mental connection to make you think about that teaching if you
considered shoplifting again. But the real TEACHING came from somewhere
else - just as it needs to (but too often doesn't) when parents spank.

snip

How many seriously bad parents in our society choose to be consistently
non-spanking parents?

Few to none, most likely. Not and follow through, at any rate.

Do you know what self selection bias is? Your statement a bit farther down
makes me wonder. I'll go ahead and explain it in case you might have
forgotten, or in case anyone else who reads this isn't familiar with the
term.

Ideally, scientific studies should divide people into caegories at random.
That way, the people in each category are likely to be essentially the same
other than in the specific factor being studied.

In contrast, with every study on spanking that I've ever heard of, the
parents being studied select which category they will be in themselves by
their choice of whether or not to spank. That creates a problem because the
same factors that cause them to choose to be spankers or choose to be
non-spankers can also influence a whole lot of other choices they make as
parents. For example, if parents choose to spank because they are too lazy
to think about anything else they could do instead, that same laziness can
cause problems in all sorts of other ways that have little or nothing to do
with the fact that they spank. That problem is known as self-selection
bias.

In a society where we both agree that it's probable that almost all
seriously bad parents spank at least occasionally, it would be absolutely
amazing if a heavily disproportionate percentage of the really messed up
people were not people who were spanked as kids. The self-selection bias
involved in that issue is one of the worst you'll find anywhere. Yet you
consistently fail to acknowledge that self-selection bias problem when you
talk about how many messed-up people were spanked as kids.

There is a huge problem of self-selection bias in
trying to compare spanking parents with non-spanking parents in
current-day America, and if any study has even come close to
doing an adequate job of controlling for that problem, I'm not
aware of it.

Then the trick is to get them to self select by motivations. Same as with
slavery, and emancipation of women.

Are you really crazy enough t think that terrible parents would magically
become good parents if they just stopped spanking?

My guess is there are some non-spankers whose children might act out
at some point. My other guess is that they handle it pretty well by
non-punitive methods, and certainly not with CP.

My guess is that a lot of parents who start off planning not to spank
change their minds because they aren't happy with the results they
get without spanking.

They aren't happy with the feelings of not being in control. It's a false
fear, because win or lose they are always "in control." Who can't control
a 2 year old child?

A person who gives up the will to do so.

They feel out of control because it's unfamiliar territory and they give
up.

The ones that stay non-spankers tend to be the ones who have
better-than-average success with alternatives, either because they have
better parenting skills and are willing to put more effort into making
alternatives work, or because their children are more naturally
cooperative.

Yep. Life is like that. So if people lack those things that's an adequate
excuse for spanking?

I'd say the two populations should swap. Those predisposed to spank should
be forbidden to, and those that are strongly opposed should be given the
choice.

The ones that change their minds and start spanking are probably
disproportionately likely to be bad parents no matter whether they spank
or not. If this guess is right, it throws the results of studies
on the subject way out of kilter - especially in regard to what we
could expect if we banned spanking.

So if we banned spanking those predisposed to NOT spank wouldn't have a
problem with it.

And the others?

Tough ****, as they say.

You've already defined them as less, even IN-competent.

You're missing my point. Did you even try to understand the point I was
making, or were you too busy looking for a way to spin what I wrote into an
attack on spanking?

If any significant number of parents who aren't good at being non-spanking
parents quit trying and become spanking parents, the result is that the
overall category of non-spanking parents looks better than it would if those
less competent parents had remained in the category. At least part of the
difference between non-spanking parents and spanking parents is an illusion
insofar as actual difference in the quality of the parenting techniques is
concerned. If those less successful non-spanking parents were required to
remain non-spanking parents, the category of non-spanking parents would look
worse.

Further, to the extent that those parents are less competent or incompetent
overall, rather than just not good at making non-spanking methods work,
having them jump categories to the spanking category drags down the average
for the category of spanking parents. The difference isn't just a
difference in the methods the parents use, but is a difference in the
underlying quality of the parents themselves. If the parents who use one
method average being better parents than the parents who use another method,
the method that has the better parents use it will look better than it
really is, and the method that has the worse parents use it will look worse
than it really is.

So how would you deal with a case of repeated shoplifting in a genuinely
nonpunitive way?

Depends on the age. Below 4, explain and walk away after returning the
item.

Above that age begin introducing restitution.

If, by restitution, you mean more than just having to give back what was
taken or pay for it, I don't regard that as entirely nonpunitive. I suppose
it could be argued that it's not punitive for people who are caught
shoplifting to have to repay store owners for thefts by similarly competent
(or incompetent) shoplifters who get away with their shoplifting. But
anything beyond that would definitely qualify as punishment.

And never leave out how it make YOU the parent feel, your emotions upon
learning the child has taken something of someone else's without
permission and payment.

It's far easier than it might appear. A word or two is all that is needed.

snip

When parents do their job properly, they stop relying on "I'm bigger
than you" as the primary basis for their authority when their children
are young, and start building a different foundation by earning their
children's trust and respect.

Could I earn your trust and respect by making you afraid of me?

I'm really disappointed, not to mention frustrated and sometimes angry, that
you don't make more effort to understand what I am trying to say. What you
did here was take what I was trying to say and twist it as if it meant
almost the exact opposite.

A lot of what goes into building trust and respect has nothing to do with
punishment. It has to do with things like helping children, and setting a
good example, and teaching them and offering them guidance, and helping them
understand things, and sometimes just being there for them. You should
recognize that at least as well as I do, yet you completely ignored it.
Why?

The relationship between punishment and trust and respect is a complex one.
When punishment is clearly unfair, and especially when the person doing the
punishing is perceived as not even making much effort to be fair, it
destroys trust and respect. But people don't respect pushovers either. If
parents want respect, their children have to view them as doing their job as
parents - which includes preventing the children from doing things that they
know are wrong.

I would expect the ideal to be if parents can find ways to genuinely solve
problems without having to resort to threats or punishments. Then the
children can respect their parents for having done the right thing without
any emotional baggage from having been punished.

If parents do punish, but they do it fairly, they generate some short-term
turbulence in the sea of trust and respect. But if the children look back
later and view the punishment as having been just - or at least understand
why their parents thought it was just - I think the long-term result can
still be to help build respect. And parents can earn that they will try to
be fair in deciding whether and when children's actions are serous enough to
warrant punishment - a trust that alleviates fear of unjust punishment.

How DO we gain another's trust and respect?

I had a supervisor once on a very large contract that I liked a lot. She
was being used by administration to punish workers that disagreed with
policy (policy that was not in the best interests of the customers) and
while she was fairly new, two years on the job, she was well trained and
conscientious.

I knew she needed to move on, so I did the ultimate "punishment" to her.

I walked into her office one day with no one around but her and I, put on
my most kindly face and said, "I'm so very disappointed in you."

She instantly opened up to ask me why. And I could tell her what I was
seeing. She left and moved on to better things 60 days later. Even
forfeiting an educational bonus to do so.

If I'd walked in, insulted her, challenged her authority, in other words
really punished her, she'd likely still be there helping to destroy that
enterprise...as it did self destruct eventually.

Does the sense you're using the word "punished" in here really have anything
to do with discipline? What would the purpose of starting off with an
attack under such conditions have had to do with training or teaching,
especially in the absence of any prior reason to think you thought she was
doing something wrong?

I'll also note that I am very much against insulting children as a form of
discipline. Contrary to the "sticks and stones" saying, cruel words can
leave some of the deepest and most lasting wounds of all.

To the extent that the parents continue to punish their
children sometimes, the children understand that there are reasons
behind their parents' expectations, and that the expectations are
not just arbitrary bullying of someone bigger over someone smaller.

They do? When? At 45?

The children
might not always agree with the parents' reasons, but they can at least
respect the fact that their parents are trying to do what they
believe is
right. So when the children are too big for the parents to use physical
force to enforce a punishment, the parent-child relationship still has a
solid foundation under it.

You aren't going to like this, but that's the spankers warped world view
via the spanking experience.

When children are too big to spank the ultimate betrayal has taken place
if the child now believes their parent is to be trusted.

I've just decided that continuing this discussion is pointless. What you
say here is the last straw in convincing me that your prejudice is so thick
that I don't think there's any hope of your comprehending anything that
doesn't fit the simplistic theoretical models you've built in your head.
You refuse to truly, honestly listen enough to learn from me, even though
the mismatch between my experiences and your mental models ought to make it
glaringly obvious that there at least might be things you could learn. And
the information you're giving me is pretty much all stuff I've seen before,
usually about a zillion times before.

The only reason I see why I might want to keep going is that you do mix in
some useful parenting tips here and there. But at the moment, I don't view
that as worth the time and aggravation.