"Chris" wrote in message
...
: In alt.parenting.spanking Nathan A. Barclay wrote:

[snip]
: But by and large, the system works.

I beg to differ. Punishment is the most heavily overrated child
discipline technique. I posted an article by Gordon the other day about
workshops he has led, inviting participants to list the ways they reacted
to punitive authoritarian control as children. Virtually none of the
reactions were desirable.

I agree that its heavily overrated. That does not, however, imply that
there aren't situations where it is necessary or beneficial.

Which of the reactions listed did you engage in as a child, Nathan?
Note that I don't ask if you engaged in some of them because I know you
did - we all did.

This seems a bit personal. There are limits to how much of my life and
history I want to post publicly, especially with archives like Google to
preserve the information (and it could get preserved in a reply even if I'd
flag it to prevent archiving of my own message). I'll scratch the surface
of the issue a bit, but I don't want to go into detail.

My most serious ongoing negative reaction was when I was in elementary
school, and had to do with being forced to go to school when I thought it
was boring and tedious. That gives me an excellent reason to support
educational choice. But I don't view not requiring children to go to school
at all, or giving children carte blanche to choose "schools" where they can
play all day without learning much, as a viable solution. Some children may
be responsible enough to make good choices about their education without
outside limitations on what choices they can make, but I wouldn't trust
myself at that age to do so.

I'll also admit to having circumvented the rules about bedtime quite a bit
by reading in bed through the light of my open door - and hiding my book if
my father's chair creaked indicating he might be getting up. The very few
times I was caught, I wasn't punished, but I was always afraid that I might
be (and I wouldn't have regarded it as unfair or unreasonable if I was). So
I have no illusions that punishment is anywhere near reliable when kids
expect not to get caught. Knowing that parents consider a behavior serious
enough to be worth punishing over might make enough difference in the
child's thinking to have an impact on the child's behavior - or it might
not.

As for the rest, I exhibited some of those behaviors, but aside maybe from
frequent arguments over chores (in which, looking back, I was generally
being unreasonable), they were neither frequent nor particularly serious.
Then again, my parents weren't all that punitive in their basic outlook.
They were willing to threaten, and to punish if necessary, when discussion
and persuasion didn't work, but punitive techniques weren't their first
preference.

By and large, a system with this many side effects, and with some such
side effects on the list manifesting themselves in every child raised
under it, doesn't "work" very well at all.

I think I'm looking at the glass as three quarters full and you're focusing
on the one quarter that's still empty. Yes, the system has problems, but
most children grow up to be productive citizens who generally respect each
other's rights and legitimate interests. And those who don't are kept in
check enough that most people feel reasonably safe.

That gives us an awful lot to lose if we make a radical change and it fails.
Keep in mind that parents who use purely non-punitive techniques (to the
extent that parents who never resort to even indirect threats of punishment
exist at all) are ones who choose that kind of technique voluntarily, and
who choose to invest the time and effort to make them work. Keep in mind
that at present, parents who try to use non-punitive techniques and don't
succeed can resort to threats and, if necessary, punishment as a back-up.
The jump from that to taking away parents' authority to punish at all for
anything short of criminal behavior would be an enormous one and, I contend,
an extremely dangerous one.