"0:-" wrote in message
ps.com...
Nathan A. Barclay wrote:

If parents have completely unrealistic expectations, the
results can be tragic, especially if the parents feel like it's their
duty
to force their children to live up to their unrealistic expecations no
matter how harsh a punishment is required.

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

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.) 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.)

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.

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.

But overreacting to one extreme by rushing to the other is not a
particularly rational response. Or should we outlaw cars just because
some
people drive drunk?

I'm unable to find in your posts, other than by allusion, what the two
extremes are. I can presume that beating is at one extreme, and not
spanking at all, is at the other.

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. 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.

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.

What will happen if you don't spank?

What happens if parents don't spank depends a lot on the children and on
what the parents do in the way of alternatives. There seem to be quite a
few families that can do fine without spanking. But that doesn't mean that
all families would do equally well without it. Nor, for that matter, does
the fact that a family can do fine without spanking serve as proof that the
family wouldn't have done better with it if the parents used spanking in a
careful way. The whole issue is extremely complex.

The current data collected on this, internationally, by surveying
parents, show that regardless of the accepting or rejecting mindset
there are unwanted negative consequences. I posted that recently here.

I'm not in a mood to go hunting through everything you've posted here
recently.

That's okay.

If you want to recount the data, or to give me a clear indication
of where to look, I'm willing to listen, but I don't intend to spend a
lot
of time here this time around.

Not a problem. Don't go getting all huffy on me. I can't see where
threatening to leave is a very effective response.

Not a threat, and not getting huffy. Just a statement of fact. I looked in
on the newsgroup thinking if Chris Dugan was still active here (which he no
longer seems to be), I'd ask him a question about the current state of
research. In the process, I stumbled across your question about the line
between a "hard spanking" and abuse, and I figured I'd offer an answer. But
I really don't need to be putting a lot of time into a discussion here. I
appreciate your reposting the information so I can look at it without having
to go on a hunt.

I might just forget you and let you go, unless you wish to make a
commitment to carry through on your commentary, arguments, and claims.
0:-]

Popping in and out is Troll behavior. Tsk.

Popping in and out can also be a result of a person's having more interest
in a subject than he has (or is willing to take) time to discuss it.

But, sigh I'm a sucker for a good argument, got one? Here's what you
asked for.

I posted this just yesterday, in fact, and it refers, at the beginning,
to a prior post of mine in April of this year.

I posted the following in April of this year.

From: 0:- - view profile
Date: Sun, Apr 16 2006 10:44 am
Email: "0:-"
Groups: alt.parenting.spanking
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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1114110820.htm

" ... The researchers found differences in how often mothers used
physical discipline and the mothers' perceptions of how often other
parents used physical discipline. Specifically:

* Mothers in Thailand were least likely to physically discipline
their children, followed by mothers in China, the Philippines, Italy,
India, and Kenya, with mothers in Kenya most likely to physically
discipline their children.
* More frequent use of physical discipline was less strongly
associated with child aggression and anxiety when it was perceived as
being more culturally accepted, but physical discipline was also
associated with more aggression and anxiety regardless of the
perception
of cultural acceptance.
* In countries in which physical discipline was more common and
culturally accepted, children who were physically disciplined were less
aggressive and less anxious than children who were physically
disciplined in countries where physical discipline was rarely used.
* In all countries, however, higher use of physical discipline was
associated with more child aggression and anxiety. ... "

Those last sentences pretty much says it all for the argument that
where cultures accept more CP it doesn't result in aberrent reactions
in children.

I think you are reading too much into the words "associated with."
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. 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.

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. 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.

By the way, in the long term, too much security can be at least as dangerous
to children as not enough. If children's actions don't ever have
consequences, how are children supposed to learn to think before they act?

The next is a smaller study on the use of aggressively harsh CP to
preschool aged children.

I've seen posters defend the use of such methods as being "up to the
parent to decide."

snip

In my view, if parents resort to harsh punishments of children that young,
something is almost certainly very seriously wrong. My likely suspects are
that either the parents' expectations are unreasonable, or the parents'
expectations are so unclear or inconsistent that the children can't figure
out how they need to behave to stay out of trouble. Either way, spanking
harder isn't going to solve the problem.

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


http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/423496
... Corporal punishment is associated with an increased risk of later
violence: peer violence, domestic violence, and suicide are all
correlated with parental reliance on corporal punishment. Nevertheless,
most American parents spank their children. According to Dr. Howard,
25% of children younger than 6 months old have been spanked, as have
40% of children 6-12 months old. Infants cannot understand the reason
that they are being spanked, and spanking interferes with attachment.

In contrast, parents who learn how to set firm limits without resorting
to violence teach their children a valuable lesson. Parents, in fact,
play enormously important roles in modeling how to deal with conflict
and frustration. There are a number of nonviolent negative
reinforcement techniques, ranging from the "hairy eyeball" to "time
out" models, Dr. Howard noted. ...

Comments?

It never ceases to amaze me how badly parents can misuse spanking. The
irony is that the more I know about how badly a lot of parents misuse
spanking, the harder it is for me to accept correlations between spanking
and adverse outcomes as evidence that ALL uses of spanking are
counterproductive. There is simply too much room for the bad parents to be
dragging down the average.

It sounds as though you are describing parents that have a more
punitive parenting style. Why must other alternaties cause long-term
hasle and friction? If I found my children doing something I
disapproved of, it was usually dispensed with in a few minutes and
unlikely to come up again.

Before I go on, I'll point out that you used the word "punitive" here.
Since you did, I wrote my response talking about punishment in general, not
specifically about spanking. But some pieces of your response to what I
wrote look as if you're assuming I used "punish" as a synonym for "spank."

I know a lot of people seem to think as if spanking were the only punishment
that really counts. But I try to be careful to use "spank" when I am
talking specifically about spanking, and use "punish" when the arguments I
am writing apply to punishments in general rather than only to spanking. In
many cases, I shift from talking specifically about spanking to talking
about punishment in general because I believe the same or very similar
issues also apply to other forms of punishment. That being the case, it is
important to keep an eye on which term I am using at any given time.

The reason why I made the shift to talking about punishment in general in
this case is that arguments against "punitive" parenting styles are only
arguments against spanking in situations where there is a practical,
genuinely nonpunitive alternative to spanking. To the extent that some kind
of punishment is sometimes necessary, a completely nonpunitive parenting
style is no longer an option. Therefore, the choice in those particular
situations is not between nonpunitive parenting and spanking, but is merely
between spanking and some other form of punishment.

Good for you. Have you had problems where your children shoplifted
repeatedly?

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.

I agree with you that it's good when parents can find ways to solve problems
without resorting to threats and punishments. But that doesn't mean
nonpunitive techniques are always sufficient.

Where they drove home drunk?

Nope. My kids were very anti Drugs and alcohol. They still are, in
their forties. I had worked, when they were very small, in a drug rehab
program. I shared with them. 0:-]

Where they vandalized their
school?

My kids? Nope. They were homeschooled mostly.

There are parents who have had those problems, among other very
serious problems.

Yep, and I'd venture not a consistently non-spanking parent among them.

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

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. 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.
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.

I strongly support efforts to find ways to solve problems without needing
threats or punishments *IF* those ways can genuinely solve a problem
without
giving children the idea that everyone else has to adjust to what they
want.

One would have to be pretty stupid not to have ways that made clear
what the wanted behavior was. I've known a few parents that stupid.
They are ofte referred to as "permissive." I'm not one of those, nor
ever was.

But nonpunitive techniques can only work properly if the children choose
to
cooperate.

Nope. If you can't figure out how to manage to make cooperation more
attractive then I wish you did not have children.

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

If children refuse to cooperate, and parents refuse to punish,
there is nothing at all to hold the chilren's behavior in check short of
the
point where the police get involved.

Yep. Seems like this is a bit of a challenge.

However, what I have seen, quite consistently, is that this is the
problem spanking parents have, not non-spanking parents.

Probably because the non-spanking parents you know do punish their children
in ways other than spanking if the situation gets serious enough.

In fact, spanking itself, so destroys the relationship, that either the
child escapes the family and has to work out all the horrors as an
adult, or as a teen they really do kick out the jams, and the parent
can't hit them any more, or risk a punch in the face.

You seem to write as if you think all parents who spank are the same. They
aren't.

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. 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. 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.

The kind of disaster scenario you're painting here sounds more like what I
would expect if parents don't make the transition - if parents keep trying
to rely on physical power as the foundation for their authority without ever
earning their children's trust and respect. Or, worse, if the parents use
their authority in ways their children view as fundamentally unfair, and
perhaps as not even making much effort to be fair. In that kind of
situation, spanking can maintain a limited amount of control for however
long the kids are small enough to be spanked. But when the kids get too
big, the whole situation can easily fall apart because there isn't really
anything else to hold it together.

You mention having worked in a drug rehab program. I suspect that your view
of spanking may be colored by having been exposed far more to the worst
outcomes from parents who spanked than from the best.

In fact spanking tends not to suppress unwanted behavior and MORE time
and hassle ensues. It also is a very weak deterent when the parent is
not actually supervising.

Which is why nonpunitive approaches are better - *IF* they work.

And you can say that punitive methods work more consistently? Really?

It's not either/or. Parents can use nonpunitive methods most of the time
but keep punishment available as an option for situations where nonpunitive
methods aren't working.

Where the hell have all these criminals come from? Drug addicts?
Mentally Ill?

Those things are a rarity in non-spanking families.

They are also a rarity in spanking families where the parents have a strong,
generally positive relationship with their children, are they not?

I recognize that there is a subset of spanking parents whose abusive,
extremely negative, and/or neglectful parenting styles give rise to a huge
proportion of society's problems. But blaming the entire category of
spanking parents for the problems those parents create is both unfair and
logically unsound.

But an
imperfect deterrent can be better than none at all.

Are you arguing that non-spanking means doing nothing?

No. There are all sorts of other punishments that parents could use
instead. But they would have the same "when the parent is not actually
supervising" problem that spanking does, wouldn't they? In fact, some, such
as grounding, can be even more problematical because the child can violate
the terms of the punishment if the parent isn't willing or able to supervise
closely.

Threats and punishments should NEVER be used as a replacement for
teaching.

We agree.

But that doesn't mean they shouldn't ever be used as a backup for if
children choose to reject or ignore what they have been taught.

Give us an example.

How about the situation where you shoplifted? Should you not have been
punished for that?

snip

Bruising is injury.

I'm really not interested in word games.

Then don't play them yourself. You have repeatedly done so.

Cows and dogs are both mammals,
but that doesn't mean dogs chew their cud or cows bark. Substituting a
more
general word like "injury" for a more specific one like "bruising" is far
more likely to obfuscate the truth than to clarify it.

A bruise is not an injury? Not according to medical literature.

ALL bruises are caused by injury. Though of course not all injuries
result in bruises. Grabbing a child and twisting their arm, say until
it breaks, might not leave surface visible bruising.

My point is that calling a bruise a bruise is the most accurate and precise
way to talk about it. Substituting a different word loses precision, so I
can't see any reason why you would do it unless you're playing a word game
trying to use connotations attached to the word "injury" to make bruises
sound worse than they are.

From both a moral perspective and, in many cases, a legal perspective,
there
is a huge difference between deliberately inflicting an injury and
inflicting an injury by accident.

Yes. The issue is that even without intent, say as a spanking parent
would claim, intent turns out to not be relevant.

Failing to judge correctly IS.

It would be nice if parents had a magical
way of knowing exactly how hard they could spank a child without leaving
bruises.

Yep. My point exactly. They don't, as you appear to agree, so why using
CP at all?

Either because they're going to leave enough safety margin between how hard
they spank and how hard a spanking they think would be likely to leave
bruises that the risk is probably trivial, or because they think the child's
behavior was serious enough that leaving bruises wouldn't be a terrible
tragedy.

Granted, bruising is technically classified as an injury, but it is such a
common and minor sort of injury that it would be irrational to regard it as
a horrible disaster. A number of minor injuries can add up to a major issue
if parents spank hard enough to leave bruises on anything resembling a
regular basis. But as long as parents recognize that they've spanked too
hard if they end up leaving bruises and don't spank as hard in the future,
and as long as parents don't start off swinging hard with an implement
that's significantly heavier than anything they've used before, I'd be a
whole lot more worried about the danger of football injuries than about the
danger of injuries from spanking.

But in real life, bruises can be a result of an honest mistake by
parents who misjudged how hard they could spank without bruising.

You could not argue for my point more successfully.

Laws have
to make some allowances for honest mistakes or else overzealous
prosecutors
have the power to scare people away from even coming close to the limits
of
what the law was intended to allow.

They do, currently. And also in the laws I would propose. The Swedish
model that has NO penalties whatsoever. The law is a social sanction
against CP, not a fine and lock'em up threat.

Although YOUR argument does have some small appeal, when I'm feeling
out of patience with underdeveloped in conscience folks that insist on
playing word games, and claim 'spanking' is not 'hitting,' and other
tricks of mind to fool themselves, apparently.

I don't care much for the "spanking isn't hitting" word game myself. On the
other hand, I don't much like the "substitute the word 'hit' for the word
'spank'" word game either. One gane tries to make spanking sound less
serious than it is, while the other tries to obfuscate the difference in
purpose betwee-n spanking and other forms of hitting. (On the other hand,
if parents spank because they got angry and lost their tempers, I regard the
word "hit" as entirely appropriate because their inability to control their
tempers raises serious doubts about their purpose.)

The child tends, when injured by the parent, to presume the parent
meant to injury, and that the child him or herself, deserved to be
injured.

With any but the youngest children, there is a simple solution if parents
realize they've spanked hard enough to cause bruises they didn't intend
to.

So that would work when you punish your neighbor for mowing down your
bed of freshly planted petunias? Sock'm to teach'm and if it breaks
his jaw apologise.

Sure. That'll work.

It would work to the extent of letting my neighbor know that I didn't think
what he did was so bad that he deserved a broken jaw, which is the point I
was addressing. My point wasn't that an apology would make bruises cause
less physical pain, or guarantee that the child won't be angry or upset over
having been spanked so hard. My point was that an apology would address the
problem of children's thinking they deserved to be spanked hard enough to
leave bruises.

Beyond that, I'll point out that you're cheating in the design of your
analogy. What I would be doing in your analogy would be illegal even if I
didn't break my neighbor's jaw. In order for the analogy to be valid, there
would have to be a law that people whose petunias are mowed down are allowed
to slug the person who mowed them. Also, the difference between breaking
someone's jaw and just hitting someone in the jaw is at least an order of
magnitude larger than the difference between spanking hard enough to cause a
bit of bruising and just spanking hard.

They can apologize and explain that although they intended for the
spanking
to hurt, they didn't intend for it to be hard enough to leave bruises.

I have a very important piece of information for you. It's about the
human body. If one hits hard enough to 'hurt' then there is an
extremely high probability it will leave injury.

I think you're seriously overstating the danger here, unless maybe you're
trying to define reddening of the skin as an injury. The reason why the
buttocks are the current location of choice for corporal punishment is that
they have enough padding to allow a fair amount of pain without causing
injury. I don't remember whether I ever checked whether my bottom was
bruised after I got spanked or paddled as a child, but I don't remember any
cases where it hurt to sit for more than a very brief period right after the
spanking - or hurt much to sit even then. (I won't make any claims
regarding what might have happened before I was old enough to remember.)

That's not to say that I would expect it to be difficult to spank hard
enough to cause welts or bruises - especially spanking a toddler or using an
implement that's heavy relative to a child's age. But I don't think the
safety margin is normally as paper thin as you make it sound.

That
way, the children can understand the difference between what the parents
intended (and thought the children deserved based on the seriousness of
their misbehavior)

Why is it an adult who has erred, even up to an including killing
others, can not be "spanked" as a punishment, but children can for
doing things that actually did no one any harm?

Because the kinds of spankings normally used on children wouldn't be severe
enough to make much difference on adult crimes. Personally, I'd rather get
a paddling like I got in school than have to pay a fine for a speeding
ticket. Which is why it makes sense to require me to pay the fine instead
of paddling me.

I think there are some situations where it would make sense to offer adult
criminals an option of choosing corporal punishment - especially if a fine,
jail time, or community service would end up hurting the person's family.
But the kinds of corporal punishment that would be needed would be severe
enough that a lot of people would have an emotional reaction of rejecting
them as too "cruel." Unfortunately, it's a lot easier to empathize with a
beating than it is to empathize with the cumulative effect of spending
months in prison, and that difference in empathy skews our judgment
regarding the relative cruelty of a beating versus a few months in jail.
(The same basic problem, on a smaller scale, can cause people to misjudge
spanking to be a lot more cruel than grounding.)

---

I'm going to split the rest into a separate message because this post is
already very long and your next question is important enough I don't want it
to get lost.