"Parenting Without Punishing"

"toto" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 17 Jun 2004 15:36:58 -0500, "Donna Metler"
wrote:

And teachers are told not to use rewards because it "ruins intrinsic
motivation".

So there are no grades then? No report cards?

Grades are merely a measurement device. Thus, the reward of a good grade is
the reward of doing something successfully, much as winning a game because
one played it well is a reward or playing a song on the piano well is a
reward. Conversely, bad grades "punish" in the same sense that losing a
game as a result of making mistakes is a "punishment" or making mistakes
while playing the piano is a "punishment."

The "reward" or "punishment" inherent in grades is intrinsic to the child's
knowing that he is doing something well or poorly. It is not something
extrinsic intended solely for the purpose of manipulation. Indeed, the only
way children WON'T feel the reward of being highly successful in their
studies or the "punishment" of being less successful is if adults refuse to
provide the children with accurate information about how well they are
doing.

Personally, I view hiding information from children out of fear that knowing
the truth might hurt their "self-esteem" as reprehensible. True self-esteem
comes from recognizing one's abilities and limitations and regarding it as
success to do one's best even if other people's best is better, not from
ignorance. And false self-esteem founded on ignorance is doomed to failure
in the long term because once children see the truth, their old sense of
self-esteem collapses and they have no foundation on which to build a new
sense of self-esteem to replace it.

Nathan

"Doan" wrote in message
...

"Chris is now admitting that there are evidence of beneficial effects
of low-level spanking. Good, but he went on to misrepresent the
Straus & Mouradin (1998) study. As I have pointed out early, and
Chris cannot dispute this, the study only asked the mothers thus
there is no true "never-spanked" group to speak of. Furthermore,
this study included children as old as 14 years and by asking
only about spankings in the last 6-months, there is a period
of up to 13.5 years where spankings were not even accounted for.
In short, the study just don't support what Chris claimed above."

Unless my memory is failing me miserably, Straus and Mouradian's 1998 study
did include a category of mothers who spanked but had not spanked in the
last six months. So it did draw a distinction between those who never
spanked and those who did not spank recently.

Of course that still leaves the issue of how many mothers might have started
off never intending to spank, didn't like their results, and ended up
changing their minds and spanking at least once. When a group is allowed to
eject at least some of its less successful results into another group, that
can easily make the group look more effective than it really is.

Doan wrote:

On 16 Jun 2004, Kane wrote:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Doan"
Newsgroups: alt.parenting.spanking,alt.parenting.solutions,mis c.kids,alt.activism.children
Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2004 3:18 PM
Subject: "Parenting Without Punishing"



I wouldn't this far.


Parent without using punishment? We know. You don't have the capacity.
Many have it and use it. Some got it the hard way, but thinking and
learning.

So where are they? How have their children faired? Did they grow up to
be a Mother Theresa? A Ted Turner? Or do they grow up to be like you
and Steve ? ;-)

Doan
------------------
You'd be glad to have a kid like me!
And you never would.
Steve

Donna Metler wrote:

"Lesa" wrote in message
...

"jitney" wrote in message
om...
The very title of this thread indicates a the kind of egghead
academianistic theorizing that is so full of **** that such people
need colostomy bags hooked up to their ears. If you raise a child
without punishing bad behavior, you are inflicting a criminal on
society and should yourself be held accountable. People that advocate
mindless theories like this would be far more useful to society if
they removed the grafitti that their hellion brats put up on the walls
in the first place.-Jitney

If one praises "good" behavior and treats a chid with repsect, talking to
said child when "bad" things occur, there is no need for punishment.


With all children?
------------------
If you do it 1) from the start, or 2) long enough to deprogram them, yes
indeed.


With non-neurotypical children?
------------------
Wire them up, we'll still do better than you do!


With children adopted at
the age of 3 from foreign countries? With children in foster care?
-----------------------------
It does work, takes a while, but the results are worth it.
Your results will always be worse over time.


You see, "teaching without punishing" has been pushed down the throats of
the educational system for more than a decade (I've been teaching that
long). ANd while it works with some children-the naturally compliant kids
who will burst into tears at the thought that they've failed an adult, there
are others who definitely take advantage of the situation.
-----------------------------
Then you're doing it wrong.


The result is what you see in many public schools today (probably private
ones, too)-a bunch of kids who are very sure that nothing you can do will
affect them. They don't care about the relationship, or about pleasing the
teacher. They don't care about pleasing their parents. They don't care about
long-term results.
----------------------
Then they have no friends. BE THEIR FRIEND! If you have no time for
that, if all you do is neglect to do the same evil **** you used to,
of course that won't work right! If they do something that in adult
life would be found criminal, then you have to sentence them to "jail".
If they do things that an adult is allowed to do, leave them alone,
or ask their help.


And the results is that no child in the same classroom gets a good
education.
----------------
Jail the evildoer, or send them home. The latter will scare the more
abused ones more, but jail is boring. A few times in a featureless
room with no furniture for an hour or two and they will avoid it if
you're kind to them when they come out. But you must ONLY use jail
when they abuse others criminally.


And, it has been my impression that the "don't you DARE punish my child
because I don't believe in punitive parenting" parents are the ones who
generally have the WORST behaved children, and who stand up for their child,
shielding them from even natural consequenses the most-rather than the other
way around.
-----------------------
You oughta see the way THEY treat them AT HOME! It is their paranoia
of their home-behavior being discovered that causes them to lash out
first and PRETEND to be a non-punitive parent. Actually they're just
possessive of their favorite "punching bag" and the school getting
close enough to their kid to find out!!


Those parents who do use consequences at home generally don't
have to use many. They're not shrieking lunatics beating their child with an
extention cord (actually, those are more likely to be the parent who has
never before punished their child and then snaps-the worst cases of abuse
we've had in the school were exactly that). Rather, they've learned that
saying "NO" and enforcing that "When I say NO, and you don't listen, there
are consequenses" works. Punishment doesn't always mean spanking. It doesn't
have to ever mean spanking. But there needs to be some way of showing that
the child doesn't always have complete control of all situations.
------------------------
Terror is violence, no matter if threat of harm, or the few instances
of harm that were done to cowe them. It makes kids swear revenge, and
that leads to hatred of others and society even if they leave their
parents to linger in nursing homes with bone-deep bed-sores.
Steve

Nathan A. Barclay wrote:

In fairness to non-punitive parenting techniques, public schools are
probably a pretty lousy laboratory from which to see how good their results
are. Suppose you take a child who is used to finding cooperative win-win
solutions at home, and you put him in a school where the teacher keeps
telling him what to do all the time. Suddenly, the child goes from having
parents who bend over backward to cooperate to having an adult in charge
whose job description doesn't allow much room for cooperation.
--------------------
You can bully such teachers by arranging appointments with them and
haranguing them, they are late getting home a number of times and
they learn not to **** with your kid. Also, you let the kid leave
school at 14 or 15 or home-school them and dummy the reports to the
state. If you're a great parent your kid will learn more on their own
anyway.


Worse, where
the child's love for and relationship with his parents provides a motivation
for cooperating with their desires, the child does not have similar love for
or a similar relationship with the teacher.
----------------------
Nonsense, the model of everyone is the parent.
It's hard to even convince them the teacher might not be nice
if YOU are!


Ultimately, what a purely non-punitive parenting style needs is either home
schooling or a kind of school that is more oriented toward cooperating with
the child's desires. And in a voucher system, parents who want to could
experiment with such schools without imposing their preferences (or their
children) onto others. Personally, I would expect mixed results from such
schools, with some bending over too far backwards catering to children's
whims but others finding ways to interest children in learning.
-----------------------------------
We need to ban vouchers because it causes societal schizm. We need
to subject everyone to viciousness so that they'll gang up on it and
change it.


But if parents who use non-punitive techniques at home do want to send their
children to a school that is not prepared to cater sufficiently to their
children's desires, I think they should have two choices: either the parents
accept responsibility for finding non-punitive solutions that deal with the
issue to the school's satisfaction in a timely manner, or they allow the
school to punish. Anything else is grossly unfair to the other children in
the class, and also to the teacher whose hands are tied by both the school
administration and the parents.

Nathan
-------------------
Nonsense, kids who are treated properly are no trouble at all at school,
leave them alone as if you're ignoring them and they'll do what they
ought to do anyway and learn by osmosis! These are the kind who read
a book in math class and ace the test. I was, my kids were.
Steve

Donna Metler wrote:

"toto" wrote in message
No, actually, what has been pushed is *not* teaching without
punishing, though teaching without corporal punishment has been
pushed in 27 states for more than a decade.

Using different punishments like detentions and bad grades is still
punitive. And what has been pushed is using material rewards like
stickers and bribes which is the other side of the control coin. It
works just as poorly.

Detention isn't allowed in my school-too many parents don't want it. IN
general, just about everything which could be deemed "punitive" has been
disallowed. A teacher in my school was given a formal reprimand just for
requiring that students clean up a mess that they had made-because it was
"humiliating" for the students.

And teachers are told not to use rewards because it "ruins intrinsic
motivation".
-------------------
You're merely lying in everything you just said. How pitiful.
Steve

Nathan A. Barclay wrote:

"R. Steve Walz" wrote in message
...
Nathan A. Barclay wrote:

I have very little idea of how reliably purely non-punitive parenting
techniques really work, and while people like Chris, Steve, and the
article's author would LIKE to believe that such techniques would
always work, they do not seem to be able to provide any solid
evidence.
-------------------
Just because we're WHOLLY UN-interested in the idiotic "cite-wars"
that happen, when neurotic religiously-tortured morally-offended
Right-wingnuts try to deluge this thread with their phony X-spurt
website cut-n-pasties in response to our voluminous peer-reviewed
journals that anyone CAN read if they want to,

Steve, I find it insulting that you simply assume I would do that sort of
thing.
---------------------
That can't be helped. I believe you would if I permitted it.
Rightists always do.


I know the difference between opinion and evidence, and I have no
interest in quoting opinions as if they were evidence. Doing so would only
hurt my credibility, which I place a high value on.
--------------------
Evidence does no good either, and is both a deception and a
disingenuity, because any single bit of it alone is insufficient
to the honest task, and any author is unavailable for examination.
It reminds me of calling people on your cellphone to ask them!
It's boorish compared to honestly airing the structural arguments
for and against the issue.


does NOT support
YOUR moronic accusation that "they do not seem to be able to provide
any solid evidence." In fact the reverse is true, by factors of ten
to one or MORE!! Go ask all the child development authorities you
want, and write down their opinions, and then let those stand as
a vote for which is the Truth, if you're stupid enough to need that!

Scientific truth is not determined by majority vote.
-------------------
True, but people who collect selective support and discard most
that do not should be required to do so if only to keep them honest!


It is determined by
the proper use of scientific methodologies and ONLY by the proper use of
scientific methodologies. If scientists express opinions that go beyond
what the methodologies they use can support, those opinions are merely
PERSONAL opinions, not science.
--------------------
The thing is, it cannot BE carried on fairly either on Usenet OR in
any private conversation, the budget is not available! Any such
situation then requries instead that people argue from structure,
which is the way people actually change minds and come to believe
new things anyway, and NOT through evidence, as odd as that seems!


In the past, Chris suggested a few studies for me to read. However, from
what I recall, those studies were always in terms of whether or not childen
were spanked (or, in some cases, whether or not they were spanked within a
prticular timeframe). As best I recall, none of them separated out a group
in which no punishment of any kind was used, or in which punishment was used
only in regard to situations in which the children's behavior would be a
crime for adults. Therefore, the results of those studies provide no
scientific basis for evaluating the results parents get from using purely
non-punitive techniques.
-----------------------
It takes an infinitude of studies to convince absolutely in a peer-
reviewed arena, but doing so is not actually needed to prove anything
reasonably. Instead, the reasonableness of believing this or that,
namely an honest impersonal structural argument is superior!


If you are aware of any studies that looked specifically at parents who
never punished at all, or who never punished except when the children's
behavior would be considered a crime in adults, or some such, I would
probably find it interesting to look at.
-----------------
In this culture those would be hard to find, but in the entire body of
the research that conclusion is entirely implied by the trends in
history and the research overall. This can be discerned by the logical
reasonable person.



(Although in order to constitute
legitimate science, the study would also have to deal with the issue of
parents who started off using purely non-punitive techniques, did not like
their results, and started punishing at least occasionally. Showing that
parents who like a technique's results well enough to stick with it tend to
have good results is great for showing that it can work, but does not give a
clear indication of how reliably it works.) If you do not have such
evidence, then you can say only that the opinions of some number of
scientists support your views, not that science supports them.
-----------------------
No, you can produce nearly an infinite number of various and unsortable
personalities hidden and revealed by using abuse. They prove only that
results of bad methods vary in their badness and obviousness. One needs
to use reason and logic upon data to determine WHAT IT MEANS, and that
can be anticipated sufficiently by reason and logic and structured
argument.


If you refuse to provide any such evidence, I must make at least a tentative
assumption that you do not have any.
----------------------------
Bad guess. You may dismiss this tentatively as well.


Certainly, I will not accept claims
that you have valid scientific evidence as legitimate if you refuse to
present the evidence or indicate what it is.
----------------------------
I make no such claim, instead I claim it is not as important as
a structural argument, which is what actually causes humans to
believe and to adopt views anyway. And I assert that all needed
evidence exists within awareness already as exemplar of reality.

Our reality exists as out thought about reality, and nothing else.
Steve

Doan wrote:

On 17 Jun 2004, Chris wrote:

This brings us right back to our aborted, unfinished debate of 2001,
Nathan; aborted because you disappeared and days later said you "didn't
have time" to debate about the scientific studies on spanking.

You did your best to discredit the available evidence linking spanking
to a wide variety of negative long term effects on children. When you
disappeared was after I invited you to now produce evidence of equal rigor
in support of your own position, adding that I would of course expect your
evidence to meet all of the same standards you had recently demanded of
evidence cited by me.

Three years later, I ask you again: where is your scientific evidence
of measurable long term benefit to children from spanking? If you have
none, please signify by ignoring this question, or perhaps by vanishing
again.

Chris

Here is what Chris said about Straus & Mouradina (1998) study in the past:

However, there is evidence that this connection exists,
however it may work. Gunnoe & Mariner (1997) and Straus et al. (1997)
both found that the more children were spanked at the beginning of each
study, the more their behavior had deteriorated years later in
comparison
with other children the same age, despite controlling for a variety of
other variables such as maternal warmth/involvement, family
socioeconomic
status, race, sex, etc. Since neither of these studies had a "never
spanked" group, they cannot rule out the possibility that low levels of
spanking had positive effects. However, another study did look at
children who had never been spanked by their mothers versus children who
were spanked very infrequently and the difference in age adjusted
antisocial behavior scores was quite pronounced. The children in the
never-spanked group were markedly more well-behaved than even the most
rarely-spanked children.


And my response:

"Chris is now admitting that there are evidence of beneficial effects
of low-level spanking.
------------------
No, you were a ****ty little liar then as now.
Steve

Tori M. wrote:

This whole thing is unrealistic and will set a child to fail later in life.
---------------
Nope.


If you do something bad 90% of the time there will be consequences.
----------------
Duh.


You
dont show up to work and you get fired, you slack off at your work you get
fired. You make a mess in your home eventualy you or your spouse will have
to clean it up. You cheat on your spouse they will most likely leave you.
---------------------
Yes, moron, but nobody hits you, not legally. Nobody does something
EXTRA and nasty to you besides the consequences.


While it would be wonderful to live in a world without punishment in general
it is just not the case.
----------------------
YOU mean just not for children!
Asshole!


To raise a child to not have cause and effect
other then the "natural consequenses" (IE sticking a fork in the outlet will
get the child shocked) is just as bad IMO then to over punish a child.

Tori
-----------------
Children who don't know about plugs need to be protected, and later
to know about plugs, they DON'T need to have a phobia of them and to
hate the **** out of their parent so it turns them away from their
REAL purpose here, to be happy!!
Steve

Nathan A. Barclay wrote:

"toto" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 17 Jun 2004 15:36:58 -0500, "Donna Metler"
wrote:

And teachers are told not to use rewards because it "ruins intrinsic
motivation".

So there are no grades then? No report cards?

Grades are merely a measurement device. Thus, the reward of a good grade is
the reward of doing something successfully, much as winning a game because
one played it well is a reward or playing a song on the piano well is a
reward. Conversely, bad grades "punish" in the same sense that losing a
game as a result of making mistakes is a "punishment" or making mistakes
while playing the piano is a "punishment."
----------------------
Kids KNOW whether they are doing well, just from doing it.

They just don't know how the class is doing. Grades compare
them to others, and are then inherently not useful, because
a child who likes the subject will do as well as they can,
and one who doesn't like it, won't, no matter what!
Steve