"Parenting Without Punishing"

On Fri, 18 Jun 2004, R. Steve Walz wrote:

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

Looking in the mirror again, Steve? ;-)

Doan

On Fri, 18 Jun 2004, R. Steve Walz wrote:

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

LOL! Typical respond from a "never-spanked" boy. And I thought you
were constipated!

Doan

"Tori M." wrote in message
...
This whole thing is unrealistic and will set a child to fail later in
life.
If you do something bad 90% of the time there will be consequences.

What you don't seem to realize is that eliminating punishment is not
eliminating consequences. In a school setting if a child does not do their
homework, they get a poor-- this is consequences. What is not necessary are
lectures, remaining after school, notes home to parents, meetings about what
a terrible child this is, etc. A simple statement from the teacher that
this child *WILL* receive a poor grade if this behavior continues, followed
by a poor grade is all that is necessary.

In the home setting there are also consequences. If you spill your drink at
diner, you clean it up-- again, no lectures, or spankings or time in the
corner or restrictions are needed.

On Thu, 17 Jun 2004, Nathan A. Barclay wrote:


"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.

That is a BIG difference from what Chris claimed. Like I've said before,
a fourteen year old kid can be spanked 1,000 times a year for the first 13
years of his life (13,000 times) can still be included in this "not
spanked in the "previous six-month" group. Did that sounded like "rarely
spanked" to you?

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.


Yes, another problem is the fact that parents seldom use spanking
exclusively. Most parents spank becasue the non-cp alternativde DID NOT
WORK! As Straus said:
"CP is typically a response to misbehavior, particularly after one or more
other intervention have been tried repeatedly and the misbehavior they are
meant to correct recurs."

In Straus & Mouradian (1998), non-cp alternatives predicted ASB 10 times
more strongly than did non-impulsive spanking. Now you know why Chris
doesn't dare to discuss this study with you for days now! :-)

Doan

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

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!

Would you please explain what you mean by arguing from "structure"?

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!

It does not take an "infinitude" of studies to make a compelling case. Just
enough studies, and sufficiently diverse studies, to address whatever
credible challenges are raised. For example, the tobacco industry long ago
gave up trying to explain away the evidence that smoking is harmful because
they no longer had any credible challenges left that research had not
addressed.

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.

The fact that too much of something is harmful does not imply that its total
absence would be a good thing. Clearly, too much reliance on authority and
punishment is harmful. But evidence supporting that conclusion does NOT
inherently support the conclusion that a total absence of coercion except in
response to violations of adult laws would be reliably good.

Further, I know from my own experience that your "structural arguments" are
built on an incorrect (or, at the very least, not reliably correct) model of
how children react to being coerced. You choose to deny that, because you
are so convinced in your model's reliability that you completely ignore
evidence to the contrary. But in doing so, you pretty thoroughly demolish
your credibility from my perspective.

Nathan

On Fri, 18 Jun 2004, toto wrote:

On Thu, 17 Jun 2004 21:42:25 -0500, "Tori M."
wrote:

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.

Children learn easily that *other people* can be punitive
without having their parents punish them.

Yes, that is why it is better for their parents to prepare
them for the REAL WORLD, not Oz land. Do you want your
children to grow up and be like Steve? :-)

Doan

On Fri, 18 Jun 2004, Nathan A. Barclay wrote:


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

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.

Yet another example of, "Coercion is terrible. Let's use coercion to get
rid of it." (And note, by the way, that this is an example of coercion used
when the person being targeted is NOT violating the law.)

And this is a perfect example of the anti-spanking zealotS' logic! :-)

Doan

On Fri, 18 Jun 2004, Lesa wrote:


"Tori M." wrote in message
...
This whole thing is unrealistic and will set a child to fail later in
life.
If you do something bad 90% of the time there will be consequences.

What you don't seem to realize is that eliminating punishment is not
eliminating consequences. In a school setting if a child does not do their
homework, they get a poor-- this is consequences. What is not necessary are
lectures, remaining after school, notes home to parents, meetings about what
a terrible child this is, etc. A simple statement from the teacher that
this child *WILL* receive a poor grade if this behavior continues, followed
by a poor grade is all that is necessary.

And what are the results of this philosophy? Do the students learned
more? Do the schools no longer need cops nor metal detectors?

In the home setting there are also consequences. If you spill your drink at
diner, you clean it up-- again, no lectures, or spankings or time in the
corner or restrictions are needed.

What if the children don't want to clean it up?

Doan

"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 sent out to parents, but nothing graded is to be posted and in
general, grades are ignored. A poor grade costs the child nothing-unless the
parent chooses to make it so. I don't give grades in my elective classes-I
do narrative reports.

Grades are nothing unless they are made to be. The goal is to get the child
to improve and learn.

Frankly, whenever anyone says a method works with 1000+ children, I'm
skeptical. Because, even a parent of 2-3 children will tell you that the
same things don't work for all of them. I have had students who honestly
seem to have come out of the womb intrinsically motivated to behave. I have
had students who have come out completely the opposite.

I have heard parents tell me to "just whack him one"-and parents who claim
that requiring a child to pick up a mess he/she made is too punitive and
degrading. I have seen parents who, when their child is in trouble at school
take their child to McDonald's for lunch to "talk about it"-and are
surprised when their child gets into trouble every few weeks.



--
Dorothy

There is no sound, no cry in all the world
that can be heard unless someone listens ..

The Outer Limits

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

So while at least from a theoretical perspective, an excellent case
could
be made for requiring parents to make an effort at using positive
methods to guide their children's behavior before they are allowed to
resort to threats and punishment, it is not possible to use our
society's
normal operating principles as a basis for arguing that parents should
never be allowed to punish no matter how much trouble their children's
behavior is causing them.
----------------------------
The parents "trouble" is irrelevant, unless trhe child causes it by
actions regarded as criminal if they were an adult, and with no
dishonest attempts by you to side-step this issue, if you please!!!

The view that children should have the same rights as adults makes sense as
a matter of basic principle ONLY IF children are also given the same
responsibilities as adults. If children are NOT given the same
responsibilities as adults, then society obviously does not view children as
being ready to be treated like adults. Under those conditions, a rational
argument can be made that the same differences between children and adults
that justify differences in their responsibilities also justify differences
in their rights.

If positive methods are not working, or are requiring an unreasonable
amount of time and effort from the parents before the child finally
decides to cooperate, punishment is not clearly unreasonable.
-----------------
If the child is within their Rights, is IS INHERENTLY UNREASONABLE!!

If. At present, society views children as having both fewer rights and
fewer responsibilities than adults.

(And whatever one wants
to argue about long-term effects, there are very clearly situations
where spanking can produce useful results in regard to children's
short-term behavior - especially in situations where there is no
possibility that the children won't get caught.)
-------------------------------------
Nonsense. Abuse only causes hatred and deception, not obedience.

Please stop repeating that lie over and over as if telling it often enough
somehow made it true. You can make a case that "abuse" as you call it
sometimes does cause those things. You can NOT make a case that those are
the ONLY things it causes, nor can you support a claim that it never causes
children to obey. Your position is patently false, and only your insistence
on rejecting any real-world facts that intrude on your theoretical model
gets in the way of your seeing that.

*IF* they had done something criminal, their conscience would tell
them they've done wrong. Then a punishment of detention might be
appropriate.

You are missing a critical difference. In the adult world, there are many
things that we don't NEED laws agaisnt because they can be dealt with
through the voluntary nature of adult relationships. An adult who is
annoyed by a roommate's behavior can kick the roommate out or leave,
depending on who is the owner or primary tenant. A worker who is annoyed by
a co-worker can quit, or can threaten to quit if the boss doesn't either get
the annoying co-worker to stop or fire him. A bar patron can ask the
bartender to evict another patron who is being obnoxious. And so on. The
combination of adult privileges and adult responsibilities deals with the
problems without the need to decide the exact point at which an annoying
behavior becomes a criminal offense.

But with children, many of the relationships are not nearly so voluntary.
Parents can't evict or leave their children, and allowing them to would open
children up to a threat far more dangerous than that of a spanking.
Siblings' ability to get away from each other if one behaves obnoxiously
toward another is very limited, especially if they have to share a room.
Children at school have only a very limited ability to get away from a child
who is deliberately trying to annoy them. And so forth.

So trying to take laws designed for one context and say that any behavior
that is not illegal under those laws should be allowed in another, very
different context poses some pretty significant problems.

But if that isn't true and they were only availing themselves of their
Rights, they will experience merely raw hatred and vengeance formation,
and progressive resistance to punishment so that they
WILL finally attack you.

Huh? Let me get this straight. If children are punished for something that
does not violate adult law, they will "experience merely raw hatred and
vengeance formation," but if what they are doing violates adult law, they
won't?

News flash: children's sense of right and wrong is sophisticated enough to
recognize that a behavior can be wrong without being illegal in an adult
context. What is important is not whether what they are punished for
violates adult law, but rather whether the children accept that the action
they were punished for was wrong. If someone (adult or child) is punished
for violating a law, but believes that the law was wrong, it can lead to a
great deal of resentment. And being punished for something that a person
didn't even know was considered wrong is likely to lead to resentment. But
if a child accepts that what he did was wrong, the fact that the "law" came
from a parent rather than from the government doesn't make all that much
difference in the child's perception of how he is being treated.

Further, the idea that spanking is somehow inherently more cruel than
other forms of punishment is easily refuted by the existence of
situations
where children PREFER a spanking over an alternative form of
punishment that would not be considered excessively cruel.
----------------
Absolute nonsense, abused kids do that merely to avoid worse parental
beatings. It is still abuse and entails vengeance formation and
antisocial fixation.

LOL. If your theoretical model and reality collide, you invariably think
that it must be reality that's wrong. News flash: the world didn't change
from round to flat just because people tried to deny that it was round.
Another news flash: I'm speaking from personal experience, so I know just
how full of bovine excrement you really are.

On the other hand, your incredulity may actually be explainable. Later, you
say, "every parental abuse I ever witnessed the hatred and abusive ideation
was fully involved, and the beating vicious." I can see why you would not
believe that a child would choose that over any even remotely reasonable
non-physical alternative. But in my view (and I developed this view as a
child) what makes one punishment less undesirable than another is an issue
of overall severity, not one of what form the punishment takes.

I'm curious: suppose you broke a law and were given a choice of either a
month in jail or three licks with a paddle that wouldn't be hard enough to
leave any bruising. Which would you choose?

But in general, there is no logically
sound moral reason why spanking should be rejected in favor of other
forms of punishment in situations where punishment can be defended
as legitimate.
--------------------------
Absolute abusive lie by an obvious chronic abuser who should be
prosecuted or killed.

You make that claim, but I don't see you accepting the challenge implicit in
what I wrote.

I've said all this to lay the following foundation:

(1) Under the views of
the majority of society, there is no logically sound reason for viewing
it as automatically immoral for parents to punish, and (2) there is no
logically sound reason for rejecting spanking as inherently more cruel
than other forms of punishment.
----------------
Except that all the evidence points to it causing a vast increase
in crime and antisocial behavior where it was attempted. It was once
tried in prisons in England in the 16th century, but it made prisons
so dangerous they couldn't hire enough guards!! When they restricted
prison to incarceration as punishment, the prisons became staffable
again and inmates who had been in solitary for years because of them
trying to kill anyone near them became social and even friendly again.

This is not a sufficiently detailed explanation to establish relevance to
anything that I would consider a reasonable use of corporal punishment by
parents. For all I know from what you wrote, the guards were often sadistic
scum looking for any excuse to beat their prisoners harshly.

Therefore, if one wants to build a case that
parents must not spank using a philosophical basis acceptable to
most Americans, that case has to be built on scientific evidence
showing that spanking causes sufficient long-term harm to
outweigh its short-term benefits.
-----------------
The burden is on the criminal, not their victims.

Nice try, but under current law, parents who spank are not criminals.

Otherwise, if parents cannot obtain acceptable behavior within
a reasonable amount of time using positive methods, they are
justified in using the threat of spanking (and, if necessary, actual
spanking) for the short-term benefits it produces WHETHER
OR NOT spanking produces long-term benefits compared with
if they spent a lot more time and effort trying to resolve the issue
using purely non-punitive techniques.
------------------------------------
Nope, that causes worse outcomes and no reasonable results,

You're ignoring reality again, or else playing a word game in which you can
say "no reasonable results" because you arbitrarily define the results as
unreasonable without regard to whether spanking has the desired effect on
the child's behavior.

So what does the evidence say? Straus and Mouradian's 1998 study shows
a truly enormous distinction between the effects parents can expect if
they
spank only when they have themselves firmly under control and those they
can expect if they spank as a result of losing their tempers.
----------------------------------
You're lying, misquoting and mischaracterizing.

Nice trick. If someone cites evidence that damages your position, level
accusations against him but offer no specifics that would allow him to prove
that your accusations are wrong.

And nobody *I* know have ever SEEN this imaginary reported "controlled
spanking" bull**** among parents, every parental abuse I ever witnessed
the hatred and abusive ideation was fully involved, and the beating
vicious.

Then you're working from a position of ignorance, either from not having
seen the full spectrum of how spanking is used or from having misinterpreted
what you were seeing.

And as for the supposed controlled "paddling" in schools, I
observed it caused the teachers to be assaulted, threatened, their
families endangered, so much so that the only ones who tried it either
retired early from teaching or were fired. It was a major cause of
kids winding up in prison, and two teachers I knew were severely
harmed.

"A major cause of kids winding up in prison"? On what do you base that
claim? There probably is a pretty significant correlation in places where
corporal punishment is used in school, because the same factors that cause
kids to grow up to be criminals seem likely to get them in trouble at
school, and hence possibly get them paddled, along the way. But it's hard
to imagine any significant number of cases (at least compared with the
overall prison population) where paddlings at school played a significant
role.

As for the rest, I wish I knew how objective you were being. Thinking about
the issue a little, it's not hard to see how kids who are abused (in the
legal sense) or close to it at home and who have a lot of pent-up anger and
hostility might redirect it toward a teacher who paddles them. And there
are teachers who are arbitrary enough and unfair enough in their use of
punishment to earn more than a little hostility in their own right. Even
so, I find your description of the scale of the issue a bit surprising.

If there are any teachers in the audience who work in areas where corporal
punishment either is or used to be used, do you have any comments on this
issue?

In the process,
it pretty much blows all of the other studies out of the water insofar
as
parents who always do a self-diagnostic to make absolutely sure they
have themselves under control before they spank are concerned.
---------------------
More of your self-reported dog**** and abusive wish=fulfillment.

Again you ignore evidence if it goes against your preconceptions.

In
essence, as best I can tell, that one study puts the anti-spanking side
pretty much back to square one in regard to the question of whether
parents should never spank or whether they can expect equally good
results if they merely are very careful that they spank only for the
right reasons.
-----------------
I'm tired of your unbelievably blatant lying about the results of
research, I've never seen such a degree of intentional distortion,
even out of Doan, you should be ashamed of yourself.

If A C and B C, which is greater, A or B? Straus and Mouradian clearly
showed that "never lost it" spanking mothers had vastly better results than
the average of all spankers. Other studies show that non-spanking parents
have better results than the average of all spankers. So how do "never lost
it" spankers and non-spankers compare? Straus and Mouradian's results
indicated very similar outcomes, and if other studies did not account for
the "lost it" factor, they provide no evidence at all on how those two
groups compare. That is the basis for my saying "pretty much back to square
one."

If you have any evidence that would contradict my belief about the current
state of research, please present it. Otherwise, you have no basis for
calling my presentation a "distortion." And your charges of "lying" and
that I had an intent to distort are wrong in any case, because I am working
from my best effort to analyze the information that I am aware of.

Nathan