| undecided

On Wed, 22 Oct 2003 19:47:27 -0500 (CDT), (Billy
Walker) wrote:

I have spanked my children for the past 7 or 8 years. It seemed to
fix
whatever problem they were having. But after I've seen how they enter
act with each other I'm not to sure I made the right decision. They
fight viently all the time. Fist a flying blood the whole works. I
feel
maybe by trying to teach them wrong from right all I did was to teach
them violence.
No violent movies or tv shows because it teaches aggression And
then I spank(hit) them. What do I do?? Any and all feedback welcome.

A simple answer you are likely to get is to tune up your spanking.
That is to be more thoughtful and methodic about it.

I have another idea to offer.

Spanking can, as you found, stop an unwanted behavior. The difficulty
you find yourself in is one that most would suggest you spank your way
out of.

But what if you took another tack entirely? Would you consider the
concept of no punishment at all?

If you do use punishment (and lots of parents do parent quite well
with low levels of non physical punishment) in your case it will
probably just result in an escalation of the unwanted behaviors. After
all the children will see that they aren't going to spanked so what
have they got to lose defying you?

But moving completely to a non-punitive model can be the way out of
the dilemma.

What is a non-punitive model?

The first hurdle is the largest for most of us as we were raised
likely with punishment, physical and non, and came to see a world
where what we did was either good or bad according to the merits
assigned by our parents.

Not that learning moral concepts is a bad thing. In fact it is very
good, but punishment methods tend to make it a very hard thing to
learn at all....we simply react to the punishment instead of too the
raising and prompting of our own conscience.

I would recommend two books. The first may well require that you take
a course along with it to put the concepts into place. The book has a
persistant snag in it thugh.

It relies on our ability to have and express empathy.

And empathy, often misunderstood, is not something the punished child
has a grasp of. And I am presuming you were a punished child, as
nearly everyone in our society was.

So you have to learn empathy...and it's not an intellectual exercise,
but rather an experience you can have only with others. The book and
the method is called PET or Parent Effectiveness Training, by Dr.
Thomas Gordon. Tom was a very nice man I got to meet back in the mid
seventies.

You can find out about PET at the following URL:

http://www.thomasgordon.com/

It is a very simple method to learn, but requires a shift in
perception some have a great deal of problem with....it presumes the
child is just being...not being one way or another, but just being.

As a "being" person of course, the child will have problems of his or
her own, and the child will create problems for others.

But instead of simply correcting the child one can enter into both a
helpful or consulting role with the child and one can develop the
child's own empathy...conscience...to resolve conflicts so that there
is a minimum of upset or risk to the parent-child relationship.

Again this are simple concepts. Tom used just three simple tools to do
some remarkable things to help children become better people and
parents become more effective.

The second book, while more of a read, is also pretty simple. The core
concept I'll leave you to find out, but I've recommended it to parents
with problems described much as you have in your post, and they found
it very successful in overcoming the difficulties.

It's written by a couple, the Piepers, family therapists, and parents,
foster, adoptive, and natural..so they do seem to have earned their
wings.

It's called Smart Love. Apparently it's the kind of book that a
troubled parent, at three in the morning and wakeful and worry, can
get up and read and have a fresh start and even breakthroughs with
very difficult children.

Or so a mother I helped about three years ago told me in an e-mail
just a few months ago. She adopted three little relatives, badly
neglected children, with the girl parentified and very disturbed by
the experience and fighting the adoptive mom.

Mom just forget she had read the book two or three years earlier and
got into some typical parent child control battles. Then came the
rereading of the book, and the breakthrough the next day.

It sometimes takes your kind of experience for folks to step over to
the more powerful and effective parenting that is represented by the
concepts in these two books.

There are others out there of course, and some will work for you and
some will not, but given the situation you describe I'd be trying a
totally nonpunitive approach.

An aside: you will be told that non-punished children can't learn
morals. That claim is false. In fact it is far harder for the punished
child to learn morals. The unpunished child can't fake it...no reason
to.

Children raised with gentleness do not revert to violence to solve
problems. Any honest observer of human behavior knows that.

Best wishes,

Kane