Teenagers faced with spankings

"0:-" wrote in message
ups.com...

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

Please tell us the difference between say a "hard spanking" and a
beating.

To me, the biggest distinguishing factor is whether the parent is out of
control.

There are plenty of people that most coldly and in careful control do
things like take switches to the hands of babies as young as two months
old. It's even taught by one couple that claim to be an information
source for child rearing. They call it, 'training up the child."

Granted, there are nuts, and there are grossly ignorant people who take
advice from nuts. 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.

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?

In a "hard spanking," the parent has himself or herself
under control to a point of being able to think about whether a spanking
or
something else is the most suitable punishment, and to base the severity
of
the spanking on the seriousness of the offense rather than on the
parent's
anger. The reason the spanking is hard is that the seriousness of the
offense warrants it, not that the parent is out of control. Most of the
time, it shouldn't be all that hard for a teenager to distinguish between
these two descriptions if he or she is willing to be honest with himself
or
herself, and to take a little time to think about how the situation
looked
from the parent's perspective.

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. 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.

As for reasons why parents might reasonably view spanking as the most
appropriate choice, I can think of some examples. First, some teenagers
would view a spanking - even a hard one - as less bad than the
alternative
their parents would choose if they don't spank.

Such as?

Second, parents might
decide that spanking makes sense because spankings don't cause nearly as
much long-term hassle and friction as forms of punishment that aren't
over
as quickly. (That would vary a lot depending on the personalities of
individual children.)

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.

Good for you. Have you had problems where your children shoplifted
repeatedly? Where they drove home drunk? Where they vandalized their
school? There are parents who have had those problems, among other very
serious problems.

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

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

And third, the threat of spanking could be needed to
enforce the terms of some other punishment - and any credible threat
risks
the possibility that the threat will need to be carried out.

Teaching by threat?

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

snip

Bruising is injury.

I'm really not interested in word games. 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.

And if
there is a pattern of spankings hard enough to cause bruises, the
presumption has to be that either the bruising is deliberate or the
parent
is out of control.

I don't think it's a either or situation. If there is bruising there is
injury. Intent has little to do with it.

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. It would be nice if parents had a magical
way of knowing exactly how hard they could spank a child without leaving
bruises. But in real life, bruises can be a result of an honest mistake by
parents who misjudged how hard they could spank without bruising. 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.

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.
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. 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) and what actually happened (which went beyond what the
parents thought their children deserved).

I've watched adults posting to this newsgroup defend their own beatings
administered by their parents as 'deserved,' even when they were left
bloody as a result.

For what kinds of offenses? I would expect that either the offenses were
exceptionally serious, or the people taking that view haven't made much
effort to compare the seriousness of the punishments they received with the
seriousness of what they were being punished for.

I'll readily agree that when punishments of any kind are misused, they can
cause enormous and unjustified damage to children's self-esteem and to their
ability to see the difference between justice and overkill. But that
doesn't mean I accept the opposite extreme of sending children the message
that they never deserve to be punished no matter how they behave.

Granted, this still leaves a gray area where the parent's motive is
unclear,
or it is unclear whether the severity of a spanking is warranted by the
seriousness of a child's behavior. But the sad truth is that we live in
a
world with a lot of gray in it, and wishing we could always draw clean
lines
between black and white doesn't make the gray go away.

We should not try, nevertheless?

From what I've seen, the only people who don't see a lot of shades of
gray
tend to be unthinking zealots who are so focused on an extreme position
that
they refuse to see any merit in arguments that conflict with their
preconceptions.

Personally I have no trouble seeing the continuum from a mild pat on
the bottom of say a diapered toddler to forcing a teen ager to drop
their pants and take a sever beating with a paddle, switch, strap, etc.


Of course there is a continuum.

My question has to do with where, exactly, on that continuum "spanking"
without injury leaves off and abusive injury takes place.

Your question here tries to force the issue into a much more simplistic
model than I consider appropriate. When I look at the issue, I don't see a
line between "spanking" and "abuse." Rather, I see a continuum, with
punishments that I consider clearly reasonable on one end; punishments I
consider clearly abusive on the other; and a gray area in between where I
see room for honest, reasonable people to disagree or be unsure about
whether the punishments should be considered reasonable, abusive, or perhaps
neither one.

Further, in my view, those areas move depending on how serious a child's
misbehavior is. The same punishment could be in the "clearly abusive" range
for a child who accidentally spills a glass of milk, but in the :"clearly
reasonable" range if a child who is clearly old enough to know better
commits the crime of shoplifting.

The closest I can come to a single clear line is that spanking hard enough
to leave bruises is almost always in the "clearly abusive" part of the
continuum. But because the divisions in the continuum move depending on the
seriousness of a child's misbehavior, there are some extreme cases where I
don't regard spanking hard enough to leave bruises as in the "clearly
abusive" range.

And I regard that kind of zealotry as a whole lot more
dangerous than accepting the existence of shades of gray.

Well let's look at that.

Let's say you would call me a zealot.

Frankly, I see no point in name calling as such. The reason I brought up
the issue of zealotry was to point out the danger of trying to force issues
into simplistic black-and-white models when the issues are too complex for
any simple black-and-white model to be complete and accurate.

snip

I believe from evidence I've seen both empirically and in data, that
even mild spanking has a fairly strong risk of producing psychological
injury if not physical.

Unless the evidence has gotten a lot better than what Chris Dugan got me to
look at a few years ago, I think you're overreaching. Straus and
Mouradian's 1998 study identified a group of spanking parents - those who
never spanked as a result of having "lost it" - who had essentially the same
results as non-spanking parents. Further, the studies I've looked at
consistently failed to account for the fact that a lot of parents who start
off planning not to spank are willing to change their minds if they don't
like the results they get without spanking. That creates a potential for
the category of non-spanking parents to escape responsibility for
significant numbers of its less successful outcomes

I do see all sorts of mistakes that parents can make in regard to when and
how they use spanking. Spanking can't function as a viable substitute for
teaching - for helping children to genuinely understand why particular
behaviors are good or bad. Spanking isn't anywhere near as reliable a
technique as finding solutions that children are willing to cooperate with
voluntarily - if such solutions can be found. Spanking can't make children
magically be able to live up to unrealistic expectations. :Spanking can't
have much effect on children's behavior if children don't have a reasonably
clear understanding of what kinds of behavior are likely to result in
spankings. Threats of spankings can become essentially worthless if they
are almost always empty. So there are a lot of situations where I would
expect parents who spank not to get good results, either because they aren't
using the tool properly or because they are relying on it too much at the
expense of other, more important tools.

But trying to get from there to the idea that all uses of spanking
inherently create unacceptable risks is a huge leap. And so far, I haven't
seen any evidence that supports that leap.

I've seen mild "spankings" gradually over time
escalate into majory beatings that injure the child...and that
progression from milder "spanking" not working.

In fact from the viewpoint of a behaviorist model it appears the parent
is teaching the child to grow more accustomed to more pain. Very
strange thinking to my mind.

How often have you seen that happen when parents' expectations were
reasonable and the parents didn't get in a power struggle over something
that wasn't all that important?

I did not believe, until early this past year that passing legislation
to ban spanking was a wise thing to do.

Watching the arguments in this newsgroup, and those put forward in the
media by spanking advocates (who themselves seemed to be speaking in
zealot jargon...no basis in fact, just unsupported claims) it occured
to me I've been expecting things to improve in this area of teaching by
pain and humiliation since I was about 19 years old. So far, not enough
progress.

Conversely, when someone like you puts forth a theoretical model of "how
children react to being spanked," and I know that the model is not an
accurate representation of how I reacted to being spanked, I don't view
claims based on the model as credible. Some of your claims aren't just
unsupported. They say things that I know from personal experience are off
target - or, at the very least, not reliably on target.

The reality is that people's personal experiences in their own lives ARE
facts. And when opponents of spanking make a lot of claims that conflict
with those facts, it tends to destroy their credibility.

I think the whole issue is a lot more complex than people on either side
give it credit for being. Opponents pay so much attention to situations
where spanking doesn't work that they ignore the situations where it does
produce useful effects, while supporters largely ignore how dangerous
spanking can be when parents make mistakes in how they use it or rely on it
too much.

So I proposed, which has been routinely lied about by some posters as
"forcing parents to conform," we introduce the Swedish model.

Legislation to encourage and support a change in attitude in all of
society, where spanking is seen as offensive and poor parenting, with
of course the law providing a way to deliver VOLUNTEER services to
families that wish to learn less punitive parenting methods.

As in Sweden, I suggest no penalties for violating this law.

In my view, making something illegal without enforcing the law is a bad idea
because it weakens respect for laws in general. If research ever reaches a
point where such blanket opposition to spanking would be justified, I would
consider a resolution more appropriate than a law that turns parents who
spank into technical lawbreakers without any serious attempt to enforce the
law.

I think services helping parents learn less punitive parenting methods could
be a wonderful thing - as long as parents aren't forced to swallow
anti-spanking propaganda as a condition for using the services. There are a
lot of nonpunitive techniques that can be highly useful regardless of
whether or not parents view spanking as a viable option if their other
efforts fail. But the whole point of freedom of speech and of the press is
that people are supposed to be able to disagree with each other without
undue interference from government. If government refuses to support parent
training unless it expresses particular, controversial opinions about how
bad spanking supposedly is, that would be a serious breach of freedom of
speech and/or of the press.

For that I've been called a zealot.

It's odd, if one examines certain odd things obout our laws relating to
spanking.

I presume you are arguing that spanking is a good thing.

I certainly do not adopt a blanket view that spanking is a good thing. I
think there are situations where punishing misbehavior is better than
allowing it to go unpunished, and in some of those situations, spanking can
offer advantages over other forms of punishment. But I think it's better if
parents (and other caregivers) can find ways to reduce the need for
punishment.

I don't support laws that require us to do 'good things.'

Like I would fight any law that said I had to take vitamins. I'll take
them if I wish.

Yet every state, with one exception, has had to pass laws that
expressly protect this "good thing" called spanking.

Why would that be necessary if we really believed that spanking was a
"good thing?"

In order for you to take vitamins legally, there can't be a law against
taking vitamins. In order for parents to spank legally, there can't be a
law against spanking. All the laws that "protect" spanking really do is
prevent other laws (or other portions of the same laws) from making it
illegal.

Further, spanking is merely one of many areas where laws treat children
differently from adults. Precedent speaks very loudly against the idea that
laws have to treat children the same as adults.

No law, no statute, by the way, defines where the line is between safe
CP and abusive hitting.

The ONLY way you can tell from the law is after the fact. You know you
have crossed the line if you draw blood, or break bones, etc. And even
if you do it enough that it becomes psychologically injurious to the
child.

But why can't the law state clearly how hard, how often, with what, at
what stroke frequency, a parent can spank, based on the child's age,
and physical and psychological condition?

We don't put professional athletes on the field without a great deal of
monitoring by medical personnel to determine if they are fit to take
the rigors of their sport.

Yet we expect parents to be experts in gauging this condition readying
them to safely receive Corporal Punishment....and we see those parents
fail again and again injurying their child when they claim they only
meant to "discipline."

The catch is that good parents are the world's foremost experts on their own
children. As a result, people who regard themselves as good parents are
extremely reluctant to surrender their authority to strangers. And it's
hard to design laws that stop bad parents without threatening the freedom of
good parents - especially when there are horror stories about overzealous
social workers and prosecutors who deliberately stretch their authority a
lot farther than it was intended to go.

In theory, it might be possible to design limits that are loose enough and
flexible enough that a broad consensus could form around them. But in order
to get a consensus, people who want greater restrictions on spankiing would
have to lead the way (since they are the ones who tend to want change), yet
those people would have to support a proposal that accepts much looser
limits than they really want.

Also, the idea of widespread psychological evaluations would probably be a
deal-breaker. When and if I have kids, I would consider it completely
outrageous for a law to presume that a psychologist or psychiatrist can
spend a couple hours with my kids and magically know what is best for them
better than I do. And I'm sure a lot of other people would feel the same
way.

Strauss remarked on this. I'll have to paraphrase, but basically he
pointed out that we have other effective methods of teaching and even
if spanking were as effect spanking still has a built in risk factor
the other methods don't.

What does work?

Well, it's well known that negative attention to unwanted behavior can
and does reinforce that behavior especially in the age range that is
spanked most often, the toddler to five.

The way you word this makes it sound like the problem is almost inevitable,
rather than something that may or may not occur with any given child. Is
that your intent? And if so, how do you justify such a broad
characterization?

Positive attention to unwanted behavior by way of showing the child the
desired replacement behavior is the key. And this is not brain surgery.
It's really very simple if we let go of our "control" issues.

Are you sure this characterization is accurate? If the problem is a child's
not understanding negatives like "don't," I can see how this could work very
well. But if the problem is a child's misbehaving to get attention, is what
you describe sufficient to stop the child from engaging in the unwanted
behavior in order to get attention?