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#81
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How Children REALLY React To Control
I will if he will. :-) Doan On Fri, 11 Jun 2004, Nathan A. Barclay wrote: Would the two of you please stop wasting bandwidth on this name-calling contest? "Doan" wrote in message ... On Fri, 11 Jun 2004, R. Steve Walz wrote: I wondered how you could look down the toilet while taking a dump unless your mouth was your asshole. Steve Nope! That's your mouth! ;-) Doan |
#82
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How Children REALLY React To Control
Your respect for religious freedom is completely underwhelming. From my perspective, it is your belief that God does not exist that is the "lie." In practical terms, you will never convince me that you are right if the validity of your reasoning hinges on the belief that God does not exist, nor will I convince you of anything if I use reasoning that hinges on the existence of God for its validity. I do, however, find your attempts to invoke your own atheistic beliefs in your efforts to psychoanalyze me HIGHLY offensive. "R. Steve Walz" wrote in message ... Nathan A. Barclay wrote: Keep in mind that any system of logic is based on axioms, things that people believe are true but cannot objectively prove are true. When people start with different axioms, they can reach different conclusions even though both are following perfectly valid logic based on the axioms that they believe are true. If people recognize that they are operating from different axioms, they can identify which axioms cause them to reach different conclusions, understand the root causes of their disagreement, and disuss why each holds the axioms he does. If not, they are likely to keep talking past each other indefinitely. Each will be convinced that he is right and, in fact, each will be able to "prove" that he is right, but they will never really understand each other. ------------------------ That would be true of one simple stllogistic logic, but not of ALL logical tools employed at once as humans can do. And that greater logic is NOT axiomatic, but intuitive. Logicians have numerous examples of this meta-tool logic. Would you care to give a few? Inductive reasoning is a form of reasoning that is independent of axioms. However, it is also seriously vulnerable to error. For example, the Pythagoreans once believed that all numbers could be expressed as ratios of integers because every number they could come up with could be expressed as a ratio of integers (hence the term "rational numbers"). But in time, people started running into numbers that couldn't be expressed that way ("irrational numbers") and the belief based on inductive reasoning was proved wrong. Even so, inductive reasoning can be a useful source of axioms at times, especially when all that is important is that something be generally true. What concerns me about your claims of relying on "meta-tool logic" is that it may, in practice, merely be a smokescreen by which to claim a mantle of logic for whatever you happen to want to believe. If a method of so-called logic has no rigor to it, there is no way of testing a person's claim that what he says is logical to determine whether it is in fact logical. So if you want me to accept this so-called "meta-tool logic" as logic, you'll have to explain how it functions and how claims that something is logical under it can be tested. (By the way, I could find no trace of the term "meta-tool logic" or "metatool logic" in a Google web search.) A large part of your problem of trying to tell me how I felt as a child has to do with the fact that your axioms are so different from those that I held as a child. -------------- No problem, for someone perceptive they are eminently discussable. That is called psychology. It is called malpractice, if you were a psychologist and I were your patient. snip That's not to say that I never resented times when I was punished, and certainly not to say that I never resented being told what to do or what not to do. But the level of resentment was mostly at the level of "I'm not getting my way" rather than at the level of "There is something fundamentally wrong with this" - except for the times when my analysis of a punishment found no legitimate basis for viewing it as fair. ------------------ That is abuse. That causes future progressive revenge formation and distrust. That is why the older child evades parental wishes with little concern, and it may cause danger to him. The line of communication has come down because his end has decided that his parents are not worth trusting. If parents adopt a "because I said so" parenting style and refuse to listen to their children, the lines of communication go down. In my family, the lines of communication stayed generally strong because my parents explained the reasons for the rules they made and were willing to listen - and, at times, to change their minds. Even when I didn't agree with my parents, I trusted that they were doing what they believed was best for me in the long term. Why? Because my parents acted in a way that earned that trust. That doesn't mean there weren't conflicts. Nor does it mean that my general trust in them invariably outweighed my desire to do something I enjoyed. But it was a major reason why I maintained a generally strong relationship with my parents both through my childhood and ever since, and why I take their opinions seriously today. Trust must still be evalauated by one indulging in it, it still cannot be blind trust. Parental assertion that they "know better" than he does when there is no logical reason to believe that registers as a deception in the child's mind, and poisons the adult-child relationship. No logical reason? How about the fact that the parents have lived so much longer and have so much more experience? Certainly, parents can throw away their status as people who "know better" in a number of different ways. They can behave hypocritically, thereby undermining their moral authority. They can refuse to provide explanations, so their children have no way of establishing that yes, what the parents suggest or decide generally does make sense. They can use their power in ways that appear selfish. And so on. But if parents develop a track record of making decisions that have good reasons behind them (even if the children are not always happy with the decisions), and of not using their power selfishly (and most children can recognize that expecting them to do a fair share of the household chores is not selfish in any unreasonable sense of the term, even if they might be reluctant to admit it), then they can retain their status as people who at least generally know better. And the trust in such situations is most definitely not blind. After such betrayal these people can now never live together as equal adults, just like you would have trouble trusting a housemate who has stolen from you. Except that looking back, what looked like stealing often turns out not to have been. It's more like a roommate who takes money that would have been spent on beer an holds onto it to make sure it will be available to pay the rent, or like taking someone's keys so he won't drive while intoxicated. The initial action, in and of itself, appears negative and might be resented at the time. But looking back, a smart person will recognize that it was for the best after all. That is why a lot of us who were spanked and otherwise punished do have strong relationships with our parents. Even though we sometimes disagreed with our parents' decisions at the time, and still do disagree with some of them, we feel like they did a generally good job of looking after our interests. another big snip It is NOT a matter of "legitimate" as in meaning authority-originated, for there IS NO SUCH authority! If your kid gets ****ed off at you even for a WRONG reason you can STILL wind up just as frozen to death on an ice floe, or the emotional equivalent. If you're so ****ing smart it is ALSO your duty to your species to NOT **** OFF YOUR KIDS! You CANNOT SUCCESSFULLY STOP THEM, so you need to stop pretending you are owed ANY "authority" if that offends them!! In other words, act sensibly, think pragmatically! You are forgetting a critical element of the "ice floe" test: time. When a child decides whether or not to let a parent freeze to death, he will be doing so with the maturity of an adult, and will be able to judge in hindsight how good the parent's decisions were. For example, suppose, as a young boy, a child is spanked for wandering off from camp (to follow your primitive tribal analogy) and the spanking causes him to stop doing so, or at least to wander off a lot less often. A few years later, another child wanders off from camp and is killed. The boy, now a young man, reevaluates how dangerous wandering off was and realizes that the spanking might have saved his life. So even though the child originally resented the punishment, it later becomes a reason to view the parent as wise and someone who looked after his best interests. What you refuse to acknowledge is that many parents who spank ultimately pass the "ice floe" test. Whatever resentment the spankings generated originally, the children ultimately decide that their parents loved them, were trying to look after their best interests, and generally did a pretty good job. Further, they often recognize times when what their parents forced them to do or not to do were, in hindsight, better choices than they would have made for themselves. I would also point out that parents can fail the "ice floe" test through inaction. If a parent allows a child to do something that results in the child's being killed or crippled, the child will not be able to help the parent when the parent is old. |
#83
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How Children REALLY React To Control
Would the two of you please stop wasting bandwidth on this name-calling contest? "Doan" wrote in message ... On Fri, 11 Jun 2004, R. Steve Walz wrote: I wondered how you could look down the toilet while taking a dump unless your mouth was your asshole. Steve Nope! That's your mouth! ;-) Doan |
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How Children REALLY React To Control
"Chris" wrote in message ... Nathan, you brushed off the list of responses from workshop participants to Thomas Gordon's question about how they reacted to punitive control as children, saying it was "anecdotal." But you never answered my question to you: which of the behaviors on the list did *you* engage in as a spanked child? Don't say you didn't engage in any of them because I know you did; all of us raised the way you advocate did. I did answer your message where you asked that. If you didn't get the response, you may want to do a Google Groups search for recent messages from me on this newsgroup to find it and see what other of my posts you might have missed. I view the question as asked as getting a bit too personal, especially in a forum that is permanently archived, but I did provide some information. |
#85
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How Children REALLY React To Control
Nathan A. Barclay wrote:
Your respect for religious freedom is completely underwhelming. ------------------------- When nearly all of these "religion" things almost invariably try to subvert freedom and Majority Democratic government, not to mention individual rights, there simply needs to be NO "freedom" to do THAT! From my perspective, it is your belief that God does not exist that is the "lie." ------------------------ That isn't my belief. I might well believe in a Divinity of sorts, but just NOT YOURS! And that galls you. In practical terms, you will never convince me that you are right if the validity of your reasoning hinges on the belief that God does not exist, nor will I convince you of anything if I use reasoning that hinges on the existence of God for its validity. --------------------------------- I don't have any reason to do that, but I have EVERY reason to make sure that the "Gawd" you believe in isn't telling you to commit criminal conspriracies against the rest of us, and against our secular rights and freedoms FROM religion. I do, however, find your attempts to invoke your own atheistic beliefs ----------------------------------- As I told you, I'm NOT an atheist, I just don't believe in YOUR stupid "Gawd"! in your efforts to psychoanalyze me HIGHLY offensive. --------------------------------------- Tough ****. You religious crazies always think that psychologists are wrong, which is why you often have to be court-ordered to obtain treatment for your mental disorders. "R. Steve Walz" wrote in message ... Nathan A. Barclay wrote: Keep in mind that any system of logic is based on axioms, things that people believe are true but cannot objectively prove are true. When people start with different axioms, they can reach different conclusions even though both are following perfectly valid logic based on the axioms that they believe are true. If people recognize that they are operating from different axioms, they can identify which axioms cause them to reach different conclusions, understand the root causes of their disagreement, and disuss why each holds the axioms he does. If not, they are likely to keep talking past each other indefinitely. Each will be convinced that he is right and, in fact, each will be able to "prove" that he is right, but they will never really understand each other. ------------------------ That would be true of one simple syllogistic logic, but not of ALL logical tools employed at once as humans can do. And that greater logic is NOT axiomatic, but intuitive. Logicians have numerous examples of this meta-tool logic. Would you care to give a few? ---------------------------------------- The process of picking axioms is one that brings ready agreement, but does NOT require syllogism itself. That is the primary principle. Corollaries are left to the student as homework. Inductive reasoning is a form of reasoning that is independent of axioms. However, it is also seriously vulnerable to error. ------------------- It CAN be, but as I said above, it isn't when we use it together in good faith. For example, the Pythagoreans once believed that all numbers could be expressed as ratios of integers because every number they could come up with could be expressed as a ratio of integers (hence the term "rational numbers"). But in time, people started running into numbers that couldn't be expressed that way ("irrational numbers") and the belief based on inductive reasoning was proved wrong. Even so, inductive reasoning can be a useful source of axioms at times, especially when all that is important is that something be generally true. ---------------------------- He thought that was "pretty", but any group of people experimenting in math would have told him that he couldn't count on everything being rational without exchausting an infinite search or finding a better reason than he had. Peer review puts the kibosh on such opining as an excuse for process. What concerns me about your claims of relying on "meta-tool logic" is that it may, in practice, merely be a smokescreen by which to claim a mantle of logic for whatever you happen to want to believe. ------------------------ We can always discuss it, and that puts it to task. But the superstitious don't WANT to discuss THEIR presumptions and the possibility of them being wrong! If a method of so-called logic has no rigor to it, there is no way of testing a person's claim that what he says is logical to determine whether it is in fact logical. -------------------- Rigor is fine INSIDE the province of any one tool, or if we developed a persuasive unified theory. But absenting that, there is no such requirement, except that we continue the process and all decide pro tempore if we must do so at all at any point. So if you want me to accept this so-called "meta-tool logic" as logic, you'll have to explain how it functions and how claims that something is logical under it can be tested. (By the way, I could find no trace of the term "meta-tool logic" or "metatool logic" in a Google web search.) ------------------------------------ My term, there are others. Peer review mostly functions to question assumptions that cannot be easily defended reasonably, and to suggest better limits to the process, or what meets more people's criteria of reasonableness. A large part of your problem of trying to tell me how I felt as a child has to do with the fact that your axioms are so different from those that I held as a child. -------------- No problem, for someone perceptive they are eminently discussable. That is called psychology. It is called malpractice, if you were a psychologist and I were your patient. ------------------------------------- No. You're merely posturing disingenuously. That's not to say that I never resented times when I was punished, and certainly not to say that I never resented being told what to do or what not to do. But the level of resentment was mostly at the level of "I'm not getting my way" rather than at the level of "There is something fundamentally wrong with this" - except for the times when my analysis of a punishment found no legitimate basis for viewing it as fair. ------------------ That is abuse. That causes future progressive revenge formation and distrust. That is why the older child evades parental wishes with little concern, and it may cause danger to him. The line of communication has come down because his end has decided that his parents are not worth trusting. If parents adopt a "because I said so" parenting style and refuse to listen to their children, the lines of communication go down. In my family, the lines of communication stayed generally strong because my parents explained the reasons for the rules they made and were willing to listen - and, at times, to change their minds. -------------------- Such one-sided authority and high-handedness is illegitimate, and inherently abusive. However compelled a dictator might feel he is to explain his abuse, it is still abuse. Even when I didn't agree with my parents, I trusted that they were doing what they believed was best for me in the long term. Why? Because my parents acted in a way that earned that trust. ----------------------------------- Brainwashed. Stockholm Syndrome. That doesn't mean there weren't conflicts. Nor does it mean that my general trust in them invariably outweighed my desire to do something I enjoyed. But it was a major reason why I maintained a generally strong relationship with my parents both through my childhood and ever since, and why I take their opinions seriously today. ----------------------------------- And Cognitive Dissonance. Trust must still be evalauated by one indulging in it, it still cannot be blind trust. Parental assertion that they "know better" than he does when there is no logical reason to believe that registers as a deception in the child's mind, and poisons the adult-child relationship. No logical reason? How about the fact that the parents have lived so much longer and have so much more experience? ------------------------------ Experience is conveyed as requested advice, or at most, offered without being asked, but NOT coercion. Certainly, parents can throw away their status as people who "know better" in a number of different ways. They can behave hypocritically, thereby undermining their moral authority. They can refuse to provide explanations, so their children have no way of establishing that yes, what the parents suggest or decide generally does make sense. They can use their power in ways that appear selfish. And so on. ------------------------------- Or they can attempt foolishly and destructively to try to live a life that is NOT THEIRS TO LIVE! But if parents develop a track record of making decisions that have good reasons behind them (even if the children are not always happy with the decisions), ---------------- If not, then they are NOT "good" decisions, by definition! and of not using their power selfishly (and most children can recognize that expecting them to do a fair share of the household chores is not selfish in any unreasonable sense of the term, even if they might be reluctant to admit it), then they can retain their status as people who at least generally know better. And the trust in such situations is most definitely not blind. ------------------------------------ Garbage, you're blathering around to try to sound reasonable, but everything you're saying could be used to defend ANY petty venal tyranny!! it is NOT compelling! After such betrayal these people can now never live together as equal adults, just like you would have trouble trusting a housemate who has stolen from you. Except that looking back, what looked like stealing often turns out not to have been. It's more like a roommate who takes money that would have been spent on beer an holds onto it to make sure it will be available to pay the rent, or like taking someone's keys so he won't drive while intoxicated. ------------------- People living their own lives are not "intoxicated", and one's own opinion for their own life is no "drug". People who take their friend's keys will lose that person as a friend if they don't appreciate it in the morning. That person will toss them out of their life if it is not so, and their usefulness to the other person's life will be forever damaged beyond repair. The initial action, in and of itself, appears negative and might be resented at the time. But looking back, a smart person will recognize that it was for the best after all. ---------------------------- No, we''re not having a bit of it. This high0handedness has mostly caused children to move as far as they can get from their parents and to never speak to them or let them anywhere NEAR their own grandchildren! This has become such an issue that the Supreme Court of the US has said that grandparents have NO right to see their grandchildren as minors. That is why a lot of us who were spanked and otherwise punished do have strong relationships with our parents. -------------------- No, that is the psychological phenomenon called the Stockholm Syndrome. People abused by their captors come to defend them and their causes to avoid admitting to themselves the humilation of their own abuse at their hands, the more vicious and humilating and prolonged the abuse, the harder it is to deprogram them and dispel their neurosis. Even though we sometimes disagreed with our parents' decisions at the time, and still do disagree with some of them, we feel like they did a generally good job of looking after our interests. ----------------------------- And those for which this isn't true aren't alive, but that doesn't speak at all to the crimes done to the damaged people who are now wandering around hurt and confused and the criminals harming others that these parents produced. It is NOT a matter of "legitimate" as in meaning authority-originated, for there IS NO SUCH authority! If your kid gets ****ed off at you even for a WRONG reason you can STILL wind up just as frozen to death on an ice floe, or the emotional equivalent. If you're so ****ing smart it is ALSO your duty to your species to NOT **** OFF YOUR KIDS! You CANNOT SUCCESSFULLY STOP THEM, so you need to stop pretending you are owed ANY "authority" if that offends them!! In other words, act sensibly, think pragmatically! You are forgetting a critical element of the "ice floe" test: time. When a child decides whether or not to let a parent freeze to death, he will be doing so with the maturity of an adult, and will be able to judge in hindsight how good the parent's decisions were. For example, suppose, as a young boy, a child is spanked for wandering off from camp (to follow your primitive tribal analogy) and the spanking causes him to stop doing so, or at least to wander off a lot less often. A few years later, another child wanders off from camp and is killed. The boy, now a young man, reevaluates how dangerous wandering off was and realizes that the spanking might have saved his life. So even though the child originally resented the punishment, it later becomes a reason to view the parent as wise and someone who looked after his best interests. -------------------------------------- No, the abuse is still abuse, a crime, and the effect is still revenge formation. You just don't really seem to GET IT, that abuse TRUMPS even good sense in producing a desire to kill, to hurt and to wreak revenge on people that get in the way of this adult child as whose emotional development has been halted by abuse. This is what causes kids to shoot people seemingly at random, and that abuse is NOT acceptible!! When you hit someone you turn them from their attention to their life and set them on a path toward you to wreak vengeance upon you for your abuse and their hurt and humilation. This entirely defeats your own avowed purpose. The child vows to devote his life to hurting you back, or anyone vaguely LIKE YOU! He gives up on his life and turns toward hate as his raisson d'etre, his reason for being. What you refuse to acknowledge is that many parents who spank ultimately pass the "ice floe" test. ---------------------- That many parents may not produce immediate monsters and may limit their abuses to a number of occasions accidentally less than enough to do so is merely a lucky accident, but the degree of abuse being less doesn't magically make the damage negligible, the adult child is still damaged in their creativity, their self-esteem, and their internal "humilation index" is still substantial, and they still hold a deeply buried secret grudge against anyone who wrong them that can accumulate and explode into violence or antisocial behavior or crimes. In fact greed is one major product of this process. The adult-child sees economic abuse and cruelty toward others as his "payback". Righwing militia-men and Republicans are made in this neurotic manner. Whatever resentment the spankings generated originally, the children ultimately decide that their parents loved them, were trying to look after their best interests, and generally did a pretty good job. Further, they often recognize times when what their parents forced them to do or not to do were, in hindsight, better choices than they would have made for themselves. ------------------------- No, they SAY this as part of the Stockholm Syndrome to deny their internal humiliation and hurt, but inside they are seething with hatred and desire for revenge against somebody, anybody! This is called stuffing one's emotions, it is like tamping an explosive charge. I would also point out that parents can fail the "ice floe" test through inaction. If a parent allows a child to do something that results in the child's being killed or crippled, the child will not be able to help the parent when the parent is old. --------------------------------------- True, but coercion is NOT an acceptible alternative. People who stuff their emotions hit their children, passing their hurt and damage to another generation, while a sane person expresses relief and joy, permitting himself to cry when he finds his small child lost in the woods and expresses his love in that manner, and the child learns about love from his parents terror, and not hate from his parents viciousness and cruelty and imability to express real emotion! All stuffed emotions are funneled into being manifested as anger and hate, the hate for anything that reminds them of their own abuse as a child which forces them to recall that terrible humilation. Steve |
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How Children REALLY React To Control
Nathan A. Barclay wrote:
"R. Steve Walz" wrote in message ... Nathan A. Barclay wrote: My hypothesis does not require the existence of children who are "completely indifferent." It requires only the existence of children whose desire to engage in certain actions that their parents consider unacceptable outweighs whatever damage to harmony those particular actions will cause. ---------------------- I see that "harmony" is your euphemism for abject obedience to your ignorant immature and insecure sickness. That's an interesting accusation, given your sterling efforts toward harmony in this newsgroup. You seem to be the one who views having everyone else give in as the only allowable path to harmony around here. --------------------------- I don't believe that some insipid harmony is important when it abuses so many people as its cost. Your definition of "harmony" seems to center around allowing children to run wild and do anything short of things that are outright criminal, with absolutely no regard either for how their actions affect others (including the parents) or to how their actions might cause harm to themselves later in life, if that is what they so desire. ---------------------------- I think that children who commit crimes against others should be sentenced to jail for sufficient time to dissuade them from crime against others, but adults who impede a child's freedom otherwise should be publically beaten. (And before you talk about how wonderfully children who are raised with freedom will invariably treat others, -------------------------- They will treat others as those others deserve to be treated. look at how you're treating me. That alone proves that it doesn't always work.) ------------------------------ Don't posture and pretend like a little manipulative ****. Disagreeing with you isn't any "crime"!! I've committed no crime against you, I have told you the Truth, just one you simply don't like, and I have told you what I think of you, nothing more. (By "unacceptable," I am referring to matters serious enough that the parents believe they ought to be non-negotiable or negotiable only within certain boundaries, not just to actions parents would prefer not to accept.) -------------------- If you cannot convince your children of that by reason and logic, then you're merely wrong in your beliefs. Let me get this straight. If parents and children disagree, it is automatically the parents, the people who have lived more than twice as long and generally have a significantly higher level of maturity, that are wrong? I don't see that as making any sense at all. ---------------------------------- If you and the person you're pushing around and bullying disagree, then yes, it is your fault because YOU'RE pushing them around. Feel free to get back to me whenever it is that children pushing their larger parents around becomes more than an imaginary problem, or more than just a way of speaking. One of the things that can happen in any relationship where needs and desires are not entirely compatible is for there to be quiet power struggles in which who wins and who loses depends on which side is willing to give in in the interest of harmony first. -------------------- No, actually that's you simply being wrong about human relationships again. People who care about each other want each one of them to all get what they each separately and differently want, In general, that is true. But when you love someone, and that person wants something that you know will be bad for them, you will generally hope that they do NOT get what they want. For example, if your children would decide that they wanted to take a dangerous illegal drug, would you want for them to get the drug or want for them not to get it? If you would want them to get it, I have the same contempt for you that you have toward parents who spank. -------------------------- If your "children" are sufficiently able to research, inquire, and obtain a drug against your desires, then no coercion of any kind is likely to do more than endanger you if you try to get in their way physically. It isn't likely to be a situation in which they are unaware of your opinion. The most constuctive thing you can do is to maintain civility with them so that you have their ear and then you can tell them of your worries, and any information about the drug that you might give them. Still, if you DID have a friendship relationship with them, one devoid of any coercion, ONLY THEN would you even be LIKELY to know of their drug use ANYWAY! Any coercive relatiionship you have with them will serve to prevent you even being ALLOWED by them to know of their drug use. As a parent *I* would rather be uncoercive and KNOW what my kids were interested in, and be able to speak with them without being ignored and dismissed, than to coerce them and lose that knowledge entirely!! Again, respect and pragmatism is the watchword. Coercion never works, it only blinds you and separates you from them as their enemy. Unfortunately, your model of human relationships seems to allow only for the type of love that gives people what they want without regard to whether or not it is good for them, not for the type of love that causes parents to want to make sure their children will NOT get what they want if it is bad for them. ----------------------------- Our kids were raised without coercion, and they never did anything without talking to us about it. If we had been coercive, they would have gone into secrecy and we'd have been shut out. And since they had no worry that we'd act to stop them, they ALSO TOOK OUR ADVICE, JUST AS IF THEY WERE ADULT FRIENDS OF OURS!! They had no impression that we were simply dishonoring them and attempting to control them, so they trusted us!! (In an ideal relationship, both sides will love each other enough and care enough about each other's desires that a middle ground can be found without such a power struggle, ----------------------- There is no such "middle ground". People who respect and love each other make room all over the map for each other. They do NOT think that everyone has to do the same things and feel the same. Suppose the parents in a family want to go one place on vacation and the children want to go another. The kind of "middle ground" I speak of would come about if the parents decide to put their children's happiness first and have the family go where the children want, or if the children decide to put their parents' happiness first and agree for the family to go where the parents want, or if both the parents and the children place a high value on each other's happiness and the family agrees to go somewhere everyone would enjoy (if not necessarily their first choice). Clearly, the concept of "middle ground" can apply in that type of situation. -------------------------------------- The matter is decided like adults who want to vacation together decide. If you can't do it that way, then it cannot be done anyway! The degree to which it applies in other situations is at least partly a matter of religious/philosophical perspective. From a philosophical perspective in which exercise of parental authority is considered legitimate only in regard to criminal behavior, and in which parents are viewed as "owing" their children free room and board without expecting anything at all in return, the only times when "middle ground" might apply are when children want something their parents are not regarded as "owing" them. From a perspective that regards parents as having legitimate authority over a wider range of issues, the concept of "middle ground" would come into play more often - for example, parents' allowing a child to do something that is more dangerous than they really want to allow because the child wants to do it so badly. ------------------------- Equals don't owe each other anything but their care and concern, because among respected equals there is no mere debt obligation. Nor do they owe a vacation choice to each other. But if you can't figure it out by equality and respect, then you should probably go on different vacations! but I don't view it as realistic to expect all relationships to consistently measure up to that ideal.) If the parents generally give in first, the result is in the direction of the stereotypical spoiled brat who knows that if he or she doesn't cooperate, harmony will still probably come when the parents give up. ---------------- A child wanting what they want for themselves is NOT a "spoiled" or any kind of "brat" Who ever said that merely wanting something makes a child a a brat? --------------- You did. Above. You implied that demanding one's own freedom made a child a "spiled brat" merely because that demand disturbed your high-handed notion of harmony! There are two basic categories of behavior that I associate with the "spoiled brat" stereotype. One is the use of tantrums or similar types of psychological coercion to get what they want. (I see nothing inherently wrong with, "Please, please, please can I have that?" although it can become psychologically coercive if a child persists after being told no in the hope that a parent will agree just so the child will stop asking.) ------------------ Children only throw tantrums when they believe that you're not on THEIR side. If they believe you would get something for them if you could, because you showed interest in what they wanted, then they would never get that frustrated. You just have to prove to them that you are as much on their side as on your own. Many times in stores when I could see that one of our kids was absolutely fascinated and enthralled with something, I took great pains to let them know that I saw them and to talk about it. When they looked ready to freak I was down on the floor talking to them on my lap right on the floor in the aisle. I asked what it was that they thought was so neat, and they could tell me, even when they were tiny they could make it known. Then I would try to find a way that they could get that interest satisfied, even if it didn't mean buying that thing off the rack. My daughter was looking at a little cheap plastic tea set once, and I said why not go to the thrift store and buy you some REAL dishes and keep them in your room and we have some old cloth napkins in the cupboard, would they and a table cloth be good enough, and she almost melted, she was so happy! We found some little demitasses and saucers that were a dime a piece, cheaper than the plastic trash and eminently better. My son loved flying toys, and we went through a number of balsa planes that broke, of course, so the next time my son got the bug for flying toys, I turned him on to building experimental gliders with cardboard and balsa and glue, great BIG ones, and taught him how to build sheet plastic hangglider models for his GI Joe-like figure he found at the thrift to fly on, his favorite things after that were large sized cans of glue and tape and plastic sheet and rubber bands and balsa and other light wood that could be had for cheap. He would make things for hours. They learned that what we did in OUR family was ALWAYS MUCH BETTER than some trashy goo-gah they could buy in the store!! And when they looked like they were getting frustrated that we didn't have the money that other kids seemed to have for clothes, heading into the middle school grades, I surprised them with a sewing machine and taught them how to use it so they could modify and customize any item of clothing they could find from the thrift store. They were so amazed at what they could make for mere pennies out of used clothing, I actually thought my daughter would become a seamstress or costumer till she got into computers. The other is the attitude that they can behave more or less however they want to with little regard to the possible danger to themselves or to how their behavior affects others and not expect to suffer any significant adverse consequences as a result. ------------------------------------- No child who is loved and respected wants that. Our kids loved us and loved themselves, they would never endanger any of us, we were having too much fun together. But a child who is coercied, forced, hit, hurt, dishonored, he wants revenge! He WILL hurt you, and LIKE IT! On the other hand, consider situations in which a child is reluctant to give up doing what he or she wants to do in the interest of whatever amount of harmony is at stake regarding that particular issue, and in which the parents decide that they cannot afford to give up in the interest of harmony because they view the issue as too important. ----------------- Your entire take is one-sided, you completely ignore the degree to which a parent trying to control to merely meet with his insane or superstitious sense of order is inhumane and at fault. You ignore the possibility that something more than just an "insane or superstitious sense of order" might be at stake. -------------------------------- Nothing can actually be gained by coercion and punishment. When a child is tiny and runs in the street you can rescue them, but if you hit them or shame them or act hateful to them you have exceded any good you can do and crossed over into damage, as if you had reached to grab a falling glass and slapped it off the table altogether and broken it. If you cry you can possibly teach them that they scared you, and that is possibly useful, but even more useful is simply waiting till they can understand before talking about your fears. Till then it is fine to remove them away from harm, as long as you APOLOGIZE FOR IT, just as you would if you pulled an adult out from in front of the path of a bus, you would then APOLGIZE for laying hands on them. Rescuing is ALWAYS permitted to ANYONE of ANY AGE, but when you know they will oppose you with their own rationale for what they want to do, then give it up!! You can only offend them after that, and destroy any future benefit you might otherwise have in their life. You indulge in paranoid fantasy that children don't WANT you to be happy On the contrary, I made it very clear to Chris that that was NOT my assumption. Suppose a child would like to make his parents happy, but to do so would require not doing something that the child believes (not necessarily correctly) will make him happy. Further suppose the parents have a good reason not to want the child to do what the child thinks will make him happy - whether because they expect the long-term negative impact to outweigh the short-term happiness benefit, or because of a danger involved, or because of harm it would cause someone else (albeit not to a point of criminal behavior). That is the type of situation I'm trying to address. ------------------------------------------ This all sounds like blabber. Why not give an example and I'll tell you how a sensible parent SHOULD behave? If the child chooses to largely ignore the parents' efforts at persuasion, it is not implausible that even though the child wants his parents to be happy, the child will choose to put his own happiness first and do what he thinks will make him happy in spite of the fact that he knows his parents won't like it. Or are you going to try to tell me that in non-punitive relationships, children will invariably put their parents' happiness ahead of their own in such situations? --------------------- No, but the parent in such a relationship will back the **** off and let the child make their mistakes or experiment, after telling them what their worries are. purely non-punitive approach leaves the parents with no choice but to give up, accept defeat, and let the child win no matter how concerned they are about the possible consequences of the behavior. ----------------------------- This is as it should be, because actually, in real human life, you cannot control any other living person but YOURSELF, and pretending that you can or should, and that others should obey you, is LUNACY!!! Perfect, total, complete control over another human being is impossible. ------------------- No. You absolutely REQUIRE another's assent and cooperation or else you are achieving nothing. NO "control" of another is possible, as you cannot control their body. But in situations where a person knows that misbehavior will be caught and punished (for example, if a parent counts to three to get a child to do something or stop doing something), the level of control can be quite high. Obviously, as the risk of a child's getting caught and punished declines, so does the amount of control that can be exerted through punitive techniques. ---------------------------- That sort of attitude of high-handed mind-control toward a child is nothing but a desperate mental illness, a perversion, a sickness! You make me want to vomit. That violates even the Geneva Convention for the Treatment of Prisoners. If you treat a child that way you are systematically creating nothing but a bullying monster with demons inside. Also, how sure can you be that you aren't falling into the "The parents must not be trying hard enough" trap? Keep in mind that there is a self-selection process involved in whether or not parents stick to entirely non-punitive methods. ------------------------------ Bull****. Parents have far more they can do for a child by way of negotiation goods than kids can do for adults. And if parents actually use their highest-value negotiating goods as leverage - things like food, clothing, and shelter - they undermine their children's basic security. ------------------ No, that would be intimidation. But your attitude, if I understand it correctly, seems to be that children are entitled to those things for free with absolutely no return obligations whatsoever to their parents, and that parents must go beyond those things if they want to offer their children something in negotiations. ------------------------ Precisely, a parent can do a great number of extra things for and with a child to help them in their numerous quests. These are the things that FRIENDS do for one another, even if one owes the other some money. To those of us who believe in free will, ------------------------ It doesn't matter how many of you are delusional, it won't be true! The future is a result of the past, and as long as cause and effect runs the Universe, it's neither POSSIBLE, NOR even DESIRABLLE to have "Free Will". If you truly believe that, why all the animosity toward parents who punish? ---------------------------- Because coercion by force works with rocks, but NOT with humans, as they have complex feedback loops that prevent a push or pull or smack from resulting in a precise billiard ball trajectory. If you push a rock it tends to go pretty much in that direction, even cows do as well, but if you hit a human, he puts his life down and turns and comes at the thing that pushed him to KILL IT. In other words, coercion doesn't result in what you wanted. In fact it is a principle of psychology that coercion always results in the very OPPOSITE of what the inflictor wanted!! Humans are MUCH more complex than cows. After all, they are nothing more than machines doing what they were programmed to do, with absolutely no choice in the matter. ------------------------ And if you hit them, they will have NO other choice but to hate you and try to harm you and everyone vaguely LIKE you, all the days of their life unless something accidentally happens to modify that from within. In others words, YOU WILL HAVE DONE GREAT HARM!! Would you hold a bridge that collapsed and killed people accountable for its actions just because it succombed to the forces that caused it to collapse? If not, then why blame parents who merely succomb to the forces that made their actions inevitable? ------------------------ I don't think that the criminals that people like you make should even BE punished, but only restrained and given a pleasing life by the state under restraint, and a skill that is productive, and supervised sexual and other entertainment and hobby activities. The psychopaths made by abuse are merely victims. Nothing more. I'm snipping the rest of this (as I have chunks before now) because it's pretty much just rants and personal attacks. By the way, I might point out that I don't have any children of my own yet, although I hope to someday. ----------------- Which explains a lot of your ignorance. I would also note that statistically, you have no basis for a claim that my children can be expected to hate me (at least beyond occasionally being angry at me for short periods) if I do choose the kind of parenting style I'm talking about here when and if I have children. ------------------ No, if you beat them they will probably love you and blabber that love repeatedly to every prison psychologist who cares for them after their convictions. They HAVE to think you "loved" them, and that your abuse was actually "love", or else they will know they weren't loved at all, and for someone so frightened and abused and beaten down, that would be waaaay too dispiriting to even contemplate!! That *IS* the nature of the psychological phenomenon of cognitive dissonance, examplified by the Stockholm Syndrome. Most children are punished more than you consider proper, yet as best I can tell, most children love their parents. -------------------------- Hahahahahahahah! They're not REALLY your parents(friends). See Google: Stockholm Syndrome. Which implies that your views about how children react to being punished are way off target. Nathan ------------------------------- Before you EVER think of raising children, you REALLY need a few good courses in psychology, or you are going to do a GREAT DEAL of damage to innocent children. Steve |
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How Children REALLY React To Control
Doan wrote:
On Fri, 11 Jun 2004, R. Steve Walz wrote: Doan wrote: On 10 Jun 2004, Kane wrote: Chris has been running away from me since the Straus et al (1997) debacle. ---------------- No, we simply stand back when you ****, and you **** everywhere we take you, like a baby with projectile diarrhea. The only "****" on this newsgroup I see is ------------- You. Go the **** away, or grow a brain and use it. Steve |
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How Children REALLY React To Control
Doan wrote:
On Fri, 11 Jun 2004, R. Steve Walz wrote: Doan wrote: On Fri, 11 Jun 2004, R. Steve Walz wrote: Doan wrote: On Fri, 11 Jun 2004, R. Steve Walz wrote: Doan wrote: On Thu, 10 Jun 2004, Nathan A. Barclay wrote: "Doan" wrote in message ... On Wed, 9 Jun 2004, Nathan A. Barclay wrote: "Doan" wrote in message ... Simple answer - Steve is a "never-spanked" kid! :-) Why in the world would you think that? Because he said so! :-0 I'm still puzzled as to the reasons for your saying, "Simple answer - Steve is a 'never-spanked' kid! :-)" How do you view it as an answer at all? Or was that meant purely as some sort of "inside joke" that I didn't have the background to get? You got it! Doan -------------- It's SO "inside" that nobody gets it but him. Steve Could it be because your brain is fill with "****"? So much that it oozed out of your mouth! :-) Doan ---------------------- You're looking in the mirror again, you ****-mouthed peckerhead. Steve Nope, I was looking down the toilet, taking a dump, and I see MYSELF with my mouth wide open. Then, I started thinking, is that my **** coming out of my mouth? ;-) Doan ---------------- I wondered how you could look down the toilet while taking a dump unless your mouth was your asshole. Steve Nope! That's my mouth! ;-) Doan -------------------------- Uh-huh. Steve |
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How Children REALLY React To Control
On Sat, 12 Jun 2004, R. Steve Walz wrote:
Doan wrote: On Fri, 11 Jun 2004, R. Steve Walz wrote: Doan wrote: On 10 Jun 2004, Kane wrote: Chris has been running away from me since the Straus et al (1997) debacle. ---------------- No, we simply stand back when you ****, and you **** everywhere we take you, like a baby with projectile diarrhea. The only "****" on this newsgroup I see is ------------- You. Go the **** away, or grow a brain and use it. Steve LOL! Speaking like a "never-spanked" kid with a "****" coming out of his mouth. Tell me, do all "never-spanked" grow up to be like you? Doan |
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How Children REALLY React To Control
On Sat, 12 Jun 2004, R. Steve Walz wrote:
Doan wrote: On Fri, 11 Jun 2004, R. Steve Walz wrote: Doan wrote: On Fri, 11 Jun 2004, R. Steve Walz wrote: Doan wrote: On Fri, 11 Jun 2004, R. Steve Walz wrote: Doan wrote: On Thu, 10 Jun 2004, Nathan A. Barclay wrote: "Doan" wrote in message ... On Wed, 9 Jun 2004, Nathan A. Barclay wrote: "Doan" wrote in message ... Simple answer - Steve is a "never-spanked" kid! :-) Why in the world would you think that? Because he said so! :-0 I'm still puzzled as to the reasons for your saying, "Simple answer - Steve is a 'never-spanked' kid! :-)" How do you view it as an answer at all? Or was that meant purely as some sort of "inside joke" that I didn't have the background to get? You got it! Doan -------------- It's SO "inside" that nobody gets it but him. Steve Could it be because your brain is fill with "****"? So much that it oozed out of your mouth! :-) Doan ---------------------- I AM looking in the mirror again, you **** in my mouth. Steve Nope, I was looking down the toilet, taking a dump, and I see your face with my mouth wide open. Then, I started thinking, is that my **** coming into your mouth? ;-) Doan ---------------- I wondered how you could look down the toilet while taking a dump unless my mouth was your asshole. Steve Nope! That's my mouth! ;-) Steve -------------------------- Uh-huh. Steve That is why you are a "never-spanked" boy! :-) Doan |
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