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#11
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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? |
#12
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Teenagers faced with spankings
Nathan A. Barclay wrote:
"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. They don't think they are ignorant. Nor grossly so. 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. We are in agreement. And here in this newsgroup, aps, I have seen again and again, pro spankers discuss circumstances where they would spank, and demonstrating they have extremely unrealistic expectations of children. The idea that any child, for instance, under the age of 12 or so, would "willfully disobey." It's nonsense. They are following natural imperatives to explore the universe. All an aware parent needs to do is learn how to question and investigate and when the parent has figured out (even if wrong) some probable natural imperative the child is reacting to, simply show them how to get their appropriately. Wanted behavior replacing unwanted behavior. This isn't rocket science, and no child with parents that can figure this out is "spanked." It's too damned obvious to a parent that can think, and is compassionate (even in the absence of exact evidence) that the child does not need spanking to learn. 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? I'm unable to find in your posts, other than by allusion, what the two extremes are. I can presume that beating is at one extreme, and not spanking at all, is at the other. What will happen if you don't spank? 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. That's okay. 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. Not a problem. Don't go getting all huffy on me. I can't see where threatening to leave is a very effective response. I might just forget you and let you go, unless you wish to make a commitment to carry through on your commentary, arguments, and claims. 0:-] Popping in and out is Troll behavior. Tsk. But, sigh I'm a sucker for a good argument, got one? Here's what you asked for. I posted this just yesterday, in fact, and it refers, at the beginning, to a prior post of mine in April of this year. I posted the following in April of this year. From: 0:- - view profile Date: Sun, Apr 16 2006 10:44 am Email: "0:-" Groups: alt.parenting.spanking Not yet rated Rating: show options Reply | Reply to Author | Forward | Print | Individual Message | Show original | Remove | Report Abuse | Find messages by this author http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1114110820.htm " ... The researchers found differences in how often mothers used physical discipline and the mothers' perceptions of how often other parents used physical discipline. Specifically: * Mothers in Thailand were least likely to physically discipline their children, followed by mothers in China, the Philippines, Italy, India, and Kenya, with mothers in Kenya most likely to physically discipline their children. * More frequent use of physical discipline was less strongly associated with child aggression and anxiety when it was perceived as being more culturally accepted, but physical discipline was also associated with more aggression and anxiety regardless of the perception of cultural acceptance. * In countries in which physical discipline was more common and culturally accepted, children who were physically disciplined were less aggressive and less anxious than children who were physically disciplined in countries where physical discipline was rarely used. * In all countries, however, higher use of physical discipline was associated with more child aggression and anxiety. ... " Those last sentences pretty much says it all for the argument that where cultures accept more CP it doesn't result in aberrent reactions in children. The next is a smaller study on the use of aggressively harsh CP to preschool aged children. I've seen posters defend the use of such methods as being "up to the parent to decide." http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0202073032.htm .... In their article, Roy C. Herrenkohl, distinguished university service professor at Lehigh, and M. Jean Russo, a Lehigh research scientist, say evidence points to a strong link between child rearing and early childhood aggression. "Infants and preschoolers whose early socioemotional needs are not appropriately met develop expectations that care is not available and that others cannot be trusted or caring," the researchers say. "Consequently, these children may view themselves as unworthy of such care and become angry in the expectation that their needs will not be met. This sense of deprivation gives rise to frustration and anger. "Overly severe physical discipline in early childhood is one type of violent behavior experienced at a time when the child is learning to interact with the world. The experience of harsh, physical discipline both terrorizes and humiliates the child, adding to the sense of worthlessness and providing a model for coping in social interactions. .... http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/423496 .... Corporal punishment is associated with an increased risk of later violence: peer violence, domestic violence, and suicide are all correlated with parental reliance on corporal punishment. Nevertheless, most American parents spank their children. According to Dr. Howard, 25% of children younger than 6 months old have been spanked, as have 40% of children 6-12 months old. Infants cannot understand the reason that they are being spanked, and spanking interferes with attachment. In contrast, parents who learn how to set firm limits without resorting to violence teach their children a valuable lesson. Parents, in fact, play enormously important roles in modeling how to deal with conflict and frustration. There are a number of nonviolent negative reinforcement techniques, ranging from the "hairy eyeball" to "time out" models, Dr. Howard noted. ... Comments? 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? Nope. Not once, to my knowledge. I did myself at about age 6 though. I simply was asked to make up for it to the druggist, someone we knew, by sweeping his store for a week. I still can't pass a Baby Ruth candy bar without a little shudder. I wasn't spanked. Where they drove home drunk? Nope. My kids were very anti Drugs and alcohol. They still are, in their forties. I had worked, when they were very small, in a drug rehab program. I shared with them. 0:-] Where they vandalized their school? My kids? Nope. They were homeschooled mostly. There are parents who have had those problems, among other very serious problems. Yep, and I'd venture not a consistently non-spanking parent among them. My guess is there are some non-spankers whose children might act out at some point. My other guess is that they handle it pretty well by non-punitive methods, and certainly not with CP. 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. One would have to be pretty stupid not to have ways that made clear what the wanted behavior was. I've known a few parents that stupid. They are ofte referred to as "permissive." I'm not one of those, nor ever was. But nonpunitive techniques can only work properly if the children choose to cooperate. Nope. If you can't figure out how to manage to make cooperation more attractive then I wish you did not have children. 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. Yep. Seems like this is a bit of a challenge. However, what I have seen, quite consistently, is that this is the problem spanking parents have, not non-spanking parents. In fact, spanking itself, so destroys the relationship, that either the child escapes the family and has to work out all the horrors as an adult, or as a teen they really do kick out the jams, and the parent can't hit them any more, or risk a punch in the face. 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. And you can say that punitive methods work more consistently? Really? Where the hell have all these criminals come from? Drug addicts? Mentally Ill? Those things are a rarity in non-spanking families. But an imperfect deterrent can be better than none at all. Are you arguing that non-spanking means doing nothing? 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. We agree. 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. Give us an example. snip Bruising is injury. I'm really not interested in word games. Then don't play them yourself. You have repeatedly done so. 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. A bruise is not an injury? Not according to medical literature. ALL bruises are caused by injury. Though of course not all injuries result in bruises. Grabbing a child and twisting their arm, say until it breaks, might not leave surface visible bruising. 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. Yes. The issue is that even without intent, say as a spanking parent would claim, intent turns out to not be relevant. Failing to judge correctly IS. It would be nice if parents had a magical way of knowing exactly how hard they could spank a child without leaving bruises. Yep. My point exactly. They don't, as you appear to agree, so why using CP at all? But in real life, bruises can be a result of an honest mistake by parents who misjudged how hard they could spank without bruising. You could not argue for my point more successfully. 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. They do, currently. And also in the laws I would propose. The Swedish model that has NO penalties whatsoever. The law is a social sanction against CP, not a fine and lock'em up threat. Although YOUR argument does have some small appeal, when I'm feeling out of patience with underdeveloped in conscience folks that insist on playing word games, and claim 'spanking' is not 'hitting,' and other tricks of mind to fool themselves, apparently. 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. So that would work when you punish your neighbor for mowing down your bed of freshly planted petunias? Sock'm to teach'm and if it breaks his jaw apologise. Sure. That'll work. 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. I have a very important piece of information for you. It's about the human body. If one hits hard enough to 'hurt' then there is an extremely high probability it will leave injury. 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) Why is it an adult who has erred, even up to an including killing others, can not be "spanked" as a punishment, but children can for doing things that actually did no one any harm? and what actually happened (which went beyond what the parents thought their children deserved). Which brings us back to, "why spank if other methods work at least as well?" 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? Are you seriously going to argue that if the offense is serious enought beating a child bloody is acceptable? Well, let's see if you do. 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. Well, I guess you ARE arguing that with a serious enough offense it's appropriate to beat the child until they bleed. Am I mistaking your meaning? 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. The highest incidence of 'spanking' is to those children that can NOT understand why they are being spanking, and certainly are not able to distinguish mistakes from intent. To them it's simply that mommy hits me sometimes. 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. This is always an interesting challenge. But pretty easily answered when one stops the theorizing and get's real. As in the real world. There is more than enough unpleasantness for most kinds of unwanted, antisocial behavior. If you respond, with the very young child, to wanted behavior with energetic attention and meeting needs (this is even how animals do it) you are starting off on the right track. You don't need to set up an artificially concieved pain delivery system. Again and example: If a tiny child hurts you and you inadvertanly yelp out loud, "OUCH!" because of built in instinctually imbedded reactions humans have, you will startle that child and they will have an unpleasant feeling...the one that goes with being startled. That's ALL that needs to happen. You don't have to get a switch and lay into them. They won't have the least idea what is going on, except that you are a dangerous nut and they best start looking for ways to stay safe around you. In fact, the latter activity tends to make nutsos and criminals. Make a child afraid of you and you lay the groundwork for survival skill building...which just by coincidence, happen to be common to criminal behavior. 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. You may "consider" what you wish. I consider it to be fundamental to the problems associated with chosing to hit children and try to call it something else. When I look at the issue, I don't see a line between "spanking" and "abuse." That's right. There isn't any line. 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. Then why chose to use methods that are risky at best, and often not only unsuccessful, but counter productive? 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. At what age does a child "know better?" 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. So if you can't see the injuries it's okay? Black children with darker skin, for instance, don't show bruising as easily...but it is there, medically speaking. 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. I preferred not to experiment on my children. I chose the 'easy way' out. I simply did not hit them as a means of disciplining them. 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. Neither side has a lock on what is complete and accurate. But what I can be absolutely sure of is that CP risks injury, long and short term, that non-CP methods don't. 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. I am completely at sea in trying to figure out what you just said. Can you help me understand it better? 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. Your proof would be? That creates a potential for the category of non-spanking parents to escape responsibility for significant numbers of its less successful outcomes It does? It seems to me that pro spankers keep coming up with projections. They presume all this failure on the part of non-spankers without actually looking at facts. I know hundreds of non-spanking families, some of whom were once spankers, and they consistently have better behaved children with fewer problems of all kinds. Even the former spankers ... in fact especially the former spankers ... report wonderful results from cultivating non-punitive parenting methods. And I don't mean just non CP methods, but turning energetically to NON punishment methods. Showing a child, for instance, who is doing an unwanted behavior what the wanted behavior is is really quite simple and in the best tradition of teaching. 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. Then I cannot help but ask, why use it at all? 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. This last is never a problem for non-spankers, as long as they are not those strange souls who drift from permissiveness to screaming threats. And they are rare indeed among non-spankers. It's more often spankers who do this shifting and bobbing about that create the most mentally disturbed children. 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. I can't disagree with you, and I also can't resist telling you once again this isn't a problem for non-punitive parenting families. 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. Then you haven't read the literature. From researchers to working pediatricians, it's all out there. You only need to come to it without a bias in favor of spanking. A very hard thing to do, apparently. I admire that that can. I recall a poster here as I recall, who went from being a spanker to a non-spanker. It was as though he experienced a different reality. Which of course, he did. Another one tried, and went back to being a spanker. Reading his posts over time and the 'fundy" (not religious, just fundy style thinking) thinking he exhibitied made clear that the non-punitive method he chose was impossible for him to incorporate. I felt very sad about that, though I certainly didn't let him off the hook for it. Sometimes we have to push through our biases and keep working the problem out. 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? The use of spanking IS evidence of a power struggle. And to the child the issue no longer is on the table. Only the pain is. Adults who report on parental use of CP are consistent in reporting this. They can remember the spankings, but they cannot remember the 'lesson' supposedly being taught. They can't remember their "offense," most of the occurances of spanking for it. Often when they DO remember it's because they were older, and because so often the offense didn't warrant the injuries the CP left on body and mind. 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 What am I "like?" puts forth a theoretical model of "how children react to being spanked," It's not theoretical. It's what children, and later adults, have told me. Both personally and in clinical reports and studies. and I know that the model is not an accurate representation of how I reacted to being spanked, The letter I just referred you back to is a case in point. This insightful woman points out that she had to structure her reality to deny her own pain. That's just the tip of the iceberg. Many victims of childhood spanking repeatedly mistake the facts....that are gathered from other families members, including their own siblings who witnessed the spankings. 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. I posted recently, and no, it was just yesterday so YOU can look it up or not as your fancy takes you, a long letter by a women that discussed her reaction to being spanked as a child. Read it. We all have different viewpoints even on things that we both experienced exactly the same. We don't think we did, of course. The reality is that people's personal experiences in their own lives ARE facts. You are presuming a mistaken notion. We find so often that personal experience is so colored by the person that indeed they do NOT conform to the facts. As police investigators who specialize in interviewing victims and witnesses. And when opponents of spanking make a lot of claims that conflict with those facts, it tends to destroy their credibility. No it doesn't. Not if you insist on claims like people's remembered experience being a 'fact.' I think the whole issue is a lot more complex than people on either side give it credit for being. I don't. Not to someone that's made a nearly lifelong study of it. Opponents pay so much attention to situations where spanking doesn't work that they ignore the situations where it does produce useful effects, On the contrary. That's exactly what IS examined. while supporters largely ignore how dangerous spanking can be when parents make mistakes in how they use it or rely on it too much. Not only do they ignore, but they deny in the face of actual injury. 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. So many people are raised with the punitive model for controlling human behavior they are immune to the reality of how social sanctions can and do work. 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. A "resolution?" Explain please. 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. If ever there was a propaganda loaded statement ... "forced to swallow anti-spanking propaganda." I put carefully researched data on this newsgroup, and immediately it's attacked as 'propaganda.' A ploy. By propagandists themselves, who provide nothing in the way of research to support the claims of spanking as being effective. 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. I'm not arguing that we, either of us, be proscribed from debating this issue publicly. 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. No it wouldn't. Where do you get such strange ideas? In fact the very claim YOU make applies to trying to force training to NOT discuss the limitations and dangers of spanking. YOU and those 'like you' have NO proof that spanking is NOT injurious. And none that shows it is effective in any away more than non-CP methods. So I submit that in fact YOU are trying to censor training to represent YOUR propaganda...that spanking is not harmful. Now THAT is zealotry. 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, Then logically you are arguing that spanking is a good thing. You are mincing words. and in some of those situations, spanking can offer advantages over other forms of punishment. Name them. Describe them. Give us examples. But I think it's better if parents (and other caregivers) can find ways to reduce the need for punishment. I'll say. Reduce crime, mental illness, injury, addiction. Yep, I'm with you on that one. 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. Yep. All the laws that "protect" spanking really do is prevent other laws (or other portions of the same laws) from making it illegal. As I said, if it's such a good thing, why do we need laws protecting it? I think the answer is obvious, even using your argument. 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. That was once, and still survives in some very sick ways, stated about blacks and women. They were "different." They weren't, aren't, and neither are children in precisely the way we are arguing about. There is no more reason to believe that the infliction of pain is more reasonable to teach a child than to teach an adult. We KNOW that the infliction of pain can reduce learning. Sometime I'll run across that study again, but it as scientifically proven by direct experimentation on human subjects. (I think that's illegal now). Subjects attempting to learn a task, about as complicated to an adults as handling the glass of milk might be to a child, were subjected to pain, some to more, some to less, some to none. Want to guess how it came out, or does you bias allow it self to be set aside for adults, but remain in place for children. Pain and humiliation are NOT teaching tools that actually do teach the lesson desire. Well, unless one is a fascist and wishes to create more fascists. 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. Not even according to them. Not even according to them. It's a self delusion that they learn, if they can listen objectively to their adult children, was not true. As a result, people who regard themselves as good parents are extremely reluctant to surrender their authority to strangers. I hope you wouldn't argue that "bad parents" are any less willing to surrender authority to anyone. 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. Similar arguments can be presented for laws that deal with bigotry and misogynation. I've seen them. The civil rights movement being a case in point. 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. Your concept falls in on itself by the use of a requirement for 'consensus.' We certainly didn't have concensus about an end to slavery and to prohibitions concerning women's rights. Also, the idea of widespread psychological evaluations would probably be a deal-breaker. I've not argued for that. Nor would I. 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. The model I suggested has no requirement for psychological evaluations. 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, It is. As a parent. What happens when you tell a small child to stop jumping on the furniture? 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? Because children are, the younger they are, more alike in fundamental ways developmentally. They all need pretty much the same access to the invironment and to do the same experiments. Take the one where they repeat a particular movement, over and over again, like gently banging their heels on the couch while sitting watching TV, or reading a book. Even the most careful non-punitive method of intervention is unlikely to succeed in stopping such behavior at a certain age. Nature is driving it. The child needs to keep moving. The building of their circulatory system demands it. 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? Having done it thousands of times? Yes, I'd say so. If the problem is a child's not understanding negatives like "don't," I can see how this could work very well. In fact you have presented the perfect example of just when such replacement WILL work. The response would be, 'honey, don't do that, do this.' But I wouldn't say it that way, on the off chance my momentary mention of the unwanted behavior might be heard more clearly than my offer of the replacement behavior. I'd simply tell a child, say that was badgering me for a snack, "you can eat anything you wish on your section of the bottom shelf of the refridgerator." And of course I'd have anticipated this, as I did when my children were growing, and have those finger foods available for them that I felt most would meet their need. Occasionally I'd try new foods there, and because there was no pressure, and THEY could make a choice between things, they try out new foods. My son got hooked on string beans. But eventually got over that addiction when he discovered cut up potato chunks. Then it was...well, you get the idea. 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? And you can't see that child handing you a tool for teaching? Dear me. I'm stumped. If YOU don't get it from your own example you have to be blocked from seeing my explanation. Should I give up now? Oh ****, I can't resist. The need for attention is the tool built in by nature for strong learning experiences. You will either give that child NEGATIVE attention (which can include ignoring as well as spanking) or you can give them positive attention in the form of teaching wanted behavior. Now, have I oversimplified, or do you see the light coming on over your head? Hell, you yourself claim that other tools beside spanking need to take precedence. Certainly this is one of those. This depiction of children as little bundles of contrary wilfully disobedient creatures seems to be a constant theme in the spanking crowd. Dobson made a bundle writing books about it and how to torture the child into submission. I guess he knew his audience. Kane |
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Teenagers faced with spankings
On 6 Dec 2006 10:30:24 -0800, "0:-" wrote:
And they are rare indeed among non-spankers. It's more often spankers who do this shifting and bobbing about that create the most mentally disturbed children. Why did you say "rare"? daniel mcgrath -- Daniel Gerard McGrath, a/k/a "Govende": for e-mail replace "invalid" with "com" Developmentally disabled; has Autism (Pervasive Developmental Disorder), Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, & periodic bouts of depression. [This signature is under construction.] |
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Teenagers faced with spankings
"Daniel al-Autistiqui" wrote in message ... On 6 Dec 2006 10:30:24 -0800, "0:-" wrote: Faced? |
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Teenagers faced with spankings
Daniel al-Autistiqui wrote: On 6 Dec 2006 10:30:24 -0800, "0:-" wrote: And they are rare indeed among non-spankers. It's more often spankers who do this shifting and bobbing about that create the most mentally disturbed children. Why did you say "rare"? Because it's true. It's spankers that more often have among them parents that are inconsistent. Non-spankers, because they don't have a spanking "backup" tend to remain consistent in the tools they do use. To put it bluntly, it's a superior set of tools. And so easy and pleasant to use, why not do so? My observation. What's yours? Kane daniel mcgrath -- Daniel Gerard McGrath, a/k/a "Govende": for e-mail replace "invalid" with "com" Developmentally disabled; has Autism (Pervasive Developmental Disorder), Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, & periodic bouts of depression. [This signature is under construction.] |
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Teenagers faced with spankings
"0:-" wrote in message ps.com... Nathan A. Barclay wrote: 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. We are in agreement. And here in this newsgroup, aps, I have seen again and again, pro spankers discuss circumstances where they would spank, and demonstrating they have extremely unrealistic expectations of children. The idea that any child, for instance, under the age of 12 or so, would "willfully disobey." It's nonsense. They are following natural imperatives to explore the universe. All an aware parent needs to do is learn how to question and investigate and when the parent has figured out (even if wrong) some probable natural imperative the child is reacting to, simply show them how to get their appropriately. Wanted behavior replacing unwanted behavior. This isn't rocket science, and no child with parents that can figure this out is "spanked." It's too damned obvious to a parent that can think, and is compassionate (even in the absence of exact evidence) that the child does not need spanking to learn. My personal experience from when I was a child proves beyond any possible doubt that you are wrong about this. Sometimes children simply decide that something that they've been told not to do is enough fun that they want to do it anyhow. Granted, if parents take enough time, they can often find a way to redirect the children's choices by offering them something that's almost as much fun, or maybe even more fun, that they wouldn't have to feel guilty about doing. But that doesn't mean the children's disobedience isn't willful. When I read your claim, I started thinking back trying to find the first occasions when I can be absolutely sure that I willfully disobeyed my parents - where I knew I wasn't allowed to do something but made a deliberate choice to do it anyhow. I can come up with two situations when I was no older than six, and possibly younger. (I know I couldn't have been older because we moved to a different house when I was six, but beyond that, I have no way of pinpointing my age.) One situation involved playing with the shower curtain in a way that had the bottom of the curtain in the tub but had it draped over the side hanging over the outside so my younger brother and I could put water in the part of the curtain where it sagged over the outside. (It's kind of hard to explain.) My brother and I had been told repeatedly not to do it because my parents were afraid we'd break the shower curtain. But I couldn't figure out how what we were doing could break it, and I knew I was being too careful to spill water outside the tub, so I wasn't inclined to give up my fun and obey my parents. As it turned out, the shower curtain did break, and my brother and I got in trouble. (The flaw in my reasoning was that I didn't even begin to comprehend that the place that would break was where the curtain was held up by hooks through holes, far above my head. Now I can recognize that the stress on the holes was vastly greater than the stress on the part I was paying attention to as a little kid.) The other early occasion I remember involved vitamin pills. We didn't generally have candy around, but chewable vitamin pills tasted good, and there were times when I snuck extra ones even though I knew I wasn't supposed to. I'll strongly agree that a lot of things young children do are caused by things other than willful disobedience. Sometimes they don't even understand that they are doing something wrong. Other times, they forget about rules they are supposed to obey - especially if they get carried away with what they are doing. But the idea that children have to be around age 12 before they are capable of making willful choices to disobey is completely preposterous. 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? I'm unable to find in your posts, other than by allusion, what the two extremes are. I can presume that beating is at one extreme, and not spanking at all, is at the other. Merely choosing not to spank is not, in my view, an extreme position. The people I regard as genuine extremists are people who refuse to accept any possibility that spanking can ever be a useful tool - who refuse to accept a possibility that their own opinion regarding spanking might not be entirely on target. And that is especially true when such people seek to use government power to push or force their view that spanking is always, inherently harmful onto others. Similarly, I regard people who believe it's impossible to rear children successfully without ever spanking them as extremists on the other side - albeit a different kind of extremists from those who take the severity of the spankings to extremes. What will happen if you don't spank? What happens if parents don't spank depends a lot on the children and on what the parents do in the way of alternatives. There seem to be quite a few families that can do fine without spanking. But that doesn't mean that all families would do equally well without it. Nor, for that matter, does the fact that a family can do fine without spanking serve as proof that the family wouldn't have done better with it if the parents used spanking in a careful way. The whole issue is extremely complex. 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. That's okay. 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. Not a problem. Don't go getting all huffy on me. I can't see where threatening to leave is a very effective response. Not a threat, and not getting huffy. Just a statement of fact. I looked in on the newsgroup thinking if Chris Dugan was still active here (which he no longer seems to be), I'd ask him a question about the current state of research. In the process, I stumbled across your question about the line between a "hard spanking" and abuse, and I figured I'd offer an answer. But I really don't need to be putting a lot of time into a discussion here. I appreciate your reposting the information so I can look at it without having to go on a hunt. I might just forget you and let you go, unless you wish to make a commitment to carry through on your commentary, arguments, and claims. 0:-] Popping in and out is Troll behavior. Tsk. Popping in and out can also be a result of a person's having more interest in a subject than he has (or is willing to take) time to discuss it. But, sigh I'm a sucker for a good argument, got one? Here's what you asked for. I posted this just yesterday, in fact, and it refers, at the beginning, to a prior post of mine in April of this year. I posted the following in April of this year. From: 0:- - view profile Date: Sun, Apr 16 2006 10:44 am Email: "0:-" Groups: alt.parenting.spanking Not yet rated Rating: show options Reply | Reply to Author | Forward | Print | Individual Message | Show original | Remove | Report Abuse | Find messages by this author http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1114110820.htm " ... The researchers found differences in how often mothers used physical discipline and the mothers' perceptions of how often other parents used physical discipline. Specifically: * Mothers in Thailand were least likely to physically discipline their children, followed by mothers in China, the Philippines, Italy, India, and Kenya, with mothers in Kenya most likely to physically discipline their children. * More frequent use of physical discipline was less strongly associated with child aggression and anxiety when it was perceived as being more culturally accepted, but physical discipline was also associated with more aggression and anxiety regardless of the perception of cultural acceptance. * In countries in which physical discipline was more common and culturally accepted, children who were physically disciplined were less aggressive and less anxious than children who were physically disciplined in countries where physical discipline was rarely used. * In all countries, however, higher use of physical discipline was associated with more child aggression and anxiety. ... " Those last sentences pretty much says it all for the argument that where cultures accept more CP it doesn't result in aberrent reactions in children. I think you are reading too much into the words "associated with." Statistical associations can be a result of inherent cause-and-effect relationships, or of cause-and-effect relationships that occur only some of the time, or of having the same factors that can cause one thing also be able to cause another. There can even be other, even more complex interrelationships. It would take a lot of additional (and much deeper) research to make a scientifically sound determination of which is actually the case. From my experience with teachers when I was in school, I would expect major links between spanking and insecurity to show up in cases where parents (or teachers) are so strict that children routinely worry that they might accidentally do something that gets them in trouble. The problem would be even worse if parents have unrealistic expectations, thereby making it essentially impossible for the children to reliably stay out of trouble even when they are trying to behave, or if parents have a hair trigger that almost anything can set off when they are in a bad mood. On the other hand, if children feel comfortable that they won't get in trouble as long as they are trying to behave, the only time the prospect of spanking would give them a reason to feel insecure is when they are doing or have recently done something they know was wrong. Now consider what happens if you average those scenarios together without trying to distinguish between them. Such an average gives you a causal link between spanking and insecurity even though the link is a serious problem only in certain types of situations. So I don't see any reason for parents to worry about creating excessive insecurity as long as they try to give their children the benefit of a reasonable number of reasonable doubts. By the way, in the long term, too much security can be at least as dangerous to children as not enough. If children's actions don't ever have consequences, how are children supposed to learn to think before they act? The next is a smaller study on the use of aggressively harsh CP to preschool aged children. I've seen posters defend the use of such methods as being "up to the parent to decide." snip In my view, if parents resort to harsh punishments of children that young, something is almost certainly very seriously wrong. My likely suspects are that either the parents' expectations are unreasonable, or the parents' expectations are so unclear or inconsistent that the children can't figure out how they need to behave to stay out of trouble. Either way, spanking harder isn't going to solve the problem. I've long thought that the limits on the severity of corporal punishment ought to depend on what a child is being punished for. Parents should have relatively wide latitude in how they punish behavior that they can reasonably view as exceptionally serious, assuming their children are old enough to understand how serious the behavior is. But giving parents the same latitude when a four-year-old spills a glass of milk is absurd. http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/423496 ... Corporal punishment is associated with an increased risk of later violence: peer violence, domestic violence, and suicide are all correlated with parental reliance on corporal punishment. Nevertheless, most American parents spank their children. According to Dr. Howard, 25% of children younger than 6 months old have been spanked, as have 40% of children 6-12 months old. Infants cannot understand the reason that they are being spanked, and spanking interferes with attachment. In contrast, parents who learn how to set firm limits without resorting to violence teach their children a valuable lesson. Parents, in fact, play enormously important roles in modeling how to deal with conflict and frustration. There are a number of nonviolent negative reinforcement techniques, ranging from the "hairy eyeball" to "time out" models, Dr. Howard noted. ... Comments? It never ceases to amaze me how badly parents can misuse spanking. The irony is that the more I know about how badly a lot of parents misuse spanking, the harder it is for me to accept correlations between spanking and adverse outcomes as evidence that ALL uses of spanking are counterproductive. There is simply too much room for the bad parents to be dragging down the average. 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. Before I go on, I'll point out that you used the word "punitive" here. Since you did, I wrote my response talking about punishment in general, not specifically about spanking. But some pieces of your response to what I wrote look as if you're assuming I used "punish" as a synonym for "spank." I know a lot of people seem to think as if spanking were the only punishment that really counts. But I try to be careful to use "spank" when I am talking specifically about spanking, and use "punish" when the arguments I am writing apply to punishments in general rather than only to spanking. In many cases, I shift from talking specifically about spanking to talking about punishment in general because I believe the same or very similar issues also apply to other forms of punishment. That being the case, it is important to keep an eye on which term I am using at any given time. The reason why I made the shift to talking about punishment in general in this case is that arguments against "punitive" parenting styles are only arguments against spanking in situations where there is a practical, genuinely nonpunitive alternative to spanking. To the extent that some kind of punishment is sometimes necessary, a completely nonpunitive parenting style is no longer an option. Therefore, the choice in those particular situations is not between nonpunitive parenting and spanking, but is merely between spanking and some other form of punishment. Good for you. Have you had problems where your children shoplifted repeatedly? Nope. Not once, to my knowledge. I did myself at about age 6 though. I simply was asked to make up for it to the druggist, someone we knew, by sweeping his store for a week. I still can't pass a Baby Ruth candy bar without a little shudder. I wasn't spanked. No, you were punished in a different way. But what happened to you was a far cry from "dispensed with in a few minutes." In fact, I strongly suspect that more than a few kids would choose a spanking over having to sweep up for a week. I agree with you that it's good when parents can find ways to solve problems without resorting to threats and punishments. But that doesn't mean nonpunitive techniques are always sufficient. Where they drove home drunk? Nope. My kids were very anti Drugs and alcohol. They still are, in their forties. I had worked, when they were very small, in a drug rehab program. I shared with them. 0:-] Where they vandalized their school? My kids? Nope. They were homeschooled mostly. There are parents who have had those problems, among other very serious problems. Yep, and I'd venture not a consistently non-spanking parent among them. How many seriously bad parents in our society choose to be consistently non-spanking parents? There is a huge problem of self-selection bias in trying to compare spanking parents with non-spanking parents in current-day America, and if any study has even come close to doing an adequate job of controlling for that problem, I'm not aware of it. My guess is there are some non-spankers whose children might act out at some point. My other guess is that they handle it pretty well by non-punitive methods, and certainly not with CP. My guess is that a lot of parents who start off planning not to spank change their minds because they aren't happy with the results they get without spanking. The ones that stay non-spankers tend to be the ones who have better-than-average success with alternatives, either because they have better parenting skills and are willing to put more effort into making alternatives work, or because their children are more naturally cooperative. The ones that change their minds and start spanking are probably disproportionately likely to be bad parents no matter whether they spank or not. If this guess is right, it throws the results of studies on the subject way out of kilter - especially in regard to what we could expect if we banned spanking. 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. One would have to be pretty stupid not to have ways that made clear what the wanted behavior was. I've known a few parents that stupid. They are ofte referred to as "permissive." I'm not one of those, nor ever was. But nonpunitive techniques can only work properly if the children choose to cooperate. Nope. If you can't figure out how to manage to make cooperation more attractive then I wish you did not have children. So how would you deal with a case of repeated shoplifting in a genuinely nonpunitive way? 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. Yep. Seems like this is a bit of a challenge. However, what I have seen, quite consistently, is that this is the problem spanking parents have, not non-spanking parents. Probably because the non-spanking parents you know do punish their children in ways other than spanking if the situation gets serious enough. In fact, spanking itself, so destroys the relationship, that either the child escapes the family and has to work out all the horrors as an adult, or as a teen they really do kick out the jams, and the parent can't hit them any more, or risk a punch in the face. You seem to write as if you think all parents who spank are the same. They aren't. When parents do their job properly, they stop relying on "I'm bigger than you" as the primary basis for their authority when their children are young, and start building a different foundation by earning their children's trust and respect. To the extent that the parents continue to punish their children sometimes, the children understand that there are reasons behind their parents' expectations, and that the expectations are not just arbitrary bullying of someone bigger over someone smaller. The children might not always agree with the parents' reasons, but they can at least respect the fact that their parents are trying to do what they believe is right. So when the children are too big for the parents to use physical force to enforce a punishment, the parent-child relationship still has a solid foundation under it. The kind of disaster scenario you're painting here sounds more like what I would expect if parents don't make the transition - if parents keep trying to rely on physical power as the foundation for their authority without ever earning their children's trust and respect. Or, worse, if the parents use their authority in ways their children view as fundamentally unfair, and perhaps as not even making much effort to be fair. In that kind of situation, spanking can maintain a limited amount of control for however long the kids are small enough to be spanked. But when the kids get too big, the whole situation can easily fall apart because there isn't really anything else to hold it together. You mention having worked in a drug rehab program. I suspect that your view of spanking may be colored by having been exposed far more to the worst outcomes from parents who spanked than from the best. 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. And you can say that punitive methods work more consistently? Really? It's not either/or. Parents can use nonpunitive methods most of the time but keep punishment available as an option for situations where nonpunitive methods aren't working. Where the hell have all these criminals come from? Drug addicts? Mentally Ill? Those things are a rarity in non-spanking families. They are also a rarity in spanking families where the parents have a strong, generally positive relationship with their children, are they not? I recognize that there is a subset of spanking parents whose abusive, extremely negative, and/or neglectful parenting styles give rise to a huge proportion of society's problems. But blaming the entire category of spanking parents for the problems those parents create is both unfair and logically unsound. But an imperfect deterrent can be better than none at all. Are you arguing that non-spanking means doing nothing? No. There are all sorts of other punishments that parents could use instead. But they would have the same "when the parent is not actually supervising" problem that spanking does, wouldn't they? In fact, some, such as grounding, can be even more problematical because the child can violate the terms of the punishment if the parent isn't willing or able to supervise closely. Threats and punishments should NEVER be used as a replacement for teaching. We agree. 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. Give us an example. How about the situation where you shoplifted? Should you not have been punished for that? snip Bruising is injury. I'm really not interested in word games. Then don't play them yourself. You have repeatedly done so. 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. A bruise is not an injury? Not according to medical literature. ALL bruises are caused by injury. Though of course not all injuries result in bruises. Grabbing a child and twisting their arm, say until it breaks, might not leave surface visible bruising. My point is that calling a bruise a bruise is the most accurate and precise way to talk about it. Substituting a different word loses precision, so I can't see any reason why you would do it unless you're playing a word game trying to use connotations attached to the word "injury" to make bruises sound worse than they are. 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. Yes. The issue is that even without intent, say as a spanking parent would claim, intent turns out to not be relevant. Failing to judge correctly IS. It would be nice if parents had a magical way of knowing exactly how hard they could spank a child without leaving bruises. Yep. My point exactly. They don't, as you appear to agree, so why using CP at all? Either because they're going to leave enough safety margin between how hard they spank and how hard a spanking they think would be likely to leave bruises that the risk is probably trivial, or because they think the child's behavior was serious enough that leaving bruises wouldn't be a terrible tragedy. Granted, bruising is technically classified as an injury, but it is such a common and minor sort of injury that it would be irrational to regard it as a horrible disaster. A number of minor injuries can add up to a major issue if parents spank hard enough to leave bruises on anything resembling a regular basis. But as long as parents recognize that they've spanked too hard if they end up leaving bruises and don't spank as hard in the future, and as long as parents don't start off swinging hard with an implement that's significantly heavier than anything they've used before, I'd be a whole lot more worried about the danger of football injuries than about the danger of injuries from spanking. But in real life, bruises can be a result of an honest mistake by parents who misjudged how hard they could spank without bruising. You could not argue for my point more successfully. 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. They do, currently. And also in the laws I would propose. The Swedish model that has NO penalties whatsoever. The law is a social sanction against CP, not a fine and lock'em up threat. Although YOUR argument does have some small appeal, when I'm feeling out of patience with underdeveloped in conscience folks that insist on playing word games, and claim 'spanking' is not 'hitting,' and other tricks of mind to fool themselves, apparently. I don't care much for the "spanking isn't hitting" word game myself. On the other hand, I don't much like the "substitute the word 'hit' for the word 'spank'" word game either. One gane tries to make spanking sound less serious than it is, while the other tries to obfuscate the difference in purpose betwee-n spanking and other forms of hitting. (On the other hand, if parents spank because they got angry and lost their tempers, I regard the word "hit" as entirely appropriate because their inability to control their tempers raises serious doubts about their purpose.) 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. So that would work when you punish your neighbor for mowing down your bed of freshly planted petunias? Sock'm to teach'm and if it breaks his jaw apologise. Sure. That'll work. It would work to the extent of letting my neighbor know that I didn't think what he did was so bad that he deserved a broken jaw, which is the point I was addressing. My point wasn't that an apology would make bruises cause less physical pain, or guarantee that the child won't be angry or upset over having been spanked so hard. My point was that an apology would address the problem of children's thinking they deserved to be spanked hard enough to leave bruises. Beyond that, I'll point out that you're cheating in the design of your analogy. What I would be doing in your analogy would be illegal even if I didn't break my neighbor's jaw. In order for the analogy to be valid, there would have to be a law that people whose petunias are mowed down are allowed to slug the person who mowed them. Also, the difference between breaking someone's jaw and just hitting someone in the jaw is at least an order of magnitude larger than the difference between spanking hard enough to cause a bit of bruising and just spanking hard. 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. I have a very important piece of information for you. It's about the human body. If one hits hard enough to 'hurt' then there is an extremely high probability it will leave injury. I think you're seriously overstating the danger here, unless maybe you're trying to define reddening of the skin as an injury. The reason why the buttocks are the current location of choice for corporal punishment is that they have enough padding to allow a fair amount of pain without causing injury. I don't remember whether I ever checked whether my bottom was bruised after I got spanked or paddled as a child, but I don't remember any cases where it hurt to sit for more than a very brief period right after the spanking - or hurt much to sit even then. (I won't make any claims regarding what might have happened before I was old enough to remember.) That's not to say that I would expect it to be difficult to spank hard enough to cause welts or bruises - especially spanking a toddler or using an implement that's heavy relative to a child's age. But I don't think the safety margin is normally as paper thin as you make it sound. 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) Why is it an adult who has erred, even up to an including killing others, can not be "spanked" as a punishment, but children can for doing things that actually did no one any harm? Because the kinds of spankings normally used on children wouldn't be severe enough to make much difference on adult crimes. Personally, I'd rather get a paddling like I got in school than have to pay a fine for a speeding ticket. Which is why it makes sense to require me to pay the fine instead of paddling me. I think there are some situations where it would make sense to offer adult criminals an option of choosing corporal punishment - especially if a fine, jail time, or community service would end up hurting the person's family. But the kinds of corporal punishment that would be needed would be severe enough that a lot of people would have an emotional reaction of rejecting them as too "cruel." Unfortunately, it's a lot easier to empathize with a beating than it is to empathize with the cumulative effect of spending months in prison, and that difference in empathy skews our judgment regarding the relative cruelty of a beating versus a few months in jail. (The same basic problem, on a smaller scale, can cause people to misjudge spanking to be a lot more cruel than grounding.) --- I'm going to split the rest into a separate message because this post is already very long and your next question is important enough I don't want it to get lost. |
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Teenagers faced with spankings
Daniel al-Autistiqui wrote: Why did you say "rare"? Why did ***you*** say 'rare'? |
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Teenagers faced with spankings
Nathan A. Barclay wrote: "0:-" wrote in message ps.com... Nathan A. Barclay wrote: 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. We are in agreement. And here in this newsgroup, aps, I have seen again and again, pro spankers discuss circumstances where they would spank, and demonstrating they have extremely unrealistic expectations of children. The idea that any child, for instance, under the age of 12 or so, would "willfully disobey." It's nonsense. They are following natural imperatives to explore the universe. All an aware parent needs to do is learn how to question and investigate and when the parent has figured out (even if wrong) some probable natural imperative the child is reacting to, simply show them how to get their appropriately. Wanted behavior replacing unwanted behavior. This isn't rocket science, and no child with parents that can figure this out is "spanked." It's too damned obvious to a parent that can think, and is compassionate (even in the absence of exact evidence) that the child does not need spanking to learn. My personal experience from when I was a child proves beyond any possible doubt that you are wrong about this. It appears we are off to a bad start. Are you sure that your personal experience is not in conflict with facts from other sources? And the personal experience, in fact, should be the only arbiter of 'the truth?" Hey, despite my education in the field and 50 years of examining this and my experience throughout that time, much of it professional as well as personal, I would not offer such a blanket statement as that. There is always the possibility I've been wrong...why, back in 75 I can recall that I was...well, that's a long story. Want to start over? Start with my statement you follow your claim with. Thanks. Kane Sometimes children simply decide that something that they've been told not to do is enough fun that they want to do it anyhow. Granted, if parents take enough time, they can often find a way to redirect the children's choices by offering them something that's almost as much fun, or maybe even more fun, that they wouldn't have to feel guilty about doing. But that doesn't mean the children's disobedience isn't willful. When I read your claim, I started thinking back trying to find the first occasions when I can be absolutely sure that I willfully disobeyed my parents - where I knew I wasn't allowed to do something but made a deliberate choice to do it anyhow. I can come up with two situations when I was no older than six, and possibly younger. (I know I couldn't have been older because we moved to a different house when I was six, but beyond that, I have no way of pinpointing my age.) One situation involved playing with the shower curtain in a way that had the bottom of the curtain in the tub but had it draped over the side hanging over the outside so my younger brother and I could put water in the part of the curtain where it sagged over the outside. (It's kind of hard to explain.) My brother and I had been told repeatedly not to do it because my parents were afraid we'd break the shower curtain. But I couldn't figure out how what we were doing could break it, and I knew I was being too careful to spill water outside the tub, so I wasn't inclined to give up my fun and obey my parents. As it turned out, the shower curtain did break, and my brother and I got in trouble. (The flaw in my reasoning was that I didn't even begin to comprehend that the place that would break was where the curtain was held up by hooks through holes, far above my head. Now I can recognize that the stress on the holes was vastly greater than the stress on the part I was paying attention to as a little kid.) The other early occasion I remember involved vitamin pills. We didn't generally have candy around, but chewable vitamin pills tasted good, and there were times when I snuck extra ones even though I knew I wasn't supposed to. I'll strongly agree that a lot of things young children do are caused by things other than willful disobedience. Sometimes they don't even understand that they are doing something wrong. Other times, they forget about rules they are supposed to obey - especially if they get carried away with what they are doing. But the idea that children have to be around age 12 before they are capable of making willful choices to disobey is completely preposterous. 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? I'm unable to find in your posts, other than by allusion, what the two extremes are. I can presume that beating is at one extreme, and not spanking at all, is at the other. Merely choosing not to spank is not, in my view, an extreme position. The people I regard as genuine extremists are people who refuse to accept any possibility that spanking can ever be a useful tool - who refuse to accept a possibility that their own opinion regarding spanking might not be entirely on target. And that is especially true when such people seek to use government power to push or force their view that spanking is always, inherently harmful onto others. Similarly, I regard people who believe it's impossible to rear children successfully without ever spanking them as extremists on the other side - albeit a different kind of extremists from those who take the severity of the spankings to extremes. What will happen if you don't spank? What happens if parents don't spank depends a lot on the children and on what the parents do in the way of alternatives. There seem to be quite a few families that can do fine without spanking. But that doesn't mean that all families would do equally well without it. Nor, for that matter, does the fact that a family can do fine without spanking serve as proof that the family wouldn't have done better with it if the parents used spanking in a careful way. The whole issue is extremely complex. 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. That's okay. 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. Not a problem. Don't go getting all huffy on me. I can't see where threatening to leave is a very effective response. Not a threat, and not getting huffy. Just a statement of fact. I looked in on the newsgroup thinking if Chris Dugan was still active here (which he no longer seems to be), I'd ask him a question about the current state of research. In the process, I stumbled across your question about the line between a "hard spanking" and abuse, and I figured I'd offer an answer. But I really don't need to be putting a lot of time into a discussion here. I appreciate your reposting the information so I can look at it without having to go on a hunt. I might just forget you and let you go, unless you wish to make a commitment to carry through on your commentary, arguments, and claims. 0:-] Popping in and out is Troll behavior. Tsk. Popping in and out can also be a result of a person's having more interest in a subject than he has (or is willing to take) time to discuss it. But, sigh I'm a sucker for a good argument, got one? Here's what you asked for. I posted this just yesterday, in fact, and it refers, at the beginning, to a prior post of mine in April of this year. I posted the following in April of this year. From: 0:- - view profile Date: Sun, Apr 16 2006 10:44 am Email: "0:-" Groups: alt.parenting.spanking Not yet rated Rating: show options Reply | Reply to Author | Forward | Print | Individual Message | Show original | Remove | Report Abuse | Find messages by this author http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1114110820.htm " ... The researchers found differences in how often mothers used physical discipline and the mothers' perceptions of how often other parents used physical discipline. Specifically: * Mothers in Thailand were least likely to physically discipline their children, followed by mothers in China, the Philippines, Italy, India, and Kenya, with mothers in Kenya most likely to physically discipline their children. * More frequent use of physical discipline was less strongly associated with child aggression and anxiety when it was perceived as being more culturally accepted, but physical discipline was also associated with more aggression and anxiety regardless of the perception of cultural acceptance. * In countries in which physical discipline was more common and culturally accepted, children who were physically disciplined were less aggressive and less anxious than children who were physically disciplined in countries where physical discipline was rarely used. * In all countries, however, higher use of physical discipline was associated with more child aggression and anxiety. ... " Those last sentences pretty much says it all for the argument that where cultures accept more CP it doesn't result in aberrent reactions in children. I think you are reading too much into the words "associated with." Statistical associations can be a result of inherent cause-and-effect relationships, or of cause-and-effect relationships that occur only some of the time, or of having the same factors that can cause one thing also be able to cause another. There can even be other, even more complex interrelationships. It would take a lot of additional (and much deeper) research to make a scientifically sound determination of which is actually the case. From my experience with teachers when I was in school, I would expect major links between spanking and insecurity to show up in cases where parents (or teachers) are so strict that children routinely worry that they might accidentally do something that gets them in trouble. The problem would be even worse if parents have unrealistic expectations, thereby making it essentially impossible for the children to reliably stay out of trouble even when they are trying to behave, or if parents have a hair trigger that almost anything can set off when they are in a bad mood. On the other hand, if children feel comfortable that they won't get in trouble as long as they are trying to behave, the only time the prospect of spanking would give them a reason to feel insecure is when they are doing or have recently done something they know was wrong. Now consider what happens if you average those scenarios together without trying to distinguish between them. Such an average gives you a causal link between spanking and insecurity even though the link is a serious problem only in certain types of situations. So I don't see any reason for parents to worry about creating excessive insecurity as long as they try to give their children the benefit of a reasonable number of reasonable doubts. By the way, in the long term, too much security can be at least as dangerous to children as not enough. If children's actions don't ever have consequences, how are children supposed to learn to think before they act? The next is a smaller study on the use of aggressively harsh CP to preschool aged children. I've seen posters defend the use of such methods as being "up to the parent to decide." snip In my view, if parents resort to harsh punishments of children that young, something is almost certainly very seriously wrong. My likely suspects are that either the parents' expectations are unreasonable, or the parents' expectations are so unclear or inconsistent that the children can't figure out how they need to behave to stay out of trouble. Either way, spanking harder isn't going to solve the problem. I've long thought that the limits on the severity of corporal punishment ought to depend on what a child is being punished for. Parents should have relatively wide latitude in how they punish behavior that they can reasonably view as exceptionally serious, assuming their children are old enough to understand how serious the behavior is. But giving parents the same latitude when a four-year-old spills a glass of milk is absurd. http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/423496 ... Corporal punishment is associated with an increased risk of later violence: peer violence, domestic violence, and suicide are all correlated with parental reliance on corporal punishment. Nevertheless, most American parents spank their children. According to Dr. Howard, 25% of children younger than 6 months old have been spanked, as have 40% of children 6-12 months old. Infants cannot understand the reason that they are being spanked, and spanking interferes with attachment. In contrast, parents who learn how to set firm limits without resorting to violence teach their children a valuable lesson. Parents, in fact, play enormously important roles in modeling how to deal with conflict and frustration. There are a number of nonviolent negative reinforcement techniques, ranging from the "hairy eyeball" to "time out" models, Dr. Howard noted. ... Comments? It never ceases to amaze me how badly parents can misuse spanking. The irony is that the more I know about how badly a lot of parents misuse spanking, the harder it is for me to accept correlations between spanking and adverse outcomes as evidence that ALL uses of spanking are counterproductive. There is simply too much room for the bad parents to be dragging down the average. 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. Before I go on, I'll point out that you used the word "punitive" here. Since you did, I wrote my response talking about punishment in general, not specifically about spanking. But some pieces of your response to what I wrote look as if you're assuming I used "punish" as a synonym for "spank." I know a lot of people seem to think as if spanking were the only punishment that really counts. But I try to be careful to use "spank" when I am talking specifically about spanking, and use "punish" when the arguments I am writing apply to punishments in general rather than only to spanking. In many cases, I shift from talking specifically about spanking to talking about punishment in general because I believe the same or very similar issues also apply to other forms of punishment. That being the case, it is important to keep an eye on which term I am using at any given time. The reason why I made the shift to talking about punishment in general in this case is that arguments against "punitive" parenting styles are only arguments against spanking in situations where there is a practical, genuinely nonpunitive alternative to spanking. To the extent that some kind of punishment is sometimes necessary, a completely nonpunitive parenting style is no longer an option. Therefore, the choice in those particular situations is not between nonpunitive parenting and spanking, but is merely between spanking and some other form of punishment. Good for you. Have you had problems where your children shoplifted repeatedly? Nope. Not once, to my knowledge. I did myself at about age 6 though. I simply was asked to make up for it to the druggist, someone we knew, by sweeping his store for a week. I still can't pass a Baby Ruth candy bar without a little shudder. I wasn't spanked. No, you were punished in a different way. But what happened to you was a far cry from "dispensed with in a few minutes." In fact, I strongly suspect that more than a few kids would choose a spanking over having to sweep up for a week. I agree with you that it's good when parents can find ways to solve problems without resorting to threats and punishments. But that doesn't mean nonpunitive techniques are always sufficient. Where they drove home drunk? Nope. My kids were very anti Drugs and alcohol. They still are, in their forties. I had worked, when they were very small, in a drug rehab program. I shared with them. 0:-] Where they vandalized their school? My kids? Nope. They were homeschooled mostly. There are parents who have had those problems, among other very serious problems. Yep, and I'd venture not a consistently non-spanking parent among them. How many seriously bad parents in our society choose to be consistently non-spanking parents? There is a huge problem of self-selection bias in trying to compare spanking parents with non-spanking parents in current-day America, and if any study has even come close to doing an adequate job of controlling for that problem, I'm not aware of it. My guess is there are some non-spankers whose children might act out at some point. My other guess is that they handle it pretty well by non-punitive methods, and certainly not with CP. My guess is that a lot of parents who start off planning not to spank change their minds because they aren't happy with the results they get without spanking. The ones that stay non-spankers tend to be the ones who have better-than-average success with alternatives, either because they have better parenting skills and are willing to put more effort into making alternatives work, or because their children are more naturally cooperative. The ones that change their minds and start spanking are probably disproportionately likely to be bad parents no matter whether they spank or not. If this guess is right, it throws the results of studies on the subject way out of kilter - especially in regard to what we could expect if we banned spanking. 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. One would have to be pretty stupid not to have ways that made clear what the wanted behavior was. I've known a few parents that stupid. They are ofte referred to as "permissive." I'm not one of those, nor ever was. But nonpunitive techniques can only work properly if the children choose to cooperate. Nope. If you can't figure out how to manage to make cooperation more attractive then I wish you did not have children. So how would you deal with a case of repeated shoplifting in a genuinely nonpunitive way? 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. Yep. Seems like this is a bit of a challenge. However, what I have seen, quite consistently, is that this is the problem spanking parents have, not non-spanking parents. Probably because the non-spanking parents you know do punish their children in ways other than spanking if the situation gets serious enough. In fact, spanking itself, so destroys the relationship, that either the child escapes the family and has to work out all the horrors as an adult, or as a teen they really do kick out the jams, and the parent can't hit them any more, or risk a punch in the face. You seem to write as if you think all parents who spank are the same. They aren't. When parents do their job properly, they stop relying on "I'm bigger than you" as the primary basis for their authority when their children are young, and start building a different foundation by earning their children's trust and respect. To the extent that the parents continue to punish their children sometimes, the children understand that there are reasons behind their parents' expectations, and that the expectations are not just arbitrary bullying of someone bigger over someone smaller. The children might not always agree with the parents' reasons, but they can at least respect the fact that their parents are trying to do what they believe is right. So when the children are too big for the parents to use physical force to enforce a punishment, the parent-child relationship still has a solid foundation under it. The kind of disaster scenario you're painting here sounds more like what I would expect if parents don't make the transition - if parents keep trying to rely on physical power as the foundation for their authority without ever earning their children's trust and respect. Or, worse, if the parents use their authority in ways their children view as fundamentally unfair, and perhaps as not even making much effort to be fair. In that kind of situation, spanking can maintain a limited amount of control for however long the kids are small enough to be spanked. But when the kids get too big, the whole situation can easily fall apart because there isn't really anything else to hold it together. You mention having worked in a drug rehab program. I suspect that your view of spanking may be colored by having been exposed far more to the worst outcomes from parents who spanked than from the best. 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. And you can say that punitive methods work more consistently? Really? It's not either/or. Parents can use nonpunitive methods most of the time but keep punishment available as an option for situations where nonpunitive methods aren't working. Where the hell have all these criminals come from? Drug addicts? Mentally Ill? Those things are a rarity in non-spanking families. They are also a rarity in spanking families where the parents have a strong, generally positive relationship with their children, are they not? I recognize that there is a subset of spanking parents whose abusive, extremely negative, and/or neglectful parenting styles give rise to a huge proportion of society's problems. But blaming the entire category of spanking parents for the problems those parents create is both unfair and logically unsound. But an imperfect deterrent can be better than none at all. Are you arguing that non-spanking means doing nothing? No. There are all sorts of other punishments that parents could use instead. But they would have the same "when the parent is not actually supervising" problem that spanking does, wouldn't they? In fact, some, such as grounding, can be even more problematical because the child can violate the terms of the punishment if the parent isn't willing or able to supervise closely. Threats and punishments should NEVER be used as a replacement for teaching. We agree. 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. Give us an example. How about the situation where you shoplifted? Should you not have been punished for that? snip Bruising is injury. I'm really not interested in word games. Then don't play them yourself. You have repeatedly done so. 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. A bruise is not an injury? Not according to medical literature. ALL bruises are caused by injury. Though of course not all injuries result in bruises. Grabbing a child and twisting their arm, say until it breaks, might not leave surface visible bruising. My point is that calling a bruise a bruise is the most accurate and precise way to talk about it. Substituting a different word loses precision, so I can't see any reason why you would do it unless you're playing a word game trying to use connotations attached to the word "injury" to make bruises sound worse than they are. 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. Yes. The issue is that even without intent, say as a spanking parent would claim, intent turns out to not be relevant. Failing to judge correctly IS. It would be nice if parents had a magical way of knowing exactly how hard they could spank a child without leaving bruises. Yep. My point exactly. They don't, as you appear to agree, so why using CP at all? Either because they're going to leave enough safety margin between how hard they spank and how hard a spanking they think would be likely to leave bruises that the risk is probably trivial, or because they think the child's behavior was serious enough that leaving bruises wouldn't be a terrible tragedy. Granted, bruising is technically classified as an injury, but it is such a common and minor sort of injury that it would be irrational to regard it as a horrible disaster. A number of minor injuries can add up to a major issue if parents spank hard enough to leave bruises on anything resembling a regular basis. But as long as parents recognize that they've spanked too hard if they end up leaving bruises and don't spank as hard in the future, and as long as parents don't start off swinging hard with an implement that's significantly heavier than anything they've used before, I'd be a whole lot more worried about the danger of football injuries than about the danger of injuries from spanking. But in real life, bruises can be a result of an honest mistake by parents who misjudged how hard they could spank without bruising. You could not argue for my point more successfully. 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. They do, currently. And also in the laws I would propose. The Swedish model that has NO penalties whatsoever. The law is a social sanction against CP, not a fine and lock'em up threat. Although YOUR argument does have some small appeal, when I'm feeling out of patience with underdeveloped in conscience folks that insist on playing word games, and claim 'spanking' is not 'hitting,' and other tricks of mind to fool themselves, apparently. I don't care much for the "spanking isn't hitting" word game myself. On the other hand, I don't much like the "substitute the word 'hit' for the word 'spank'" word game either. One gane tries to make spanking sound less serious than it is, while the other tries to obfuscate the difference in purpose betwee-n spanking and other forms of hitting. (On the other hand, if parents spank because they got angry and lost their tempers, I regard the word "hit" as entirely appropriate because their inability to control their tempers raises serious doubts about their purpose.) 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. So that would work when you punish your neighbor for mowing down your bed of freshly planted petunias? Sock'm to teach'm and if it breaks his jaw apologise. Sure. That'll work. It would work to the extent of letting my neighbor know that I didn't think what he did was so bad that he deserved a broken jaw, which is the point I was addressing. My point wasn't that an apology would make bruises cause less physical pain, or guarantee that the child won't be angry or upset over having been spanked so hard. My point was that an apology would address the problem of children's thinking they deserved to be spanked hard enough to leave bruises. Beyond that, I'll point out that you're cheating in the design of your analogy. What I would be doing in your analogy would be illegal even if I didn't break my neighbor's jaw. In order for the analogy to be valid, there would have to be a law that people whose petunias are mowed down are allowed to slug the person who mowed them. Also, the difference between breaking someone's jaw and just hitting someone in the jaw is at least an order of magnitude larger than the difference between spanking hard enough to cause a bit of bruising and just spanking hard. 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. I have a very important piece of information for you. It's about the human body. If one hits hard enough to 'hurt' then there is an extremely high probability it will leave injury. I think you're seriously overstating the danger here, unless maybe you're trying to define reddening of the skin as an injury. The reason why the buttocks are the current location of choice for corporal punishment is that they have enough padding to allow a fair amount of pain without causing injury. I don't remember whether I ever checked whether my bottom was bruised after I got spanked or paddled as a child, but I don't remember any cases where it hurt to sit for more than a very brief period right after the spanking - or hurt much to sit even then. (I won't make any claims regarding what might have happened before I was old enough to remember.) That's not to say that I would expect it to be difficult to spank hard enough to cause welts or bruises - especially spanking a toddler or using an implement that's heavy relative to a child's age. But I don't think the safety margin is normally as paper thin as you make it sound. 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) Why is it an adult who has erred, even up to an including killing others, can not be "spanked" as a punishment, but children can for doing things that actually did no one any harm? Because the kinds of spankings normally used on children wouldn't be severe enough to make much difference on adult crimes. Personally, I'd rather get a paddling like I got in school than have to pay a fine for a speeding ticket. Which is why it makes sense to require me to pay the fine instead of paddling me. I think there are some situations where it would make sense to offer adult criminals an option of choosing corporal punishment - especially if a fine, jail time, or community service would end up hurting the person's family. But the kinds of corporal punishment that would be needed would be severe enough that a lot of people would have an emotional reaction of rejecting them as too "cruel." Unfortunately, it's a lot easier to empathize with a beating than it is to empathize with the cumulative effect of spending months in prison, and that difference in empathy skews our judgment regarding the relative cruelty of a beating versus a few months in jail. (The same basic problem, on a smaller scale, can cause people to misjudge spanking to be a lot more cruel than grounding.) --- I'm going to split the rest into a separate message because this post is already very long and your next question is important enough I don't want it to get lost. |
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Teenagers faced with spankings
"0:-" wrote in message news:OfqdnZlDS7kQzuXYnZ2dnUVZ_tudnZ2d@scnresearch. com... Nathan A. Barclay wrote: "0:-" wrote in message ps.com... We are in agreement. And here in this newsgroup, aps, I have seen again and again, pro spankers discuss circumstances where they would spank, and demonstrating they have extremely unrealistic expectations of children. The idea that any child, for instance, under the age of 12 or so, would "willfully disobey." It's nonsense. They are following natural imperatives to explore the universe. All an aware parent needs to do is learn how to question and investigate and when the parent has figured out (even if wrong) some probable natural imperative the child is reacting to, simply show them how to get their appropriately. Wanted behavior replacing unwanted behavior. This isn't rocket science, and no child with parents that can figure this out is "spanked." It's too damned obvious to a parent that can think, and is compassionate (even in the absence of exact evidence) that the child does not need spanking to learn. My personal experience from when I was a child proves beyond any possible doubt that you are wrong about this. It proves YOU, a single case, anecdotally, draw this conclusion. There are other people out there. Unless and until you offer compelling evidence that my experience was entirely atypical, I'm inclined to trust my own experience over your theoretical psychobabble. Human beings are extremely complex, so any attempt to develop a theoretical model of how we think and react will almost inevitably be simplistic and less than entirely accurate. Sometimes children simply decide that something that they've been told not to do is enough fun that they want to do it anyhow. Depending on age - developmental stage - they mostly do not really "decide" anything at all. Nature is deciding. Before about 6 years old, normally, children are responding entirely to the external world reflexively That doesn't mean they are never capable of making a deliberate choice, does it? If this were not so they would not need parents to protect them. They could just 'decide' as we adults do, what to do next. You're missing an important point. Just being capable of making deliberate decisions is not enough to be ready to be an adult. Adults also need a lot of knowledge and experience to base our decisions on. We need to truly understand what something like "a broken arm" or "death" is instead of their just being words or vague concepts. We need some grasp on probability - on understanding that even a small chance of something very bad happening isn't worth it. And we need the ability to fully understand complex cause-and-effect interrelationships. Children are ready to start making simple choices about simple things long before they are capable of making the kinds of vastly more complex choices, about vastly more omplex things, that adults have to make. For the most part, the need for punishment arises from the need for simple, easily understood consequences because the child isn't ready yet to live in a world with adult consequences. They would die in a few days without us. Because they are not fully developed. They are ignorant practical experimental physicists, among other things. But they will experiment. If they do not, they risk the chance of never developing the skills for living. Another thing they are is human beings who enjoy doing things that are fun for them. And they need to learn that doing whatever is the most fun is not always acceptable. Also, children need to be prevented from engaging in experiments that are unacceptably dangerous, harmful, or destructive. Consider, especially, what can happen if a child uses a baby as the subject of experiments. To some extent, it is possible to eliminate dangers by modifying a child's environment. But as children get older, they need to learn to start taking responsibility themselves for not engaging in kinds of experiments that their parents tell them are unacceptably damaging or dangerous, especially if the children are ever going to be allowed in an environment that is not made thoroughly safe for them. Granted, if parents take enough time, they can often find a way to redirect the children's choices by offering them something that's almost as much fun, or maybe even more fun, that they wouldn't have to feel guilty about doing. But that doesn't mean the children's disobedience isn't willful. It's nature. Not willful at all. They haven't the mind to make the will come from, yet. Or we wouldn't call them children, minors. If you've spent much time around children age four or five, and you don't think they have will, you are living in a state of denial. There are a lot of things they don't have anywhere near as much of as adults - information, experience, understanding of complex interrelationships, and such. But they very definitely have will - as they can make abundantly clear when someone tries to get them to do something they don't want to do or to stop doing something they want to do. snip When I read your claim, I started thinking back trying to find the first occasions when I can be absolutely sure that I willfully disobeyed my parents - where I knew I wasn't allowed to do something but made a deliberate choice to do it anyhow. I can come up with two situations when I was no older than six, and possibly younger. (I know I couldn't have been older because we moved to a different house when I was six, but beyond that, I have no way of pinpointing my age.) One situation involved playing with the shower curtain in a way that had the bottom of the curtain in the tub but had it draped over the side hanging over the outside so my younger brother and I could put water in the part of the curtain where it sagged over the outside. (It's kind of hard to explain.) R R R R....No, not to anyone that was a child it isn't. You were doing physics experimentation and nature was driving you. You only THINK you were deciding yourself. That you were more conscious of your involvement and engaged your mind in the exercise shows that you WERE in fact about 6 years old. That's when the brain starts doing abstract cause and effect work, and exactly the kinds of experiments you are describing become the rule. You were not just doing physics, you were doing social dynamics as well (I know my parents don't want me doing this). A crucial time for children, indeed. And crucial that parents handle it without pain and humiliation. There is more than enough for most but the brain damaged child to be upset at making a mess, or upsetting his or her parents, with being whaled on as well. My brother and I had been told repeatedly not to do it because my parents were afraid we'd break the shower curtain. But I couldn't figure out how what we were doing could break it, and I knew I was being too careful to spill water outside the tub, so I wasn't inclined to give up my fun and obey my parents. As it turned out, the shower curtain did break, and my brother and I got in trouble. (The flaw in my reasoning was that I didn't even begin to comprehend that the place that would break was where the curtain was held up by hooks through holes, far above my head. Now I can recognize that the stress on the holes was vastly greater than the stress on the part I was paying attention to as a little kid.) Man you are describing exactly the kinds of situations I've been pointing out. I note that you say, "got in trouble." I presume you weren't spanked. Yet you learned...you knew what trouble was. It did not have to be CP driven for you to understand. That is the case for most children. On the contrary, until the shower curtain broke, my parents tried to deal with the problem without resorting to punishment - and it didn't work. My brother and I did get spanked after the shower curtain broke, althouggh that was not the entire punishment; my parents also said they wouldn't be buying us candy for a while because they'd be using the money to buy a new shower curtain. (I remember being confused by that, because it didn't seem like we usually had candy around anyhow.) My memories after that are a lot fuzzier, but I'm pretty sure getting spanked that one time when the shower curtain broke didn't stop me. I don't think there was ever a case where I actually got punished when a shower curtain didn't break. And since I didn't understand how what I did broke the shower curtain and I'd put water in the shower curtain a lot of times without its breaking, I didn't expect to break a shower curtain and get in trouble if I kept doing it. And to whatever extent I did keep playing with shower curtains that way, there was never another case where one broke as a result. But back to my original point of why I brought this incident up, I was definitely quite capable of making a deliberate choice to do something my parents had repeatedly told me not to at an age no older than six. The other early occasion I remember involved vitamin pills. We didn't generally have candy around, but chewable vitamin pills tasted good, and there were times when I snuck extra ones even though I knew I wasn't supposed to. Do you think spanking would have made you stop sneaking "candy?" Do all children that are spanked stop the unwanted behavior? Not so as I've noticed. Now getting sick from eating too much candy could be as good or better a teacher. And there is one other thing. If children are getting into things that are dangerous to them they are too young to understand...so why aren't those things being secured safely by THE PARENTS? I didn't bring this up as an example of a situation where spanking would help. I brought it up as a case study of a child no older than age six making a deliberate choice to do something he knew he wasn't allowed to. I agree that spanking is of only very limited value when children can figure out a way to do what they want without getting caught. But when there isn't a way for children to avoid getting caught, spanking can have a much stronger effect. I'll strongly agree that a lot of things young children do are caused by things other than willful disobedience. Sometimes they don't even understand that they are doing something wrong. Other times, they forget about rules they are supposed to obey - especially if they get carried away with what they are doing. But the idea that children have to be around age 12 before they are capable of making willful choices to disobey is completely preposterous. No it isn't. You just wrote the reasons they often do things without willful intent to disobey. You're missing a very important point. Consider the following two statements. 1) A lot of inappropriate behavior does not involve a deliberate intent to disobey. 2) Sometimes young children do make deliberate choices to disobey. Those two statements are NOT mutually exclusive. From my own experience in my own childhood, I can say definitively that both statements were true in my case at least as early as age six. I do think a lot of people - especially certain types of religious nuts (at least nuts insofar as their understanding of children's motivations is concerned) go ridiculously overboard in presuming that when children disobey, it is an act of willful disobedience. I think children deserve the benefit of reasonable doubts as to whether or not they intended to disobey. But I don't think it's good for children when that benefit of the doubt turns into an unrestricted license for deliberate disobedience. Externally applied controls have limited learning potential. Engaging the child's own self control is the ultimate in teaching, and learning. Successfully. When it works. Merely choosing not to spank is not, in my view, an extreme position. The people I regard as genuine extremists are people who refuse to accept any possibility that spanking can ever be a useful tool - who refuse to accept a possibility that their own opinion regarding spanking might not be entirely on target. Most don't come to an epiphany. Most have giving a great deal of thought to it. Most spankers appear to not have thought about choosing spanking. Most non-spankers have chosen often after long and difficult examination, and argument. The fact that a person became converted to an idea after a lot of thought does not prevent the person from being a zealot, or even a potentially dangerous zealot. And that is especially true when such people seek to use government power to push or force their view that spanking is always, inherently harmful onto others. That claim is not universal. What they do claim is that we cannot know at what point spanking is and isn't harmful, and why take the risk, since non-spanking alternatives are rarely if ever harmful, or risk harm. I don't view that line of reasoning as extreme. I think it's dangerous to base laws on that line of reasoning because if there are situations where spanking is useful, and we outlaw spanking, we pretty much destroy our chances of finding the situations where spanking is useful. But the underlying sentiment is well within the bounds of how people can reasonably react to the existing research. I will point out, though, that refusing to spank does risk harm if other approaches consistently fail and parents run out of other ideas. If you know that not spanking isn't working, and there is any realistic possibility at all that spanking could help get the situation under control, then refusing to spank carries a risk. If you are right, parents who don't spank will never reach that point. But if I am right, significant numbers of them will - if only because they aren't willing to take the time to research and try every alternative available. Counter arguments are the ones that go to extremes. Especially proponents that publish. The idea that a child will become and out of control criminal if farcical. I keep inviting over the years, anyone that posts here to come up with a short list of unspanked criminals. No researcher has ever found any such people in criminal populations. At http://www.geocities.com/cddugan/NoFear5.htm I found a reference to a 1991 Straus study. The page describes the results of the study as follows: "Straus (1991) found that juveniles who had been physically punished were nearly twice as likely to have committed theft and over three times as likely to have hit a non-family-member with an object in comparison with unspanked children." I agree with you that a lot of claims made by supporters of spanking about what happens if children aren't spanked are ridiculous. But it looks to me like your claims about how impossible it is for children who aren't spanked to end up having their behavior go out of control are also a serious distortion of the truth. Similarly, I regard people who believe it's impossible to rear children successfully without ever spanking them as extremists on the other side - albeit a different kind of extremists from those who take the severity of the spankings to extremes. I see rather a lot of the former and few of the latter. Most people do not think spanking is harmful in all the possible conformations of it. But they DO recognize the inherent risks. I can drive my car at 140 MPH if I chose. And most time's where I chose to do so I am in no danger...because nothing happened. Or am I? What about factors I cannot control? This raises the question of whether the correlations between spanking and negative outcomes are results of factors parents can't control, or are results of factors parents can control. Consider the various risks involved in driving 140 miles per hour. What kind of shape is your car in? How straight is the road? How good is your visibility? How good and careful a driver are you? Is the road limited access, and is it fenced off from animals? Is there slower traffic in front of you? Is the road divided to essentially eliminate the risk of hitting an oncoming car? Are you going to try to do something else that divides your attention at the same time you're driving? Under optimal conditions, people could very easily view driving at speeds far in excess of America's speed limits (if not necessarily all the way up to 140) as worth the risk. But if you would average together all of the different kinds of drivers, under all different kinds of conditions, driving fast would look a whole lot worse. Similarly, if parents can figure out the risk factors that make spanking dangerous, and avoid or minimize those risk factors, I believe there are situations where the benefits outweigh the remaining risks that can't be controlled. But studies that lump wide rangers of conditions together are essentially useless in confirming or refuting my belief. The same goes with choosing to spank. Likely 99 percent of the time no harm will be done. I think I'll just not drive my car at 140 MPH, what do you think? I doubt that I'd have enough confidence in my driving skills to go all the way up to 140, but in a relatively new car under optimal conditions, I'd go way past 70 if the law allowed it. snip Statistical associations can be a result of inherent cause-and-effect relationships, or of cause-and-effect relationships that occur only some of the time, or of having the same factors that can cause one thing also be able to cause another. Yep. And that is good enough to run world wide industries with. There can even be other, even more complex interrelationships. It would take a lot of additional (and much deeper) research to make a scientifically sound determination of which is actually the case. Of course. In the interests of scientific research that is true of ALL such findings. We don't wait for the final definitive answer to be found, because science has discovered there really is no such thing. Good approximations...association strong enough for practical purposes are used in every other field...why not in child rearing practices? Herein lies the crux of our dispute. You regard the approximations as good. I regard them as so simplistic as to be all but useless for my purposes. My situation is like that of a factory owner who believes he has very good pollution controls on his factory. I'm not willing to accept studies indicating that the average factory, regardless of whether or not it has any kind of decent pollution controls, exposes people around it to dangerous levels of pollution. I'm only willing to accept research that shows that factories with pollution controls reasonably similar to mine still generate dangerous levels of contamination. --- I'm snipping your responses that interrupt my writing below so the context will be clear for what I do want to reply to. Some of what I'm snipping is your impressions based on your own experiences, which might be worth discussing except that you have shown such an enromous bias that I'm not prepared to trust in your ability to be an objective observer where the issue of spanking is concerned. --- From my experience with teachers when I was in school, I would expect major links between spanking and insecurity to show up in cases where parents (or teachers) are so strict that children routinely worry that they might accidentally do something that gets them in trouble. The problem would be even worse if parents have unrealistic expectations, thereby making it essentially impossible for the children to reliably stay out of trouble even when they are trying to behave, or if parents have a hair trigger that almost anything can set off when they are in a bad mood. On the other hand, if children feel comfortable that they won't get in trouble as long as they are trying to behave, the only time the prospect of spanking would give them a reason to feel insecure is when they are doing or have recently done something they know was wrong. Now consider what happens if you average those scenarios together without trying to distinguish between them. Such an average gives you a causal link between spanking and insecurity even though the link is a serious problem only in certain types of situations. You are giving more credit than is deserved. That would not be a "causal" link, but a correlation. And I'm not really sure what you are trying to say. If you read what I wrote as a unified whole, it shouldn't be hard to follow. To put it in terms of set theory, suppose set A contains subsets A1 and A2. There is a significant causal link between subset A1 and result B, but not between subset A2 and result B. If you look at set A as a whole, you see a causal link going from set A to result B, but the reality is that only A1 produces the causal link. Basically, I'm postulating that at least most of the feelings of serious insecurity associated with spanking come from a specific subset of situations where spanking is used. That subset is situations where the people who spank are so strict, inflexible, or unreasonable that the children have to worry about getting spanked even when they are trying to behave. I see no reason to expect a similar general feeling of insecurity just at being around an authority if children are comfortable that they won't get spanked (or otherwise punished or penalized) unless they willfully choose to disobey. But when studies fail to distinguish between the two subsets of situations where spanking takes place, it looks as if all spanking creates a serious risk of insecurity instead of just a certian subset doing so. So I don't see any reason for parents to worry about creating excessive insecurity as long as they try to give their children the benefit of a reasonable number of reasonable doubts. The mindset of the punisher. Why not give the child the benefit of a reasonable number of assurances they are doing the right thing...that replaces the doing the wrong thing? It's a much more powerful motivation and learning tool. I don't see how you can give children assurances that they are doing the right thing if they refuse to do the rright thing. By the way, in the long term, too much security can be at least as dangerous to children as not enough. Really? How so? This is ridiculous. You interrupt here to ask a question that I already answered in my very next sentence. If children's actions don't ever have consequences, how are children supposed to learn to think before they act? Whoa whoa whoa? Who said that non-spankers contend that actions should not have consequences? The question is just how painful and from where should those consequences come, and what delivery system should be used? You are being inconsistent. When I talk about there being times when some kind of punishment is needed, you dodge by complaining about the punitive nature of my writing. When I talk about the danger if children don't have consequences for their behavior, you dodge by saying that a choice not to spank doesn't mean there won't be consequences. The reality is that when parents shield their children from so much of the natural consequences of their actions that what is left is not a useful deterrent, either there will be some kind of punishment, or there will not be meaningful consequences at all. If punishment is useful in a situation, it is completely irrational to reject spanking just because it is a punishment. If you reject punishment, you're left without any meaningful consequence at all in cases where the genuinely natural consequences are not enough. You're trying to have your cake and eat it too. All that does, as far as I'm concerned, is make me regard you as a person whose reactions are driven by emotion rather than by anything resembling sound logic. snip I've long thought that the limits on the severity of corporal punishment ought to depend on what a child is being punished for. I've long thought that it should be limited by them being sovereign human beings with a right to protection from deliberate pain and humiliation. Did you think even for a moment what the word "sovereign" means before you wrote this? For children to be sovereign human beings, they would have to have ALL of the same rights as adults. Your own writings earlier in this post show a clear recognition that children aren't ready to be sovereign over their own lives. Parents should have relatively wide latitude in how they punish behavior that they can reasonably view as exceptionally serious, assuming their children are old enough to understand how serious the behavior is. But giving parents the same latitude when a four-year-old spills a glass of milk is absurd. Your logic escapes me. Now you are actually suggesting some 'limits' be imposed. How would you 'give' various amounts of latitude....by law? Limits are already imposed by our laws against child abuse and governing when social workers are authorized to intervene. I think it would be better if the laws were restructured to put a greater emphasis on the relationshp between the severity of punishments and the seriousness of children's misbehavior, thereby providing greater latitude to intervene when parents punish children harshly for minor offenses while still giving parents relatively broad latitude in punishing more serious offenses. And when there is room for disagreement about whether or not an offense should be considered serious, I think parents should be given the benefit of the doubt in determining what standards they set - at least as long as the standards they set for their children are reasonably consistent with what they live by themselves. snip I contend that logical and natural consequences, metered by parents, is a far more effective learning tool than interrupting the child and hitting them. The latter breaks the cause and effect link, and even the child too young to KNOW about cause and effect needs a backlog of experiences when he or she finally reaches their capacity to integrate and understand cause and effect. There is a difference between a natural consequence of an action and a punishment disguised to look sort of like a natural consequence. My inclination is that it's better to be honest and straightforward about the fact that a child is being punished than it is to try to pretend that a punishment is a natural consequence of a child's actions. In some cases, a punishment closely related to a child's actions can help a child understand the cause-and-effect relationship behind why the parent felt a need to punish the child, or why what the child did was wrong, or why something worse could have happened if the parent didn't stop the child from engaging in inappropriate behavior. Other times, a punishment related to a child's offense can serve a double purpose of punishing the child and temporarily reducing the child's opportunity to do the same thing again. In those kinds of situations, punishments closely related to a child's offense can offer enormous advantages over more generic punishments such as spanking. Ironically, spanking can play a similar role in helping children understand why hitting is wrong. I saw a story on the news a few years ago where otherwise non-spanking parents tried everything they could think of to stop their son from hitting their dog, without success. Finally, they spanked him and explained that how he felt when he got spanked is how the dog feels when he hits it. It worked. (The story was a local interest piece on the news following a segment on 20/20 regarding spanking.) But the less assistance a punishment provides in helping a child understand cause-and-effect relationships, the less benefit there is in taking the time to figure out and implement a punishment that is specifically related to the child's offense. And a parent who makes up a punishment that's sort of related and tries to pretend it's not a punishment is being dishonest both with himself and with his child. snip In fact the definition of those terms like "punish" and "discipline," are always on my mind in these discussions. Too often "discipline" is used by spankers to include spanking. The word means to learn, nothing more, unless you are using it as a noun...which wouldn't apply. How many dictionaries did you check? All three dictionaries incorporated into dictionary.com came up with a meaning for the verb relating to punishment. The first was "to punish or penalize in order to train and control; correct; chastise." You can look up the others yourself if you want to. snip Nope. Not once, to my knowledge. I did myself at about age 6 though. I simply was asked to make up for it to the druggist, someone we knew, by sweeping his store for a week. I still can't pass a Baby Ruth candy bar without a little shudder. I wasn't spanked. No, you were punished in a different way. But what happened to you was a far cry from "dispensed with in a few minutes." In fact, I strongly suspect that more than a few kids would choose a spanking over having to sweep up for a week. You aren't seriously going to argue that the child is the best judge of how he or she will learn best, are you? No. I'm making the point of how stupid it is to treat spanking as if it were somehow magically more cruel than other forms of punishment. What does a child know of distraction and misdirection (which spanking does all too well). I got to think about those candy bars every time I swept that particular aisle. A spanking is not a good learning tool. One "gets over" a spanking usually pretty quickly, even a fierce beating. snip Sometimes a long slower learning process has much more useful effect. I agree that for something as serious as shoplifting, it's best if at least part of the punishment is something longer and slower than a spanking so the child doesn't put the whole thing behind him too quickly, with too little thought. (And I'd regard a spanking on top of a week of sweeping as overkill for a six-year-old.) But longer, slower punishments can also have a down side. They disrupt children's lives more, and can disrupt other people's lives more in the process. And there is more time in which resentment could potentially breed and grow before the punishment is behind the child. I wasn't in pain as I swept. I was in contemplative gathering of information. I couldn't use it very well, but the memory was strong, and stayed with me in later years if I was tempted again. A spanking doesn't just temporarily stop a behavior....it gives the child an excuse to do it again on the off chance he won't be caught...which criminals will tell you is actually quite seldom. The only way spanking can give children an excuse to do something is if the children are given the impression that it's okay for them to misbehave as long as they're prepared to accept the punishment if they get caught. Otherwise, I think your use of the words "gives...an excuse" is way off base. Purely in terms of deterrent effect, I don't see a fundamental difference between what happened to you and what would probably have happened if you'd gotten a hard spanking instead. You could have decided to take a chance of having to sweep up again just as easily as a child who got clobbered with a paddle could have decided to risk another paddling. Or if you don't think one hard paddling would have been as scary a prospect as having to sweep up again, how about more thna one? What I'll bet really happened with you was that one or both of your parents spent some time talking with you and making sure you understood as fully as they could explain it why shoplifting is wrong. Then the severity of the punishment helped drive home how serious a thing shoplifting is and, in the process, gave you some time to think about what your parents had said. So when you thought about shoplifting later, it wasn't just the fear of having to sweep floors or some such again that stopped you. A lot of it was remembering why shoplifting is wrong. If I'm on the right track here, it was how good a job your parents did of making sure you understood why shoplifting is wrong, and of helping you be the kind of person who doesn't want to do things that are wrong, that made you choose not to shoplift again, not the fact that your punishment was having to sweep the floor instead of being spanked. Chances are excellent that if you'd gotten a very hard spanking instead of having to sweep up for a week, you still would have thought about getting in trouble if you considered shoplifting again, but would also have thought about why it was wrong and not done it. The extra time sweeping floors gave you to think might have made a difference, but probably not enough of one to be decisive. What would have set your parents and you up for disaster would not have been if they spanked instead of making you sweep, but rather if they relied so much on any kind of punishment that they didn't take much time to explain. If all your parents did was yell at you a little about how horrible a kid you were to steal, and then make you sweep floors for a week, would it have had anything resembling the same effect? If you are not laying down a learning experience that requires some fact gathering and comparison, contemplation, then you aren't teaching. You are just controlling..and humans are forever dreaming up ways to escape control. What fact gathering and comparison did sweeping floors give you that spanking wouldn't have? What did having to sweep floors, in and of itself, give you to contemplate, other than the fact that you hated sweeping floors? The punishment served to reinforce your parents' teaching, and to provide an extra mental connection to make you think about that teaching if you considered shoplifting again. But the real TEACHING came from somewhere else - just as it needs to (but too often doesn't) when parents spank. snip How many seriously bad parents in our society choose to be consistently non-spanking parents? Few to none, most likely. Not and follow through, at any rate. Do you know what self selection bias is? Your statement a bit farther down makes me wonder. I'll go ahead and explain it in case you might have forgotten, or in case anyone else who reads this isn't familiar with the term. Ideally, scientific studies should divide people into caegories at random. That way, the people in each category are likely to be essentially the same other than in the specific factor being studied. In contrast, with every study on spanking that I've ever heard of, the parents being studied select which category they will be in themselves by their choice of whether or not to spank. That creates a problem because the same factors that cause them to choose to be spankers or choose to be non-spankers can also influence a whole lot of other choices they make as parents. For example, if parents choose to spank because they are too lazy to think about anything else they could do instead, that same laziness can cause problems in all sorts of other ways that have little or nothing to do with the fact that they spank. That problem is known as self-selection bias. In a society where we both agree that it's probable that almost all seriously bad parents spank at least occasionally, it would be absolutely amazing if a heavily disproportionate percentage of the really messed up people were not people who were spanked as kids. The self-selection bias involved in that issue is one of the worst you'll find anywhere. Yet you consistently fail to acknowledge that self-selection bias problem when you talk about how many messed-up people were spanked as kids. There is a huge problem of self-selection bias in trying to compare spanking parents with non-spanking parents in current-day America, and if any study has even come close to doing an adequate job of controlling for that problem, I'm not aware of it. Then the trick is to get them to self select by motivations. Same as with slavery, and emancipation of women. Are you really crazy enough t think that terrible parents would magically become good parents if they just stopped spanking? My guess is there are some non-spankers whose children might act out at some point. My other guess is that they handle it pretty well by non-punitive methods, and certainly not with CP. My guess is that a lot of parents who start off planning not to spank change their minds because they aren't happy with the results they get without spanking. They aren't happy with the feelings of not being in control. It's a false fear, because win or lose they are always "in control." Who can't control a 2 year old child? A person who gives up the will to do so. They feel out of control because it's unfamiliar territory and they give up. The ones that stay non-spankers tend to be the ones who have better-than-average success with alternatives, either because they have better parenting skills and are willing to put more effort into making alternatives work, or because their children are more naturally cooperative. Yep. Life is like that. So if people lack those things that's an adequate excuse for spanking? I'd say the two populations should swap. Those predisposed to spank should be forbidden to, and those that are strongly opposed should be given the choice. The ones that change their minds and start spanking are probably disproportionately likely to be bad parents no matter whether they spank or not. If this guess is right, it throws the results of studies on the subject way out of kilter - especially in regard to what we could expect if we banned spanking. So if we banned spanking those predisposed to NOT spank wouldn't have a problem with it. And the others? Tough ****, as they say. You've already defined them as less, even IN-competent. You're missing my point. Did you even try to understand the point I was making, or were you too busy looking for a way to spin what I wrote into an attack on spanking? If any significant number of parents who aren't good at being non-spanking parents quit trying and become spanking parents, the result is that the overall category of non-spanking parents looks better than it would if those less competent parents had remained in the category. At least part of the difference between non-spanking parents and spanking parents is an illusion insofar as actual difference in the quality of the parenting techniques is concerned. If those less successful non-spanking parents were required to remain non-spanking parents, the category of non-spanking parents would look worse. Further, to the extent that those parents are less competent or incompetent overall, rather than just not good at making non-spanking methods work, having them jump categories to the spanking category drags down the average for the category of spanking parents. The difference isn't just a difference in the methods the parents use, but is a difference in the underlying quality of the parents themselves. If the parents who use one method average being better parents than the parents who use another method, the method that has the better parents use it will look better than it really is, and the method that has the worse parents use it will look worse than it really is. So how would you deal with a case of repeated shoplifting in a genuinely nonpunitive way? Depends on the age. Below 4, explain and walk away after returning the item. Above that age begin introducing restitution. If, by restitution, you mean more than just having to give back what was taken or pay for it, I don't regard that as entirely nonpunitive. I suppose it could be argued that it's not punitive for people who are caught shoplifting to have to repay store owners for thefts by similarly competent (or incompetent) shoplifters who get away with their shoplifting. But anything beyond that would definitely qualify as punishment. And never leave out how it make YOU the parent feel, your emotions upon learning the child has taken something of someone else's without permission and payment. It's far easier than it might appear. A word or two is all that is needed. snip When parents do their job properly, they stop relying on "I'm bigger than you" as the primary basis for their authority when their children are young, and start building a different foundation by earning their children's trust and respect. Could I earn your trust and respect by making you afraid of me? I'm really disappointed, not to mention frustrated and sometimes angry, that you don't make more effort to understand what I am trying to say. What you did here was take what I was trying to say and twist it as if it meant almost the exact opposite. A lot of what goes into building trust and respect has nothing to do with punishment. It has to do with things like helping children, and setting a good example, and teaching them and offering them guidance, and helping them understand things, and sometimes just being there for them. You should recognize that at least as well as I do, yet you completely ignored it. Why? The relationship between punishment and trust and respect is a complex one. When punishment is clearly unfair, and especially when the person doing the punishing is perceived as not even making much effort to be fair, it destroys trust and respect. But people don't respect pushovers either. If parents want respect, their children have to view them as doing their job as parents - which includes preventing the children from doing things that they know are wrong. I would expect the ideal to be if parents can find ways to genuinely solve problems without having to resort to threats or punishments. Then the children can respect their parents for having done the right thing without any emotional baggage from having been punished. If parents do punish, but they do it fairly, they generate some short-term turbulence in the sea of trust and respect. But if the children look back later and view the punishment as having been just - or at least understand why their parents thought it was just - I think the long-term result can still be to help build respect. And parents can earn that they will try to be fair in deciding whether and when children's actions are serous enough to warrant punishment - a trust that alleviates fear of unjust punishment. How DO we gain another's trust and respect? I had a supervisor once on a very large contract that I liked a lot. She was being used by administration to punish workers that disagreed with policy (policy that was not in the best interests of the customers) and while she was fairly new, two years on the job, she was well trained and conscientious. I knew she needed to move on, so I did the ultimate "punishment" to her. I walked into her office one day with no one around but her and I, put on my most kindly face and said, "I'm so very disappointed in you." She instantly opened up to ask me why. And I could tell her what I was seeing. She left and moved on to better things 60 days later. Even forfeiting an educational bonus to do so. If I'd walked in, insulted her, challenged her authority, in other words really punished her, she'd likely still be there helping to destroy that enterprise...as it did self destruct eventually. Does the sense you're using the word "punished" in here really have anything to do with discipline? What would the purpose of starting off with an attack under such conditions have had to do with training or teaching, especially in the absence of any prior reason to think you thought she was doing something wrong? I'll also note that I am very much against insulting children as a form of discipline. Contrary to the "sticks and stones" saying, cruel words can leave some of the deepest and most lasting wounds of all. To the extent that the parents continue to punish their children sometimes, the children understand that there are reasons behind their parents' expectations, and that the expectations are not just arbitrary bullying of someone bigger over someone smaller. They do? When? At 45? The children might not always agree with the parents' reasons, but they can at least respect the fact that their parents are trying to do what they believe is right. So when the children are too big for the parents to use physical force to enforce a punishment, the parent-child relationship still has a solid foundation under it. You aren't going to like this, but that's the spankers warped world view via the spanking experience. When children are too big to spank the ultimate betrayal has taken place if the child now believes their parent is to be trusted. I've just decided that continuing this discussion is pointless. What you say here is the last straw in convincing me that your prejudice is so thick that I don't think there's any hope of your comprehending anything that doesn't fit the simplistic theoretical models you've built in your head. You refuse to truly, honestly listen enough to learn from me, even though the mismatch between my experiences and your mental models ought to make it glaringly obvious that there at least might be things you could learn. And the information you're giving me is pretty much all stuff I've seen before, usually about a zillion times before. The only reason I see why I might want to keep going is that you do mix in some useful parenting tips here and there. But at the moment, I don't view that as worth the time and aggravation. |
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Teenagers faced with spankings
Kane wrote
Hey, despite my education in the field and 50 years of examining this and my experience throughout that time, much of it professional as well as personal, I would not offer such a blanket statement as that. Can we see your resume' since you put yourself forth as an expert? |
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