"Parenting Without Punishing"

Nathan A. Barclay wrote:

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

I have very little idea of how reliably purely non-punitive parenting
techniques really work, and while people like Chris, Steve, and the
article's author would LIKE to believe that such techniques would
always work, they do not seem to be able to provide any solid
evidence.
-------------------
Just because we're WHOLLY UN-interested in the idiotic "cite-wars"
that happen, when neurotic religiously-tortured morally-offended
Right-wingnuts try to deluge this thread with their phony X-spurt
website cut-n-pasties in response to our voluminous peer-reviewed
journals that anyone CAN read if they want to,

Steve, I find it insulting that you simply assume I would do that sort of
thing.
---------------------
That can't be helped. I believe you would if I permitted it.
Rightists always do.


I know the difference between opinion and evidence, and I have no
interest in quoting opinions as if they were evidence. Doing so would only
hurt my credibility, which I place a high value on.
--------------------
Evidence does no good either, and is both a deception and a
disingenuity, because any single bit of it alone is insufficient
to the honest task, and any author is unavailable for examination.
It reminds me of calling people on your cellphone to ask them!
It's boorish compared to honestly airing the structural arguments
for and against the issue.


does NOT support
YOUR moronic accusation that "they do not seem to be able to provide
any solid evidence." In fact the reverse is true, by factors of ten
to one or MORE!! Go ask all the child development authorities you
want, and write down their opinions, and then let those stand as
a vote for which is the Truth, if you're stupid enough to need that!

Scientific truth is not determined by majority vote.
-------------------
True, but people who collect selective support and discard most
that do not should be required to do so if only to keep them honest!


It is determined by
the proper use of scientific methodologies and ONLY by the proper use of
scientific methodologies. If scientists express opinions that go beyond
what the methodologies they use can support, those opinions are merely
PERSONAL opinions, not science.
--------------------
The thing is, it cannot BE carried on fairly either on Usenet OR in
any private conversation, the budget is not available! Any such
situation then requries instead that people argue from structure,
which is the way people actually change minds and come to believe
new things anyway, and NOT through evidence, as odd as that seems!


In the past, Chris suggested a few studies for me to read. However, from
what I recall, those studies were always in terms of whether or not childen
were spanked (or, in some cases, whether or not they were spanked within a
prticular timeframe). As best I recall, none of them separated out a group
in which no punishment of any kind was used, or in which punishment was used
only in regard to situations in which the children's behavior would be a
crime for adults. Therefore, the results of those studies provide no
scientific basis for evaluating the results parents get from using purely
non-punitive techniques.
-----------------------
It takes an infinitude of studies to convince absolutely in a peer-
reviewed arena, but doing so is not actually needed to prove anything
reasonably. Instead, the reasonableness of believing this or that,
namely an honest impersonal structural argument is superior!


If you are aware of any studies that looked specifically at parents who
never punished at all, or who never punished except when the children's
behavior would be considered a crime in adults, or some such, I would
probably find it interesting to look at.
-----------------
In this culture those would be hard to find, but in the entire body of
the research that conclusion is entirely implied by the trends in
history and the research overall. This can be discerned by the logical
reasonable person.



(Although in order to constitute
legitimate science, the study would also have to deal with the issue of
parents who started off using purely non-punitive techniques, did not like
their results, and started punishing at least occasionally. Showing that
parents who like a technique's results well enough to stick with it tend to
have good results is great for showing that it can work, but does not give a
clear indication of how reliably it works.) If you do not have such
evidence, then you can say only that the opinions of some number of
scientists support your views, not that science supports them.
-----------------------
No, you can produce nearly an infinite number of various and unsortable
personalities hidden and revealed by using abuse. They prove only that
results of bad methods vary in their badness and obviousness. One needs
to use reason and logic upon data to determine WHAT IT MEANS, and that
can be anticipated sufficiently by reason and logic and structured
argument.


If you refuse to provide any such evidence, I must make at least a tentative
assumption that you do not have any.
----------------------------
Bad guess. You may dismiss this tentatively as well.


Certainly, I will not accept claims
that you have valid scientific evidence as legitimate if you refuse to
present the evidence or indicate what it is.
----------------------------
I make no such claim, instead I claim it is not as important as
a structural argument, which is what actually causes humans to
believe and to adopt views anyway. And I assert that all needed
evidence exists within awareness already as exemplar of reality.

Our reality exists as out thought about reality, and nothing else.
Steve

Doan wrote:

On 17 Jun 2004, Chris wrote:

This brings us right back to our aborted, unfinished debate of 2001,
Nathan; aborted because you disappeared and days later said you "didn't
have time" to debate about the scientific studies on spanking.

You did your best to discredit the available evidence linking spanking
to a wide variety of negative long term effects on children. When you
disappeared was after I invited you to now produce evidence of equal rigor
in support of your own position, adding that I would of course expect your
evidence to meet all of the same standards you had recently demanded of
evidence cited by me.

Three years later, I ask you again: where is your scientific evidence
of measurable long term benefit to children from spanking? If you have
none, please signify by ignoring this question, or perhaps by vanishing
again.

Chris

Here is what Chris said about Straus & Mouradina (1998) study in the past:

However, there is evidence that this connection exists,
however it may work. Gunnoe & Mariner (1997) and Straus et al. (1997)
both found that the more children were spanked at the beginning of each
study, the more their behavior had deteriorated years later in
comparison
with other children the same age, despite controlling for a variety of
other variables such as maternal warmth/involvement, family
socioeconomic
status, race, sex, etc. Since neither of these studies had a "never
spanked" group, they cannot rule out the possibility that low levels of
spanking had positive effects. However, another study did look at
children who had never been spanked by their mothers versus children who
were spanked very infrequently and the difference in age adjusted
antisocial behavior scores was quite pronounced. The children in the
never-spanked group were markedly more well-behaved than even the most
rarely-spanked children.


And my response:

"Chris is now admitting that there are evidence of beneficial effects
of low-level spanking.
------------------
No, you were a ****ty little liar then as now.
Steve

Tori M. wrote:

This whole thing is unrealistic and will set a child to fail later in life.
---------------
Nope.


If you do something bad 90% of the time there will be consequences.
----------------
Duh.


You
dont show up to work and you get fired, you slack off at your work you get
fired. You make a mess in your home eventualy you or your spouse will have
to clean it up. You cheat on your spouse they will most likely leave you.
---------------------
Yes, moron, but nobody hits you, not legally. Nobody does something
EXTRA and nasty to you besides the consequences.


While it would be wonderful to live in a world without punishment in general
it is just not the case.
----------------------
YOU mean just not for children!
Asshole!


To raise a child to not have cause and effect
other then the "natural consequenses" (IE sticking a fork in the outlet will
get the child shocked) is just as bad IMO then to over punish a child.

Tori
-----------------
Children who don't know about plugs need to be protected, and later
to know about plugs, they DON'T need to have a phobia of them and to
hate the **** out of their parent so it turns them away from their
REAL purpose here, to be happy!!
Steve

Nathan A. Barclay wrote:

"toto" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 17 Jun 2004 15:36:58 -0500, "Donna Metler"
wrote:

And teachers are told not to use rewards because it "ruins intrinsic
motivation".

So there are no grades then? No report cards?

Grades are merely a measurement device. Thus, the reward of a good grade is
the reward of doing something successfully, much as winning a game because
one played it well is a reward or playing a song on the piano well is a
reward. Conversely, bad grades "punish" in the same sense that losing a
game as a result of making mistakes is a "punishment" or making mistakes
while playing the piano is a "punishment."
----------------------
Kids KNOW whether they are doing well, just from doing it.

They just don't know how the class is doing. Grades compare
them to others, and are then inherently not useful, because
a child who likes the subject will do as well as they can,
and one who doesn't like it, won't, no matter what!
Steve

Nathan A. Barclay wrote:

"Chris" wrote in message
...

Three years later, I ask you again: where is your scientific evidence
of measurable long term benefit to children from spanking? If you have
none, please signify by ignoring this question, or perhaps by vanishing
again.

In a free society, it is not up to a person who wants to do something to
prove that what he wants to do will be beneficial. Rather, it is up to a
person who wants to regulate another's actions to prove that the action will
be harmful.
---------------------
Unless what they are doing is to someone else, then that burden exactly
reverses because you're doing it to them and THEY are
ALSO FREE!!!


It can be argued that the fact that punishment is unpleasant to the person
who is being punished is, in and of itself, sufficient reason to view
punishment as harmful. However, if we adopted that view as a matter of
blind principle, we could not punish robbers, rapists, and murderers.
--------------------
They deserve it.
Someone merely availing themselves of THEIR Rights does NOT!
Children have RIGHTS TOO!!!


Our
laws recognize that when one person's actions harm another, whether
physically or in some other way, punishment can be used to try to stop (or
at least slow down) the actions.
---------------------
Not true of children availing themselves of their Rights!!


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


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


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

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

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


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


I've seen few things more irrational
than the idea that it is abusive to paddle a child at school instead of
suspending the child even if the child would rather be paddled than
suspended.
-----------------
Either are abusive, both unreasonable and harmful to faculty, student,
and society!!!


I imagine there are children who have what might be called an
"allergic" reaction to spanking, that is, a reaction that is much more
strongly negative than is normal.
------------------
No, they are merely farther down the road toward attacking you.
You can wind up with your ****ing house burned down that way.


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


I've said all this to lay the following foundation:
------------------------
The "foundation" lays upon dangerously shifting sand,
and your sense of responsibility is only to your perversion,
nothing more.


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


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


Otherwise, if parents cannot obtain acceptable behavior within a
reasonable amount of time using positive methods, they are justified in
using the threat of spanking (and, if necessary, actual spanking) for the
short-term benefits it produces WHETHER OR NOT spanking produces long-term
benefits compared with if they spent a lot more time and effort trying to
resolve the issue using purely non-punitive techniques.
------------------------------------
Nope, that causes worse outcomes and no reasonable results, you have
done nothing but tell lies of sick wish-fulfillment and perversion
here, and your honesty is questionable on a thread where you waste
vast amounts of time arguing for such an inherently sick perversion!!!


(Obviously, this argument does not work if one accepts Steve's view that
parents owe it to their children to do whatever it takes to solve problems
through purely non-punitive techniques.
----------------------------------
We believe that should be the case for adults. They aren't allowed
to bully people to get what they want!! Why do you think that this
would be good to permit adults to do??? Why would you fancy that
children have different desires, or have different needs or responses?
We do not abuse adults because they would harm us, why do we think
children wishing to kill us is some good outcome???????


But the majority does not believe that children's interests should outweigh those of parents to that degree.)
----------------------------------
The majority is ignorant and many or most were raised abusively,
they don't know anything else, and the revenge formation they
experienced is A BIG PART of their secret reason for wanting to beat
on and bully small children, it 'pays them back' for their own
abuse as a child for which they are still insecure and feel and
are immature as a consequence!!! It is the same as fraternity hazing.
You would always feel like a wussy little pledge if you never got to
do a role-reversal and pay a new class pack for what the senior class
did to YOU when YOU were the newbie!! That's the sick nature of such
fraternity hazing, but it applies to parents and children equally if
they engage in this hereditary abuse!!


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

And nobody *I* know have ever SEEN this imaginary reported "controlled
spanking" bull**** among parents, every parental abuse I ever witnessed
the hatred and abusive ideation was fully involved, and the beating
vicious. And as for the supposed controlled "paddling" in schools, I
observed it caused the teachers to be assaulted, threatened, their
families endangered, so much so that the only ones who tried it either
retired early from teaching or were fired. It was a major cause of
kids winding up in prison, and two teachers I knew were severely
harmed.


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


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

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

To raise a child to not have cause and effect
other then the "natural consequenses" (IE sticking
a fork in the outlet will get the child shocked) is just
as bad IMO then to over punish a child.

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


--
Dorothy

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

The Outer Limits

On Thu, 17 Jun 2004 22:20:39 -0500, "Nathan A. Barclay"
wrote:


"toto" wrote in message
.. .
On Thu, 17 Jun 2004 15:36:58 -0500, "Donna Metler"
wrote:

And teachers are told not to use rewards because it "ruins intrinsic
motivation".

So there are no grades then? No report cards?

Grades are merely a measurement device. Thus, the reward of
a good grade is the reward of doing something successfully,
much as winning a game because one played it well is a reward
or playing a song on the piano well is a reward.

I disagree.
Grades are often an *incorrect* measurement of the learning
that is going on. And, children who are motivated internally
want to learn, not to be graded by some outside source.
When you play a game, you can win despite playing poorly
if your team plays well or if your opponent makes mistakes.
YOU know whether or not you played well. And, you can play
well and lose because your opponent played better. When
you play a song well on the piano, you know that you did it
well. No audience or prize is needed to motivate you or to
*make* you practice until you do play it well.

Conversely, bad grades "punish" in the same sense that
losing a game as a result of making mistakes is a "punishment"
or making mistakes while playing the piano is a "punishment."

Nope. The problem with grades is they are someone else judging
your learning, not your own judgement of whether or not you learned.
With the piano, *I* make the judgement because *I* can hear what
went wrong. This is true of learning anything *if* we use tests and
evaluations as learning tools instead of as judgements. Grades,
however, are not used this way. They are used to determine whether
or not a child fails in the judgement of the teachers and parents.

The "reward" or "punishment" inherent in grades is intrinsic to the child's
knowing that he is doing something well or poorly. It is not something
extrinsic intended solely for the purpose of manipulation. Indeed, the only
way children WON'T feel the reward of being highly successful in their
studies or the "punishment" of being less successful is if adults refuse to
provide the children with accurate information about how well they are
doing.

Providing accurate information is not the same as *grading* the
child's progress.

Personally, I view hiding information from children out of fear that knowing
the truth might hurt their "self-esteem" as reprehensible. True self-esteem
comes from recognizing one's abilities and limitations and regarding it as
success to do one's best even if other people's best is better, not from
ignorance. And false self-esteem founded on ignorance is doomed to failure
in the long term because once children see the truth, their old sense of
self-esteem collapses and they have no foundation on which to build a new
sense of self-esteem to replace it.

I don't think you should *hide* the evidence of limitations, nor
should you try to raise self-esteem by false pretences. OTOH,
grades don't actually evaluate objectively and they give no feedback
to tell the child what he needs to do to learn the subject matter.

It's the difference between giving a test and allowing the child to
correct his errors and learn the material and giving a test and
using the grade to *fix* the child's evaluation in your mind.

Nathan


--
Dorothy

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

The Outer Limits

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

Grades are merely a measurement device. Thus, the reward of a good
grade is the reward of doing something successfully, much as winning
a game because one played it well is a reward or playing a song on the
piano well is a reward. Conversely, bad grades "punish" in the same
sense that losing a game as a result of making mistakes is a
"punishment"
or making mistakes while playing the piano is a "punishment."
----------------------
Kids KNOW whether they are doing well, just from doing it.

Not really. Children can think they know how to do something but then turn
out to have been doing it the wrong way. (And no, I'm not just talking
about doing it a different right way from what the teacher said.) So some
kind of system of identifying mistakes and calling them to children's
attention is needed whether or not a formal grade is assigned.

They just don't know how the class is doing. Grades compare
them to others, and are then inherently not useful, because
a child who likes the subject will do as well as they can,
and one who doesn't like it, won't, no matter what!

You see no possibility that a child's knowledge of how well or poorly he is
doing in a subject compared with others might affect the child's priorities?

Suppose a child wants to be good at both English and Math. If he knows he's
doing better than average in Math, but worse than average in English, that
could provide an incentive to spend a bit less time on Math and a bit more
on English. I don't know how often that sort of thing would happen, but it
at least could.

Further, even in purely non-coercive households, parents might try to
encourage a child to want to work harder in a subject that the child is not
doing well in. ("You want to be a lawyer, right? Lawyers have to be really
good in English.") And in coercive families, parents may require a child to
study harder in a subject the child is not doing well in.

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

You can bully such teachers by arranging appointments with them and
haranguing them, they are late getting home a number of times and
they learn not to **** with your kid. Also, you let the kid leave
school at 14 or 15 or home-school them and dummy the reports to the
state. If you're a great parent your kid will learn more on their own
anyway.

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

Worse, where
the child's love for and relationship with his parents provides a
motivation for cooperating with their desires, the child does not
have similar love for or a similar relationship with the teacher.
----------------------
Nonsense, the model of everyone is the parent.
It's hard to even convince them the teacher might not be nice
if YOU are!

I'm sure there's an element of truth to that, especially insofar as
children's willingness to give a teacher the benefit of the doubt is
concerned. But even so, I can't really see children going as far out of
their way to avoid causing problems for a teacher they hardly even know as
they would to avoid causing problems for their parents.

Ultimately, what a purely non-punitive parenting style needs is either
home schooling or a kind of school that is more oriented toward
cooperating with the child's desires. And in a voucher system,
parents who want to could experiment with such schools without
imposing their preferences (or their children) onto others. Personally,
I would expect mixed results from such schools, with some bending
over too far backwards catering to children's whims but others
finding ways to interest children in learning.
-----------------------------------
We need to ban vouchers because it causes societal schizm. We need
to subject everyone to viciousness so that they'll gang up on it and
change it.

The "societal schism" argument used in regard to government schools today is
almost exactly the same one used with state churches around the time our
nation was founded. But the prophets of doom were wrong then, and I think
they are also wrong today.

Opponents of choice sometimes claim that vouchers would cause
"Balkanization." But the real problem in the Balkans was that the different
groups fought each other over who would get to impose their will onto
everyone, gaining an advantage for themselves and imposing a disadvantage
onto others. That is what happens in the public school monopoly system, not
what would happen with vouchers.

In other areas of life, people can make their own choices for themselves and
for their families, and issues very rarely enter the public policy arena.
With education, government tries to impose a single choice or only a small
range of choices on everyone, and we fight about it constantly. I think
there's a lesson in that. If we want less Balkanization in our society, we
should change from a system that forces families to fight each other just to
get what they want for their own children to one that lets families get what
they want for their own children without forcing their preferences onto
others.

But if parents who use non-punitive techniques at home do want to send
their children to a school that is not prepared to cater sufficiently to
their children's desires, I think they should have two choices: either
the
parents accept responsibility for finding non-punitive solutions that
deal with the issue to the school's satisfaction in a timely manner, or
they allow the school to punish. Anything else is grossly unfair to the
other children in the class, and also to the teacher whose hands are
tied by both the school administration and the parents.
-------------------
Nonsense, kids who are treated properly are no trouble at all at school,
leave them alone as if you're ignoring them and they'll do what they
ought to do anyway and learn by osmosis! These are the kind who read
a book in math class and ace the test. I was, my kids were.

As long as it works, that's fine. I did that sort of thing myself quite a
bit.

Of course one does have to wonder, though, at the wasted potential when
children who have that kind of ability are held down to the pace of the rest
of the class.

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

Doan wrote:

On 16 Jun 2004, Kane wrote:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Doan"
Newsgroups: alt.parenting.spanking,alt.parenting.solutions,mis c.kids,alt.activism.children
Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2004 3:18 PM
Subject: "Parenting Without Punishing"



I wouldn't this far.


Parent without using punishment? We know. You don't have the capacity.
Many have it and use it. Some got it the hard way, but thinking and
learning.

So where are they? How have their children faired? Did they grow up to
be a Mother Theresa? A Ted Turner? Or do they grow up to be like you
and Steve ? ;-)

Doan
------------------
You'd be glad to have a kid like me!
And you never would.
Steve

If I have a kid like you, I would KILL it before it turned three month
old. Isn't that the kind of INFANTICIDE that have said would be OK
with you? ;-)

Doan