I can provide anecdotal information (for what it’s worth). I was disciplined physically when I was a child. I was also physically abused. I distinguish between the two because there were times when I did something wrong and was spanked as a punishment (usually hit with a belt). Other times I was spanked, or had my head slammed into a wall, because my dad was upset at something that had nothing to do with me (he was having a bad day, or my brother misbehaved and I was punished too “just because”, etc.).
It never led to behavioral problems for me, aside from maybe some typical acting-out as a teenager (which I’m sure was milder than most). I did of course have resentment towards my dad because even when young I knew being hit when you did nothing wrong was not right, and I’m sure some of my self esteem issues came out of that. But I didn’t become a criminal or anything. (Ironically, my brother who was disciplined/beaten much less than I was ended up becoming a criminal who has been in and out of prison most of his adult life.)
The biggest impact that it had on me is that I refuse physical discipline on my daughters. My wives (I’ve been married twice, I don’t have a harem) used very light physical discipline (light swatting on a clothed behind) and even that made me uncomfortable. I’m probably atypical but the main result from me being beaten is that I will never ever do it myself to my own kids.
I am a big believe in spanking, but it really does have to be used in just the right way.
It has be used with younger children. Spanking older kids 7+ is just stupid, it doesn’t work.
It has be as soon as possible after the infraction. It has to be consistent. Humans are very good at picking up pasterns. If little Timmy know that disobeying Daddy is always swiftly followed with a spanking, he makes the mental connection.
It has to be after the first infraction. If you keep letting the bad behavior continue until YOU CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE, you are 1) breaking the mental disobedience-discipline connection and 2) you will be hitting your child in anger. This ties into our last item…
You have to be the calm and loving one of the two people. Spanking in anger in attempt to hurt them is child abuse. I always hug my children after spanking them. They hug me back. We talk about why the spanking happened.
I have two children, so I know that following all of these 100% of the time is impossible, but we strive to get as close as possible. However, #4 is a requirement, if I am too angry, I just tell them to go to their room until I cool down.
This is why I don’t trust most “spanking” studies. They group all the people who spank properly with the people who just hit their children. There is a difference between the two and I think most of the people (in the study and overall) just hit their children in anger and expect it to work. No wonder it is always shown not to work.
I’m not an advocate of corporal punishment but it seems that if someone is “hitting” with the intent to correct improper behavior and is doing so without being angry, then of course. They are. And size has nothing to do with intent (I certainly hope you hold no prejudice against large people and don’t always assume ill will).
I have a 3-year-old right now. She seems to understand that she gets time out when she’s bad, that time out is something she wants to avoid, and knows when something she’s doing is bad (enough that she’ll try to do it in secret).
The problem is that she still does it, but that’s part of being 3. My older daughter grew out of that and is very well-behaved.
But it’s been shown to NOT help in correcting behavior. And who the hell hits a child when they aren’t angry?
That seems worse to me. You’ve had chance to cool down and think about things logically and figure out a proper plan of action, and yet you still can’t think of anything better than striking a child?
Sounds like intellectual laziness to me. I can’t think of a solution, so let’s hit it. Primitive.
Just to clarify, I assume we’re talking about a smack on the bottom, hitting a fleshy spot that will sting but not cause injury. We’re not talking about laying a kid out with a haymaker. The terminology you’re using seems to be painting the situation as the latter, which isn’t what I’m talking about.
In any case, yes you can spank without being angry. Have you never struck someone when not angry? I’m a (former) martial artist and I’ve done so hundreds of times. While sparring, of course, so the intent is different, but it’s the same general idea; violence can be done without anger.
As I said, I don’t do it, but it’s completely plausible that someone can do it without malice (and with the opposite intent in fact). It may be misguided and counterproductive but that doesn’t make the parent an abuser automatically. I’m surprised that someone might find that difficult to believe. People make well-intentioned mistakes all of the time. People used to send their kids to get shock therapy because they loved them and wanted to help them and didn’t know what else to do.
I get why some parents get frustrated to the point where they might make the occasional swat out of tough love. I don’t necessarily agree with it but I get it in the heat of the moment.
But I don’t really understand the justification for relying on spankings that are carried out with some degree of deliberation. My parents did it to me, and yes, I turned out fine. But I would have turned out fine without the spankings.
I’ve always felt that the whole point of discipline is to connect real world consequences with actions. Obviously, a lack of maturity makes some messages hard to convey. But in the real world, your friends, coworkers, or managers aren’t going to spank you if you lie to them; they’ll just not believe you. You can teach the harshness of losing trust without raising a hand.
This touches on something I’ve long believed: if parents, from the beginning, put effort into teaching their kids right from wrong, corporal punishment is less likely to be necessary.
Young kids may not understand big words, but a loud “No!” has its effect.
If a parent is derelict in these teachings, you do what you gotta do.
Does anyone here really think that a person who advocates severe physical punishment is going to come onto a message board like this and admit it?
:smack:
However, when that pro football (or was it basketball?) player was arrested for hitting his child with a stick until the skin came off his back AND SCROTUM, I couldn’t believe the number of people who were willing to admit ON FACEBOOK that this man deserved a medal, and that the kid probably had it coming. Exactly what could a 4-year-old do to deserve something like that?
ETA: The same thing has happened when videos of parents or teachers doing this to children, anywhere from toddlers to teenagers, has ended up on You Tube.
I was never spanked as a child - I was disciplined by lecture. And honestly, I lived in dread of them. It takes a pretty determined spanker to go on for ten minutes, but a good head of steam on a lecture can easily double that. (Mind you, if a spanking did go on for ten minutes, I’d probably describe that as a beating - way over the limit)
Anyway, my husband was from a spanking family. We used it a few times when the children were little. The rules were: one warning, one slap on the hand, then that’s it. I don’t think anyone had it used on them after they reached school age. Probably the most anybody had it used on them was maybe a dozen times in their childhood.
Out of the three of them … child number one, yeah, it pretty much worked as advertised. Probably not using them would have worked too. Child number two - well, time-outs didn’t work (in fact, I remember on one infamous occasion traumatising the hell out of her with an inadvised time-out and I pretty much swore off them after that) and the threat of the smack (though not so much the smack itself) was a lot more frequent. Child number three it was probably a bad idea, and I stopped a lot younger with him.
I will point out that the advantage of the smack, when you have multiple children, is that it’s targeted only at the misbehaving child - not a feature shared by other suggested consequences like “if you don’t stop that we’re going home” (and so are your completely innocent brother and sister who are behaving perfectly)
I too am a (former) martial artist. Now, when I make contact with my sparring partner, it is with enough force to let him know he was open/vulnerable in this location. Even with sparring weapons, there is only enough force to make him/her aware of the hit. If I ever make my sparring partner cry, I’d immediately apologize, and you bet I’ll be analyzing what I did wrong. I also don’t take off my belt and go at my sparring partner.
If I hit another adult because they angered me in the way most people hit their children, I’d be going to jail.
Now, perhaps I’m basing this too much on my own experience of being wailed on with a belt, that’s fair. Perhaps most people only do a gentle swatting of the tooshie. Not sure that’s true though.
I think the distinction between “spanked a child once” and “out came the belt twice a day” tends to get lost whenever corporal punishment is discussed. It is a key distinction, though.
Number 4 can contradict number 2 and since classical conditioning is much more powerful than operant conditioning number 2 is more important for effectiveness. That is another advantage of the timeout, you don’t have to worry about not doing it in anger or doing it harder than you meant to.
To clarify, tiers is not about increasing severity and there only needs to be two tiers. Tier two is what happens if the child doesn’t comply with tier one. For example when I was in the industry, tier 1 was timeout and tier 2 was either talking to the parent or sending to the director’s office.