Actually, I wasn’t.
(highlighting mine)
The desired behavior is for the child to not commit action xyz.
Child commits action xyz
Child receives swats
Child avoids swats in the future by not committing action xyz again, thereby strengthening the desired behavior.
On the other hand in “ye olden days” parents & administators often backed teachers who took corporal punishment way too far (like shoving a child’s head through the wall), or overstepped their authority (like ignoring a doctor’s note resulting in a rebroken limb). Both of those things happened to my uncles, my grandmother did not back the teacher and was treated like she was hysterical by the administration when she complained. The whole “back the teacher not matter what or else your kids will loose all respect for authority” attitude allowed all manner of abusive shit to go down.
Child-beating does not take a negative condition away, and its purpose is not to strengthen a behavior. It adds a negative condition (pain) in order to weaken certain behavior (whatever led the caregiver to beat the child). Which your own cite correctly calls punishment.
Even if you subscribe to the archaic practice of hitting your kids, you should be averse to having others do it. Most parents have actually met very few of their childrens’ teachers. The thought of a parent being okay with a relative stranger (at least to them) striking their kids seems even more disturbing than the thought of the parent doing it himself. My dad would spank (as sparingly and judiciously as I suppose you could expect) but he wouldn’t have tolerated anyone else doing it.
It may seem absurd to take the position “if anybody’s going to hit my kid it’s going to be me”, but I guess it makes some sense if you accept corporal punishment in principle.
Negative reinforcement requires removing a negative stimulus that pre-existed the undesirable behavior. It doesn’t mean adding a punishment as a result of the undesirable behavior then removing it again once the undesirable behavior stops. What you’re describing is positive punishment.
Nobody has said anything about child-beating. The topic is corporal punishment. Getting a couple of pops on the butt with a paddle isn’t even in the same zip code with beating, but of course we have to have the blackening by exaggeration, don’t we?
The error you’re making is that “not committing action xyz” is not a behavior. The behavior is action xyz. While punishment may be good at weakening action xyz, it is not a very good means of strengthening any particular behavior. It may extinguish bad behavior; it does not teach good behavior.
Here’s a couple of study abstracts–it doesn’t need to be blackened by exaggeration, it’s quite bad enough on its own:
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2012/06/27/peds.2011-2947 – after specifically excluding physical abuse and other abuse, physical punishment still increases risk for mental disorders.
http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/bul-1284539.pdf – “Ten of the 11 meta-analyses indicate parental corporal punishment is associated with the following undesirable behaviors and experiences: decreased moral internalization, increased child aggression, increased child delinquent and antisocial behavior, decreased quality of relationship between parent and child, decreased child mental health, increased risk of being a victim of physical abuse, increased adult aggression, increased adult criminal and antisocial behavior, decreased adult mental health, and increased risk of abusing own child or spouse. Corporal punishment was associated with only one desirable behavior, namely, increased immediate compliance (whether immediate compliance constitutes a meaningful desirable behavior is qualified below).”
This is consistent with studies (which I’ve linked) that show the only potentially positive result of corporal punishment is immediate compliance.
Which is completely negated by how the few modern schools (at least in the US) administer CP. Teachers can’t just summarily hit their students in from of the rest of the class. Generally only administrators administer CP, it has to be done in private (with none of the opposite-sex present), every disiplinary method must be tried first, parents often have to be given advance warning, CP can’t be administered if the student resists, can’t leave a mark or cause real physical pain, can’t make the student undress or use a paddle, etc.
I suppose that technically, “making a big deal out of it and faffing about for half the day” technically interrupts the problem behavior, making it still work for “immediate compliance”.
Hitting someone with a board in order to cause pain is literally a beating, and it if it is being done to a child it is literally child-beating.
My kids are in Texas schools (6th and 10th grades), and I’ve never heard anything about corporal punishment here. I had assumed that it’s not allowed anymore. Do you have a cite showing that it’s allowed? I ask because your statement is so contrary to my experience.
It’s legal in the state. It may be that your school district decided against it.
Wow - in Richardson schools, where my kids are, it’s prohibited. I’d be shocked if it were allowed here. But I’m shocked that it’s allowed anywhere.