Oh, he’s being punished. No doubt about that.
shrug It’s not so cut and dried as to be able to draw the conclusion that the poster’s intent was to dehumanize the child by using that language. To many people, that construction is incorrect, which is reason enough for not using it. There are plenty of valid arguments to be made – picking the weakest one and being snarky about it just makes you look bad.
An estimated 90% of parents have spanked their children. Do any of you really believe that 90% of parents are beating and abusing their children? Some of you seem to see no middle ground between ‘no physical punishment’ and ‘abuse.’
It’s weird to me.
I have 4 children and I spanked them all. Never with an implement (brush, belt, etc.) and never more than a few swats on their bottoms. They are all of an age now when I don’t spank them any more, as other punishments work better at this age. I don’t have a problems with people who don’t spank… if they can teach their children without spanking, more power to them. But I also see nothing wrong with it as long as it doesn’t cross the line into beating or abuse.
Really? That’s what you’re getting out of this thread? I don’t see that at all.
Cite? I think that’s bullshit.
Here’s a study that says in the US, spanking varies by region from 6% to 31% of households.
“Fully 90 percent of American parents do hit their children, according the 1998 AAP report”
“corporal punishment, which is still used by more than 90 percent of American parents at some point and condoned by more than 70 percent of the population, according to 1995 and 2005 survey data.”
I can’t vouch for how accurate that number is, but it’s all over the place as the widely accepted number.
**emphasis added
“At some point” can mean a parent slapped their child’s hand once (and never again) when (he, she, it, they) were about to touch a hot stove. I find this study suspect.
My contribution to the collection of stories:
When I was about 14 or 15, I wanted to go to a concert in Cleveland (90 minutes away from where we lived) with my sister, who was 17 or 18 and had her own car. I babysat pretty frequently and had plenty of money for pizza, sodas, a t-shirt, my ticket, and to help my sister with gas money. It was all on my own dime. But the concert was on a school night. My dad grudgingly allowed me to go but we made a deal first. The conditions were: 1) I had to have my room ting clean before I left; 2) My homework and chores all had to be done before I left; and 3) No matter what time we got home, I still had to get up for school on time the next day.
Sold. No problem. We buy the tickets and wait anxiously for the day of the show. I happened to not have any homework that night – must have gotten it done in study hall or another class or something, so I made sure my room was clean and did whatever other assigned chores and off we went.
When we got home at 1 a.m. – I’m in 8th or 9th grade at the time – I was stunned to step into my room and find everything. Every. Single. Thing. in my room tossed around. Like my dad had just picked up my entire room and shaken it. Sheets stripped off mattress and thrown around. Mattress on floor. Every item in my drawers and closet thrown everywhere. Books, papers, and my completed homework that was due that morning, strewn about.
Ears ringing, my sister and I stood there in silence. She whispered to me, “What the hell did you do?” I had no idea.
To this day, I have no idea what I did or what set him off or why my room was trashed when I got home. He never addressed it the next day, I was terrified to ask, and it was never discussed. My sister offered to help me put my room back together and I told her I thought I was probably supposed to do it by myself and I’m sure if I’d left it that way and gone to school the next day, it would have been much, much, much worse. I just set about putting it all back together. Took me three hours. I went to school on about 3 hours sleep.
Even when you make what seems like a clear, concrete deal with an unstable parent, you never know when or why they will randomly decide to renege.
This is also my measuring stick.
So, when you said "You’re apologizing for beating your children by using the laughable euphemism “physical interaction.” what was it that you meant?
No, I haven’t. If you think I have, you need to quote it so I can show you your error.
Strict definition I am applying to what word? Spank, abuse, beat - which one? And what definition do you think I’m applying to it?
That isn’t “my vocabulary”, those are words in the language we are both using (at least, I think you are using it). “Beat” is definitely not the same as touch, but “physical interaction” could, but certainly not necessarily, include “beat”.
OK, then, show us how it is done. You are in a Starbucks with your two or three year old kid and said kid is, oh, climbing on the counter. You tell him to quit, he doesn’t. You tell her that if she doesn’t stop, she will lose some privilege. She doesn’t. What do you do now?
I’m sure it is quite possible that some children are born with such mild personalities that they never do the usual running about screaming and yelling. But that sidesteps the issue - what would you do if a child was doing that, since you are against touching them?
“They” is plural, but just for you I used “he” and then “her” in the above post. I cannot promise to remember every time tho.
This is exactly what I’ve been saying. I hope you currently have kids so maybe some of these folks here will listen to you.
Exactly, and as I said you ignored the great gray middle of the road that was right there in the quote from Lynn, i.e. physical discipline. You jumped to the conclusion that is must mean “beating a teenager black and blue while screaming for them to submit”, and ignored any other sort of much milder physical discipline out there.
I have not addressed any of that at all, if for no other reason than I haven’t gone back to the original thread to see what Lynn was responding to in context.
No, that was your interpretation of what she said, and I think you are quite wrong. I don’t think Lynn thinks that the only options in child rearing are grounding/ no computer time, or a beating, that is just how you chose to interpret it for some reason.
Uh huh - that’s supposed to make me feel like you have been wronged? Look, YOU are the one that jumped to the conclusion that there is no middle ground between time outs and beating a kid up, those were YOUR words. If you have been misunderstood, nothing you have said here has fixed that since all you have done is throw more mud at Lynn and drool at me.
Since we are exchanging resumes here, I’ll say that I have far more faith in Lynn than anyone who comes stomping into the Pit, quoting someone out of context and - cough - twisting words to suit their needs. Which, if that wasn’t clear enough, is exactly what you did.
::sigh::
Let’s review the facts. Someone posts a pit thread with a link to a video showing a man beating his teenage daughter with a belt while screaming at her as punishment for dowloading illegal content off the internet. It is apparently not the first time this has happened, either the horsing around online or the beating. People in pit thread are posting things along the line of that’s a terrible thing, there are other ways to punish kids who screw around on the computer. People are calling the man’s behavior abusive and uncalled-for no matter what she did.
Lynn comes into the middle of this and says, bolding mine:
In other words, she got what she wanted: she deliberately pushed his buttons because she wanted to be hit and catch it on tape. He was justified in going berzerk because she provoked him.
:rolleyes: Context? I don’t need no stinkin’ context!
The only options in child rearing… after I said twice in my last post in this thread, but I’ll repeat it once more just for giggles, I wrote the OP about the one specific instance in the TX Judge thread, not child rearing in general. It was to address Lynn’s comments in that thread.
Which also include the following, bolding mine:
Straight from the source, she doesn’t feel sorry for the girl because she’s exposing herself to computer viruses and possible legal trouble, and takes it upon herself to say that no other discipline than corporal punishment will curb this willful, unrepentant teen’s activities. He probably should have taken the computer away, but yeah, this girl wasn’t responding to milder punishments so it’s right to the harsher punishment.
Continuing:
Translation: she doesn’t know what punishments have been tried, but based on what she thinks might have happened in the past the girl is such an intractable case that taking the computer away ain’t gonna cut it and extreme measures (i.e. corporal punishment or being shipped off to brat camp) will serve.
Aaaaaaaaaand somewhere in there she suggested exactly what is an acceptable, to her, level of corporal punishment? A couple smacks with a ruler? A brief spanking on a clothed bottom? A single blow from a paddle?
No?
See, I didn’t see that anywhere, which is why I made this thread. I wanted Lynn to explain further why she thought this girl was such a difficult case. In other words, why she thinks this:
because that’s an awful lot to read into a situation we only have a brief glimpse at, and it’s an emotionally-charged issue and someone who’s been around as long as Lynn had to know that posting that was going to get backs up.
Oh? It seems to me that Lynn herself said that:
Because, you know, it looks an awful lot like she’s saying that non-physical punishment isn’t going to work on this girl so corporal punishment is needed. Heaven forfend I indulge in a little sarcasm in the process. This pit thread, just in case I’ve neglected to mention it, was an attempt to get Lynn to clarify her stance on what she considered appropriate punishment for this girl and why.
Oddly enough, just about everyone else in this thread has understood me just fine, including some long-time respected posters and the pit mods. I’d quite like to know exactly what mud I’ve thrown at Lynn. I wasn’t one of the people accusing White Unicorn of being her sock. I didn’t call her a child abuser. She’s been around the SDMB from the beginning and I’m sure she’s been flamed a lot worse before now.
If Lynn should come to this thread, I’d love to hear her reasoning but I’m not going to nag her to do it. If she doesn’t, I’m sure not going to be popping up in every thread right behind her screaming “Whaddyamean by that, you baby-beating monster?!?”
And responding to being accused of lacking self-control and arguing disingenuously while keeping calm constitutes “drooling.” I’ll file that tidbit of info where it belongs. I’m not expecting to convince you I’ve been wronged because honestly, I don’t care.
O NOEZ someone posted an angry ranty OP in the pit! Someone responded viscerally to an emotional subject-can’t be having that!
Well, I’ve provided the context you couldn’t be arsed to find on your own. Hope you had fun pulling the one quote out of the OP guaranteed to get everyone riled up, at least.
Jayzus look at the size of this thing! Fortunately, it appears that there is only one thing in here that deserves a response:
That says it all right there. If you are ignoring the context of a comment or post, then you are using what people say how you want to, not how they intended. Remember that “twisting words to suit their needs” thing?
Oops, there is more:
Which, uh, had to do with child rearing…
No, that is not what she said - read the first two sentences in what you just quoted: “Now, the judge is clearly ABUSING, not disciplining this girl. And yes, that’s wrong.” The rest of it could have been in response to someone like you saying the judge should have given the girl a time out, or taken her computer away, I don’t know because (here comes that word again) there’s no context for what she said and I don’t know what she was responding to. Apparently you expect us to either believe that you have interpreted what Lynn said entirely correctly, or that we are all supposed to go wade thru the whole thread and try to figure out what you are on about and how it happened. Why you wish to believe that Lynn would not only advocate beatings but go on to say so in public, I don’t know but I find that so unlikely that there is no way I’m going to spend a bunch of time in another thread, trying to guess how you got to that idea.
On this one I flat have no idea how you come to this interpretation. I do think it’s interesting that you think that being sent to a camp for troubled teens is just as bad as a beating tho.
Don’t know, don’t care tho I think there has been quite a bit of press coverage on this other than that video, so it is quite possible she learned these things from other news sources.
People who have opinions that don’t, at least on first scan, don’t agree with those who like to jump to negative conclusions shouldn’t post?
This is your problem right here. You are completely ignoring any sort of mild physical punishment and just assuming that anything physical has to be a beating like on the video. In the case of the judge, that may be true, but it isn’t something that a normal parent should jump to as an obvious conclusion.
Well, those who agree with your interesting idea that physical punishment must equal a beating do seem to understand that leap of illogic, I’ll give you that. Plus the one or two who are only here because they like to troll me. However, I am certainly not the only one here who disagrees with your assessment.
I’d say continuing to insist that she is advocating the beating of children is pretty muddy.
You are the one that brought up the GSP with the drool on the tennis ball. Actually, there is a great example of how something is misinterpreted - I said you were throwing (dog) drool at me, not that you were drooling. Not sure how calm you have been tho - if you are, it definitely isn’t coming across that way.
No problem with that, but you should be aware by now that if you lack logic you are going to be called on it.
Again, considering that you did that very thing to Lynn in the OP, that is pretty funny.
That construction is in fact correct no matter what many people think. The use of the pronoun ‘it’ rather than ‘they’ or ‘he or she’ is also grammatically correct, but is also a clear sign of dehumanization on the part of the author whether they use it consciously or not. The pronoun ‘it’ refers to any possible object, ‘they’ and ‘he or she’ are reserved for human beings. You should also note that I was in fact not making an argument of it, merely noting with fascination the verbiage chosen and using a single sentence to do it. Failing to admit your error on the rules of grammar and getting all snaky about it only makes you look bad.
Uh, no they aren’t. For example, ships are “she” and I just used “they” to describe words; neither of those things are humans.
“They” may be now OK for use when speaking of a singular, gender unknown person but way back in the dark ages when I learned such things, it wasn’t OK. We were taught to use “he” - I can go back to that or I can use “it” since I’m not going to bother with “he/she” or anything else that requires piles of typing. Or I can try to remember to do what I did in that one post - use he and she back and forth.
Or you can quit being so hypersensitive. A random theoretical child doesn’t need to have you defend it’s (oh crap I did it again) his “humaness”.
Tho this does remind me that Mince had no answer for that original question.
And what will you do if they don’t respond to “physical interaction.” More pronounced “physical interaction?”
No, I think not. You’ve been dodging most of what I’ve said, so I think it’s time that you put up or shut up. Respond to at least the rest of the post you got the above quote from and I’ll consider continuing. Otherwise, I am just getting too bored with all of your twisting, turning and sidestepping.
Not a chance. I’m done spinning my wheels. If my arguments seem twisted to you, it’s probably because that’s how they course your brain.
But don’t answer my above question to me. I don’t need an answer. Answer is privately. What ever will you do when a child doesn’t respond to “physical interaction.”
Can we get back to Lynn? I think the curlcoat thing is covering up the larger problem.