I mentioned at a recent gathering of Dopers that my 6 year-old stepdaughter likes violent movies, that she had recently watched and enjoyed ‘Blade’ and that ‘The Thirteenth Warrior’ is one of her favorite movies. My wife later got onto me for that, saying that some people think that’s bad parenting and some people would even consider it something to report to CPS. I started wondering how many people honestly believe that it is harmful for a child to watch violent movies. I’m not talking horror movies here, she doesn’t let her watch those, but we don’t see anything wrong with her watching violent action movies.
It depends on who you ask.
I tok my son to a whole string of therapists when we were tyring to deal with his anger issues. Not violent tendencies. Anger.
One told me violent movies and even things like the Power Rangers were bad and we should go so far as to take all his Power Ranger toys away from him and not even let him play cowboy.
The next one was “concerned” because his art depicted aliens. :rolleyes: He had watched Independence Day the night before and watches the X-Files with us.
The last one told us that was all a lot of crap and there wasn’t enough evidence linking anger or even violence in preschoolers to Power Rangers and the worst that would come of alien movies was nightmares, which he didn’t have. I tended to agree with him, since my brothers and I grew up watching whatever as long as it wasn’t “adult situations”. Our parents put there foot down on that, as do I.
We didn’t take his Power Rangers and we didn’t curtail the movies he likes. Hell, one of his favorites is Demolition Man. He doesn’t go around blowing things up and according to his therapist now, those things never had any detrimental effect on him because I always made a point of telling him it was pretend and Desperado is not anything like real life.
I wouldn’t let my daughter (who is 5 1/2) watch those movies. I think they are above her level of understanding. I think there is some violence in children’s movies like Mulan, Pocahantas, or Iron Giant to name some, that is written at a level where my child can understand. Maybe your daughter understands, or at least talks to you about what she doesn’t. I’ve seen some other things you’ve written about her, so I know you care very much for her, and don’t think you would let her watch those movies if she could’t handle them.
Do I think it’s wrong? No. It could even be argued that it’s helpful. Fear, conflict and violence are facts of life, and something every school-age kid needs to know how to deal with, because they WILL encounter it in school. When I was young, I read so-called “mature-audience” books and saw more than a few R-rated movies, and they helped me out a lot as they gave me the chance to think about and deal with these “adult themes” (what a horrible misnomer) without having to do so in the hurt, bewildered heat of the moment. The books especially…don’t underestimate the power of good fiction.
Human conflict is something most kids “can understand” quite well, as they live with it every day. I hate this myth that some people try to perpetuate, that children live in such an innocent, sheltered world…bullshit. You will never find more callously brutal and cruel creatures than children to each other.
She asked a lot of questions while we were watching Blade, mostly ‘Why is he doing that’ type of questions, and stuff about the nature of vampires. She only got visibly upset in one part, where Blade is visited by his now-vampiric mother right before he is to be sacrificed to summon La Magra, because she thought his mother should have saved him (I explained that she wasn’t really the same person anymore since she had been a vampire for 30 years). Violent scenes don’t seem to bother her, the parts of movies that bother her always seem to be family-related, like when Maximus finds his dead wife and son in Gladiator.
The way her mother and I see it, she’s going to see violent movies eventually anyway, and she’s old enough to distinguish between fantasy and reality, so it’s better for her to watch them when we are there to explain things to her than if she were to sneak off and watch them alone or with friends. We see violence as part of the world and try not to sugar-coat things too much. She doesn’t seem to dwell on the violent parts and she doesn’t act out in violent ways.
Not wrong, parent how you feel nessesary. But I wouldn’t and my family doesn’t. My 10 year old sister isn’t allowed to watch X-Files with my mom and I. We let my other sister (12) watch her first movie with large amounts of violence only last November. (It was Die Hard) It was sort of a family party, stay up late, make popcorn, etc. (My family loves to make things into celebrations.)
This contributes to the over all values of my family. In arguements the first person to raise thier voice loses, yelling solves nothing. Violence is a big no-no. Oddly, we are a lot less limiting on what kids read. (Hand Jurassic Park over to a seven year old? Sure!)
It may be seen as sugar coating, but violence still horrifies me. It is still a powerful cinematic experiance. Voilence carries this idea of wrongness with it, that it is a failure of civilized processes. Would it still be that way if I watched it when I was very young? I have no idea.
My opinion is that it depends on your values, your priorities, and how your child reacts. Violence is one of those shady areas. Some children react poorly. For example, my boys and my nephews used to play Moral Kombat on Nintendo together (my ex bought it, I wasn’t crazy about it). They responded by beating the crap out of each other. The boys can be a bit naturally aggressive, but the violence level would immediately rise about 80% and stay there for hours. No more Mortal Kombat. I can count on similar results for a variety of movies as well, especially with my younger boy. He gets whipped into a frenzy.
Watching Buffy used to freak them out. I didn’t tell them that they couldn’t watch it. I didn’t have to. They’d clear the room as soon as they saw the opening credits. Recently, my oldest started watching it with me. He doesn’t freak out anymore, and we discuss what we watch, which for me, is the key ingrediant. One of my best friends won’t let her children watch Buffy with her. She feels that they react poorly.
I say to use common sense. Discuss what you are watching, whether it be a kids show, or an adult themed show, or whatever. Know how your child reacts. If he or she is singing “Kyle’s mom is a big fat b****” on the playground, maybe South Park isn’t something you want them to watch. If your child can’t sleep alone for a week after watching a scary movie, bear that in mind. You know your values. I have a bigger problem with gratuitous sex and profanity than I do with violence that occurs in context.
I don’t see anything wrong, per se, with allowing your children to see films your feel they are mature enough to handle. I was allowed to see Terminator 2 at age 8, but I’m probably not the best example. As long as the child understands the difference between fantasy and reality, depictions of violence may acutally be benificial.
It’s really in your hands. No one can say with absolute conviction that violence is invariably bad for young children. From your OP, I can’t see anything wrong with what you are doing.
I don’t see the point in exposing children to so much ugliness while they’re still children. If they’re still learning right from wrong, whay show them wrong on such a spectacular scale? Bloodshed and adult language, not to mention psychotic killers and other amoral creatures, are things they have all the time in the world to learn about. Why rush a child into so much ugliness? I just don’t get it.
And quite frankly, the Power Rangers and similar unadulterated shit on TV does, in fact, impact children and the way they play, to say the least. When I was a daycamp counselor, we had to ban all Power Ranger play and even ask parents to stop allowing their children to watch the show after we had many, many, many incidents of children physically attacking one another because they were Rangers. Good god. One little boy launched himself into a flying kick that connected with another little girl’s neck. Even though he didn’t mean to hurt her, and it was all in play, it was absolutely violence.
It’s hard enough to teach kids not to lash out when they don’t get their way, to “use their words and not their bodies” to tell others how they feel, and again, right from wrong, that exposing them to violence even for play confuses the message. Adults see: escapist fantasy. Children see: might = right.
Maybe I was overly sensitive as a child, but I am still haunted by two movie scenes that I happened to glimpse as my Dad was watching TV. They wouldn’t bother me now, but they kept me awake and tormented for night after night then. One was of people buried up to their necks in sand, while horses galloped through them. The other was of a man getting his hat nailed to his forehead. Blah! Those were only two scenes! I can’t imagine what taking in a whole movie’s worth would have done to my overly-active imagination. It made me sick to my stomach as it was.
To sum up: It’s wrong to expose children to ultra violence when they still aren’t capable of determining real hurt from play and the moral code that should guide their own actions. Also, violence is always, always ugly. Children will grow up in time, why rush them into knowledge of all the ugliness out there?
I think I’m more on Beadalin’s wavelength on this one.
I think even Isometimes forget that violence on TV & in movies is very different from real life. I mean, for a coupla ready examples, how many cops ever draw their gun in the line of duty? How many guys get into fistfights? These things are much less common (even rare) in real life, but they are commonplace on screen. If I forget this point, how can I expect kids to keep it straight? I worry that this contributes to kids having a ho-hum attitude about violence, that they feel it’s a normal part of society when it doesn’t have to be.
And murder. I think nothing of seeing TV cops sipping coffee 3 feet away from a dead body (you can see this every night in primetime, someone shrugging over death) but they don’t show the family members devastated over it. Oh, sure, one 5-second scene of the widow crying, but they don’t show the reality of family members dealing with it for months or years, coworkers numb over the loss, parents wondering how much pain the victim suffered… well, I could go on but you get the picture. The entertainment media portrays these things in a light that doesn’t always sit right with me, and in a way that is too harsh for young children. Sure, I can sit down and talk about these things with Cranky Jr, but the collective weight of seeing this over and over is probably going to carry a message of its own that I don’t care for.
I think it’s better to shield kids from violence in the media, where possible. I think it’s stressful for them to see people getting hurt–stressful enough that they eventually have to learn to think it’s “no big deal.” That might be a great defense mechanism, but I’m not keen on that outcome, either. Violence IS a big deal, and I want to make sure I have a chance to get that message across.
I agree. Where did this notion ever come from that children are “pure and innocent”? Doesn’t anyone remember what happened in “Lord of the Flies”?
Maybe you don’t want to scare the crap out of your 4 yr old by taking them to see Saving Private Ryan. On the other hand, micromanaging what they see on TV is not going to determine whether they become a doctor or a drug addict.
Beadalin - Maybe you should be watching your kids more closely if they are doing flying kicks at each other. In any event, might does = right. You teach your kids that every time you send them to their room for quiet time or take away their Power Ranger.
The problem with parents these days is that they don’t teach their kids right from wrong and they are afraid to punish them when they act up. They just think that selecting their TV schedule is enough to do the trick.
Ah ha ha ha, that’s precious. I kept quite a close eye on my charges, thank you. But a close eye does not equal physically restraining children on the off-chance they decide to do something like a flying kick. It never entered my head that it would happen. Picture the scene: children enjoying Open Play in the half-hour between being dropped off and scheduled activities. There are 20-odd children, 5 adults, in a big room that has two levels, one 8 inches higher than the other. Boy A decides to be a Power Ranger. He runs two steps (running inside is against the rules), jumps off the upper level (a step above the lower level) and with a loud “hi-YA!” drives his foot into the neck of Girl B kneeling on the lower level. How, exactly, could I prevent this from happening?
For what it’s worth, I don’t claim that children are necessarily pure and innocent. They do cruel, manipulative, and sometimes repellant things. But they do them not because they are rational beings deciding to act against decency. They do such things because they haven’t learned any better. It is hard work to teach a child to cope with life via non-violence. When they finally get it through their heads that hitting/kicking/biting/scratching is unacceptable, they move onto verbal means. Then it’s a whole new battle to teach them that screaming/insulting/heckling/etc. are unacceptable. If you do your job right, they finally have that notion down by the time they are adults. Some never get it. Most do.
That’s a load of crap. Children are not mini-adults, and they don’t think about things the way adults do. They are not rational creatures. Discipline does not mean imposing my will onto a child purely to get my way. Discipline is a means to imparting a valuable lesson, for example, that kicking another person in the neck is a Bad Idea. And by might, I think it’s pretty clear that I meant physical force as a means of getting one’s way. If the only way I could teach a kid not to kick someone was by spanking them, then I might agree with your point. By sending them to their room or revoking privileges, I merely teach that actions have consequences.
Lord of the Flies, by the way, is not a documentary. Interesting that you bring it up as evidence when one of the key points to this discussion is at what age we develop the ability to distinguish fact from fiction.
This is mind boggling. Do you remember nothing of your own childhood? Did you ever, in your conscious memory, have trouble “determining real from play”? Do you not remember the very rational, calculating thoughts you had as a child?
I truly cannot imagine the kind of naieve, sheltered life that must be necessary to actually believe something like this…I did not think it was possible. Guess what…in a child’s world, might IS right. That’s not coming from any movie, comic book, music, or TV show…that’s coming from their every day life. The school bully gets what he wants, and is not hurt (physical, mental, whatever) because he’s strong enough to hurt others first. And, thanks to delusional attitudes like your own, said bully suffers absolutely no retribution from the adult world. “Oh, he’s just playing”, “Boys will be boys”, “It’s just an accident”, etc, etc…not on your life. No, they don’t work by adult rules, because they have their own world, with their own rules. They abandon adult rules because adults abandon them, by using such idiotic phrases above (be very careful about being patronizing: you can piss away all respect you might have as an authority figure in an instant) and so, when the adults show a total lack of understanding, and willingness to actually do anything, the children come to realize they have to fend for themselves…and to do that, they need might. Physical, psychological, social, whatever…they must be strong, or they will be stomped all over by those that are. Might IS right in a kid’s world. It’s ALL about what they can get, what can help keep them from being hurt. You manipulate who you need to and work to limit the manipulations of other. It’s an extremely calculated war, make no mistake, it is no “game”.
Do not underestimate how sharp a child’s understanding of a situation, and particularly of you and others, may be. You dismiss them at the peril of being relegated to the same category as the average adult: an irrelevant, ignorant pawn in their world, to be worked around or exploited as necessary to forward their own aims.
You think Lord of the Flies is “just fiction”? That no darling kids could ever be like that? Then I must say, it is you that is having problems recognizing what is real and what is not. A story can be wholly made up and still have everything to do with human nature…pick your favorite religious text as an example. I could suggest another book in the same vein as Flies, too: Ender’s Game. There’s a reason so many children identify with these stories. You could teach child psych classes with these alone as your texts.
I remember my childhood vividly, and the reason I’m so fired up about it is that I always considered this blind, patronizing crap as being what made my young life such a living hell. It was not the bullying, it was not the cutthroat atmosphere, it was not the constant attack-or-be-attacked, it was not this that really hurt…it was the total inability to be able to turn to anyone that could help, that understood. The people I needed help from the most, were the ones that laughed and shooed me away…hah, you silly kid, what do you know. Well, I’m old enough now that I can look back on it with the experience I’ve gained since, and I fully believe I knew exactly what was going on, and the books referenced above show exactly what it’s like…and still this cheery patronization goes on, wounding another entire generation, blaming this or that total crock of shit.
It’s enough to make me wonder that we don’t have MORE violence among children. I look back at my childhood, and I consider it a good thing that I had no idea where to get any firearms…because I just might have used them. When noone helps, noone understands, noone even bothers to LISTEN to you…yeah, you get to feeling like you have to take matters into your own hands. You feel entirely justified to cause harm to those who inflict it on you, because it’s all you can do.
It doesn’t have a goddamn thing to do with TV violence.
Part of the problem when people start talking about “children” is that they’re not some monolithic block entity any more than any person is. And that makes the question (yes, IMHO), meaningless.
Some children should not watch violent entertainment. Some children have poor self-control, are very emotionally sensitive to certain images, and cannot process.
Some children are absolutely fine with it. They have a firmer grasp of self-control for whatever age they are, are not as affected by images, and can process just fine, thank you mom & dad.
And many others fit on a range between those two extremes. I’ll give the individual parents the benefit of the doubt on having a clearer idea of where their individual children are on it.
Good point, Drastic.
Mekhazzio, I think you misread me, or let your own experiences color I said. I remember my own childhood well, and I remember on many occasions hurting myself and/or other people because I didn’t understand that my actions in the real world wouldn’t match how I imagined them panning out.
I jumped off the jungle gym with an umbrella, thinking it would act like a parachute. It didn’t. I remember nearly cutting off my toe when the axe I tried to split a piece of wood with (laid lengthwise on the ground) bounced off the wood and into my foot. Similarly, I think the little boy in my Real Life Example did not imagine that when he kicked the little girl in the neck, that she’d be knocked over, bruised, dazed and later crying. He thought she would magically counter his attack and they could fight in high style, like on TV. And I saw similar behavior many times. Certainly not all, and not even most, children did that, but the little ones had a harder time grasping which actions, when mimicked, result in actual hurt.
I do not patronize kids, and I don’t ever underestimate how keenly they are observing the world around them. They are world-class manipulators who can lay a guilt trip on an adult and verbally skin another kid alive by the time they’re able to talk. I know this well. And I have never treated the harming of another human being, by a child or otherwise, as “just play.” Name-calling is not allowed. Hitting is not allowed. No attacks of any kinds are allowed.
I’m not sure what blind, patronizing crap you’re talking about here. I laid out a specific example that very much resulted from TV violence, and presented my own philosophy about allowing kids access to it: in the process of maturing, kids learn what is and is not OK. They test those limits exhaustively, endlessly. By repeatedly showing them adults going far, far beyond the limits that the real life adults in their world try to set, you give them conflicting messages. “Don’t hit your brother! Pipe down and watch this show about teenagers beating the crap out of some cheap-looking monster!”
My philosophy is not based on some skewed perception that kids are darling sweet angels. Quite the opposite, as it happens. I do believe they are doing the best they can. All of childhood is a process of overcoming self-centeredness and learning to take others into acount, including their physical and emotional welfare. A two-year-old doesn’t give a crap if you’re tired. An eighteen-year-old (if all goes well) will ask if you’re OK and what they can do to help. I am sorry if none of the adults you grew up around helped you through your childhood miseries. I didn’t have that problem-- my parents understood that my middle school hell was, in fact, hell, and gave me good ways to deal with it. With the distance that being an adult brings, however, I am able to have more sympathy with the little shits who made my life so terrible then, and know that I was a more mature person than they were. To me, maturity is about empathy.
Which brings me, after much long-windedness, back to the OP:
Violent movies/TV at a young age often gives kids the impression that violence solves problems, or is at least hilariously entertaining. Adults work throughout a kid’s childhood to teach just the opposite. I believe violence is ugly and I sure as hell want children to learn to see it that way, too.
MEKHAZZIO –
Fortunately, the sort of conflict and the level of violence we see in the average “action” flick is not the same as we encounter in real life. I have never had anyone attempt to cut off my head with a sword. I have never come across burned bodies hanging in trees. I have never seen anyone’s brains blown out the back of their head. I personally don’t think my (hypothetical) kids need to see that at a tender age just because someone might punch them in the nose on the playground.
First, I think it’s inappropriate to state that someone is deluded or stupid just because they disagree with you. This isn’t the Pit. Second, I don’t think I would have been “rational” enough as a young child to understand that while it doesn’t appear to hurt Jackie Chan to be hit with a chair, it might hurt my brother. Third, and as already noted, I think it’s difficult to expect a child to accept that while actual acts of the mildest violence are not acceptable from him, simulated acts of extreme violence are acceptable on TV. Six of seven strikes me as a little young to have to absorb lessons about double standards.
Not in my childhood world and not in my kids’ if I have anything to say about it. I was not allowed to hit, kick, pull hair, or otherwise hurt my siblings or my classmates. If I did, I was punished. I might have occasionally gotten away with it anyway, but I was under no illusion that I was in the “right.”
This does not follow. The fact that a bully may be the assailant (“hurt others first”) does not mean his actions will not have, or should not have, consequences.
No one has said anything like this. To the contrary, what BEADALIN clearly said was that violence was NOT to be tolerated. This is not a “boys will be boys” attitude; this is a “there is no excuse for violence” attitude.
This is absolute nonsense, from first to last. If your childhood left you feeling “abandoned” by the adults who had responsibility for your safety and well-being, then I feel sorry for you. But you have no right to say that this is every child’s experience, or necessarily must be. It wasn’t mine. It won’t be my kids’.
Physical, psychological, and social strength are not incompatible with restraint and reason. A child who is bigger than every other kid in her class must be taught that she cannot simply take what she wants, because that is not how we act in a civilized society. She is unlikely to learn that lesson from Boyz In The Hood.
Baloney, baloney, baloney! Childhood is a long process of socializing a child into the world in which he or she will be living – which in our society is a world of law, where people are not allowed to just take what they want and where might is not right. My childhood was not a “war” and, again, if yours was, then I pity you.
Do not presume to tell others how they should raise their kids, or that they do not understand their own kids, or that they underestimate their own kids. Again, if that was your childhood – sucks to be you. But to extrapolate indefensible absolute truths from your own experience or opinions is indefensible – and highly insulting to parents who are doing their best to raise children who do not believe that violence is a problem-solving tool or that their only choices are “exploit, or be exploited.”
Um, Lord of the Flies is by definition “just fiction.” Even if it were not, a worst case scenario of the basest of human nature would not be a blueprint of how all of us, adult and child, must automatically act.
Again, I pity you. That does not mean that a person who is attempting to raise a child civilly and to protect that child from violence and inappropriate materials is “patronizing” the child or making their childhood “a living hell.” Under what justification can you extrapolate your own experiences to be what everyone must experience? Because my childhood was far, far different and you have NO RIGHT to tell me it was not valuable, or that my parents did not do right by me by doing their best to raise me to know right from wrong and to the former and not the latter. I agree that someone’s childhood was a “crock of shit,” but I don’t think it was mine. Or BEADALIN’s. Or BEADALIN’s kids’.
Again, your poor experience hardly proves this. My limited experience is as follows: I was a nanny for a four-year-old and a six-year-old who LOVED Power Rangers. But they were not allowed to watch the show. Why? Because any viewing of it would result in an afternoon long kick-fest of each other, since that’s what they saw the Power Rangers do. Do you think a four-year-old understands the concept of “pulling a punch” for the camera? No. He sees people solving problems through violence – people being admired for doing so – and he thinks that violence or force is an okay way to solve a problem. Which, in my world, it ain’t.
As far as the OP is concerned, I think that there is time enough for children to learn that there is ugliness and violence and death in the world. I would not choose to expose my small children to it and, if I did, I would not imagine for a second that I was doing them a favor by doing so. That said, I think every parent has to make his or her own decisions about what is appropriate viewing material for his or her own children and that no one should have the right to make that decision for them.
“I believe violence is ugly and I sure as hell want children to learn to see it that way, too.”
Amen, Beadalin.
I’m going to do my best to keep my kids away from violent movies and TV for quite a while. (They are 2 and 4 right now.) My feeling, from observing my own kids, is that they experience the world much more intensely than adults do. We don’t have a TV, so my daughter has typically only experienced an hour or so of PBS on the days she was at the babysitter. Once, when we were stuck in the waiting room at the hospital, she saw a few minutes of a Disney film that involved a crazy old man shooting a paintball gun at some kids. We had to explain that to her over and over for the next month, going deeply into the man’s possible motivations, and whether the kids were hurt or scared, etc.
Recently in a motel room she watched a few minuites of Tarzan. As luck would have it, it was a high-speed battle to the death sequence with a leopard or some such. She watched the whole thing intently and then asked me to turn the TV off.
In neither case was she traumatized or even really frightened. It was all just too…intense. And I think that’s a good thing. I don’t want my kids to become like some others I’ve seen, who have to have the volume on every experience turned up to maximum all the time. I want them to be able to enjoy small, quiet experiences and stories that unfold slowly.
For her birthday recently we took her to a live butterfly display at the L.A. Natural History Museum. She was thrilled. We have a picture of her sitting very quietly on a stone with a butterfly on her knee. That’s the picture I want to have for a long time. I hope the day when only big and fast and loud will do is a long way off yet.
Well, this got rather heated in a hurry.
To a large degree, I agree with Drastic, in that every child is different in subtle ways, and any kind of blanket generalization is short-sighted and silly. To say all children up to some arbitrary age should never experience such-and-so is, in my view, disingenuous moralizing.
In general, though, I think it’s irresponsible, even harmful, to try to “shelter” children, to maintain some state of bubble-boy innocence for as long as possible before the cold waves of harsh reality begin to wash over them. Yes, children are sponges, but most of them (not all) are also receptive to guidance, and I see no reason why a careful, fully engaged parent wouldn’t be able to educate a generally healthy and intelligent child on the ins and outs of media consumption. Besides, this stuff is so omnipresent that if the parents don’t contribute to media education, children are forced to attempt to digest it themselves, no doubt with varying degrees of success.
I know when I eventually have kids, I’ll be talking them step-by-step through the various manipulations of movies, television, advertising, and whatnot from an early age. Whether or not that includes “violence” (defined however arbitrarily; Wile E. Coyote? Terminator 2? Faces of Death?), and at what age, will depend largely on my judgment of the kid’s character when I get to that point.
This isn’t “not knowing the difference between reality and fantasy”, it’s just not being very familiar with the world’s physics yet. That’s part of growing up, you have to learn these things, and usually through mistakes.
More like he thought that’s a good excuse that could get him off the hook easily 
It’s probably more along the lines that he was expecting her to not stand there like a bump on a log and get hit by his obviously-telegraphed “attack” (stupid girl didn’t even move!, etc) – this too falls under “learning experience”, not to suddenly involve people in your games unless they too know they’re part of it. This is another one of those things everyone has to learn at one time, and is functionally no different than throwing a ball to play catch with someone who doesn’t know it’s coming. Those kids shouldn’t be allowed to watch that awful baseball on TV, it might encourage them to throw balls at each other suddenly. 
Seriously: do you really think any kid old enough to “throw a flying kick” would not know that…gee…high-velocity body parts can hurt. Any kid that doesn’t instinctively understand this by the three-year mark has been sheltered way too much
And I still say that’s something they learn from their every day life the moment they get into a social group. I found out very early on that the quickest and surest, most long-term way to solve problems was to HURT someone back for causing you the problems. Someone steals your stuff, talking won’t do any good. Adults usually won’t do any good. Inflicting pain does REAL good, and makes the consequences clear for future infractions. I learned this well from when others did it to me…evil wicked TV violence had nothing to do with it (not much violence in Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood )
It’s nice and easy to make a scapegoat, but that’s not the answer.
snort Yeah, that really solves anything. It just provides a slightly different system to be abused to achieve what you want. You think a “zero-tolerance” policy means noone ever gets hit? You think they don’t find other ways to cause torment? You think they don’t use the policy itself to achieve that torment? Can, will and does happen, all of it.
You focus on just the violence, as if you cure that (as if it could be done), that all the other problems magically go away. Physical abuse is only one form of abuse, just one tool in the repetoire to be used as appropriate, when the gains outweigh the costs…there will always be those times, especially to kids, who know perfectly well how they can get away with it. “There is no excuse” might sound all fine and dandy, but so does “Just ignore it” and all the other unrealistically feel-good nonsense.
The problem is far deeper than that.