This is the part I have never understood. They say to cool down and not hit in the middle of anger. But that’s the only time I can see hitting my child or anyone, when anger takes over and I give in to it. Once I have cooled down, I would see hitting the child as silly or creepy.
When you say “spanking works”, do you have examples of this?
I can only describe my own experience, which I have described elsewhere on TSD.
I grew up in the 40s and I was spanked regularly. So when my daughter was born in 1966, I was prepared to spank her. She was so generally well behaved that no occasion arose till she was past 3. So I spanked her. You wouldn’t believe her reaction. She just couldn’t believe that this person who had nutured her and fathered her had turn around and gave her pain. I or my wife may have done it once or twice more; I do not recall.
Then my son came along. He was rambunctious, as boys often are. He got spanked regularly. Almost every day it seemed (although probably wasn’t). My wife and I had a conference and agreed that this wasn’t working. So we stopped. It was like night and day. His behavior improved suddenly and dramatically. His disposition improved. Our third child was never spanked. We now have 6 grandshidren and they have never been spanked. All 6 are delightful kids. What happens when they behave? Timeouts.
What did we do to discipline them? We sent them to their rooms, now called a timeout. And if they didn’t go? Then we started counting to 10. We never got to 10, though. I have asked them what they thought would happen if I reached 10. They didn’t know, probably thought nothing too dire, but that was a signal we were serious. We had no idea what would happen either.
This was our experience. YMMV.
You have to understand the spanking mindset.
Good parents spank their children and I was lucky lucky that I had parents who loved me enough to spank me. If parents didn’t spank their children it meant they didn’t love them. When I got spanked I was told that it was hurting him (my father did the big spankings - my mother was more like a windmill, she grab you by one arm hard enough to leave bruises while swinging away on you with the other) more than it was hurting me. When I suggested then maybe he shouldn’t spank me I got it even harder for being a smart mouth. The whole time I was being spanked I was told he was doing it because he loved me. I was told what a horrible, selfish child I was to make him have to do it.
I was making him do it because I was a bad child and he had to do it because he loved me.
My parents were hardly the only ones to think that way. The neighbors used to beat their kids everyday. Even if they hadn’t done anything wrong, it was to punish them for the things they hadn’t been caught doing. They felt it would teach their kids to respect them.
It’s that spare the rod, spoil the child mindset.
However, my parents never cooled off before the spanking, it was always done in anger. In fact many times I wasn’t spanked for doing something wrong as much as because I pissed them off. Especially my mother, she was a lot quicker to start swinging. They were always out of control when they spanked.
It didn’t make me respect them, now I look back and think what assholes because they couldn’t control themselves. They were a product of their time though, it’s what parents did.
I don’t believe in spanking for a variety of reasons.
One is that when I was a kid, I was spanked with pretty much anything my mother could grab…not just her open hand. Sometimes it was a flipflop or a wooden spoon or a plastic spatula. She would often spank me way beyond what any normal person would consider reasonable.
Another reason is with my son (who is autistic), spanking doesn’t do any good as he’ll just assume that if I or his father can hit him, then logically he is allowed to hit us back.
IF spanking works for somebody else and their kids, then so be it. Not my circus, not my monkeys.
I found that a swat on the butt focused my son’s attention a few times when he refused to be deterred by words. I’m talking about 2-4 year old, bookcase climbing, hot stove grabbing, escape artist here. Time out? I didn’t understand why a kid would stay put and neither did he.
What do parents who never use force do when a child is having a tantrum? Is grabbing an arm or yelling or physically dragging a child out of the room that much better than a swat? Some of the non-violent punishments I’ve seen parents use is a bit too close to emotional abuse for my tastes.
shiftless–when our son starts having a meltdown, we will do everything possible to help him calm down. If he’s at home, generally that means going to his room until he decides he’s ready to come out, because if he decides to start kicking, hitting, throwing things, etc then he’s in a place where it’s safe to do so. If we’re in public, then we do our best to remove him from the situation (usually back to the car or outside the building or whatever) so that he doesn’t disturb others.
Is ok for you to be spanked by your boss? or by a Police Officer? or by your own parents now?
If it is not OK for you to be beaten by people in authority over you, why would you think it is ok for you to beat your defenseless child?
If you can’t expert discipline over your child without violence, how do you do it in the adult world?
Just the other day, a guy was throwing a prolonged tantrum outside my apartment building. He was a not a child, he was a middle-aged man. He was also very clearly on drugs, or suffering from mental problems, or both.
He was screaming, ranting, smashing his fist against car windows, and knocking objects over. Basically, he was behaving like an oversized toddler.
Yes, someone called the police, who promptly showed up and sorted out the situation. I don’t know what they did to him, exactly, but I certainly don’t feel that a bit of spanking was out of order, if that was what was needed to calm him down. Heck, I would have been fine with some tasering, too.
I never understand these kinds of comments. Would it be okay for my boss to put me in a “time out”? Would it be okay for my boss to say, “I’m going to count to three!” No! Would it even be okay for my boss to say, “Here! Let’s have a race to see who can perform Task X first!” (This is a technique I regularly use with my child which often gets me good results without discipline.) No! Ew!
It would be infantilizing and inappropriate. Because… I am an adult, not a child.
That being said, I’m against spanking except (as others have said) in clear well-defined situations where reasoning doesn’t necessarily work and immediate negative reinforcement is needed, e.g., a below-4-year-old who is running out in traffic. (Another thing, I must point out, that adult discipline doesn’t usually need to bother with. Except, I see on review, Martian Bigfoot’s case.)
Spanking and beating are two entirely different things. Jesus Christ. (Of course, I wouldn’t be too broken up about it if I deserved an ass kicking and I got one, so maybe we’re not going to see eye to eye on this.)
Anyway…
I have given my eldest (almost 3) a couple swats on the butt maybe a handful of times (when he is egregiously disregarding our authority), as has my wife. Through pants and a diaper I doubt it feels like much of anything, but it works wonders. I spanked him once on his bare butt, and I will never do it again. I still feel terrible about it, even if he had it coming.
It’s my job to take care of him. In order to do that, it has to be clear that commands are not up for debate, because when I NEED him to listen (Stop running into traffic.) there can’t be a question.
Yet there are people on this thread that say they were spanked and don’t do it to their children. The message is not that simple, you could also say, it teaches you NOT to hit because you don’t like it when people do it to you.
Corporal punishment isn’t the strongest deterrent though, ostracism form one’s peers and society has always been a much stronger and effective deterrent but even today we have moved so far from that as well.
I was only spanked (and by that I mean a quick swat on the butt) when I did something dangerous, like run out into the street, or reach for the stove when I was really young. It wasn’t something that hurt, and it was more of a “get your attention” type of thing. My parents believed spanking like that should only be for really severe stuff.
(I did get my mouth washed out with soap once or twice. It was gross, but it wasn’t a big deal)
Also, those abused spouses – why do they have to act that way and force their spouse to hit them?
A spanking isn’t a violent act, it’s a loving act.
This. I don’t like the idea of spanking, but I’ve swatted a child once. On a tush covered with jeans. Sometimes it helps to break through if the child is not listening, and generally acting out. It gets their attention.
I think in an ideal world, it should be response option 437, unless there’s some kind of extreme danger (like swatting a kid’s hand away from a hot stove burner).
Heh. This is effective for a lot of kids. When my nephew was in the middle of tantrum age, I decided to ignore his tantrums. He went into one, and I went into a room and read the newspaper. About three minutes later, he stopped, and came in and asked if I was angry with him. I said no, but it was better to tell me in words how he feels than to have a tantrum, because tantrums sound silly. Never another tantrum when it was just the two of us.
I’m on the fence. Some people say that spanking teaches a kid to hit and that it indicates that the parent has lost control and not the kid. At the same time, what happens when you’re trying to get through to a kid and it simply isn’t working? Yeah, I can give my kid some time to “cool off,” but even so, that’s going to be seen as a punishment, too. When I did that with my son when he was a kid, sometimes he’d take upwards of 3 hours to stop shrieking. My daughter less so - up to an hour max - but if I have something I urgently need to do or other obligations (work, the other kid is doing something he or she shouldn’t be doing, etc.), I don’t have hours at my disposal to play Super Nanny and make sure they stay put until they calm down.
Regardless, I’ve never hit my son or daughter (now 9 and 5 respectively), in part for the reasons stated above but also because my concern is that a) if I start, I will use it too frequently as a discipline mechanism, b) dealing with a completely intractable kid is maddening - what if I lose control? And c) I DO want to teach them to manage their emotions and if I don’t set that example, how can they learn that?
I grew up in a spanking household and the two times I was spanked, it was very much deserved and I never, ever repeated the behavior again. As long as it’s used judiciously, I try not to judge other people if they do spank. I have no idea what they’re going through.
I think in general it is bad parenting to enforce parental authority with coercive punitive violence.
Having said that, I think there are sometimes (rarely, but existent nonetheless) occasions where it is useful for a parent to express their intense rage or fear by administering a spanking in the heat of the moment, and then apologize later. If there’s going to be a loss of the parental temper, a spanking is less damaging than a lot of other possible reactions & behaviors.
It can be a good thing for children to learn that parents are people, with limits and tempers, and to learn to take that into account.
This is probably the complete opposite of some people’s attitude on the subject. (There are many who feel parents should always maintain self-control, that everything they do w/regards to their children should be deliberate, that they should, in fact, enforce parental authority, that they should present themselves as infallible perfect people whose word is law, that they should indeed enforce their authority coercively by using violence and the threat of violence, and that spankings and other corporal punishment should be administered coldly as necessary justice).
I think spanking does have a place in discipline, but it should be used as a last resort, at the same time I think it’s bad if you spank your child because you’ve lost control and are directing your own anger at them, you should only spank your child when you are a rational state of mind and are using it as a tool of discipline not because you had a bad day at work and you just can’t take the stress anymore.
For the most part the only time I’ve spanked one of my children is if they were harming one of their siblings like when my son was hitting his baby sister or the time he pushed her halfway down the stairs, I needed him to understand that this behavior would never be tolerated and that hurting his sister was not ok, he was too young at this point to be reasoned with in a conversation about the behavior. Another time was when he broke my grip and tried to run out into the road where there was traffic. I’ve never spanked my two year old daughter, I think she is too young for a spanking, but part of it may be that she’s a girl, I guess time will tell when she gets a little older. Maybe it’s wrong but it seems like boys are the ones where spanking happens more often, maybe he’s just tougher, there have been times I spanked him fairly hard and it didn’t even phase him, he just laughed.
You know I just thought of something I find funny. Kids, even young ones are a lot more intuitive than adults give them credit for. I have witnessed how a lot of times in public children will act a lot more defiant and out of control because they know a lot of times their parents are unwilling to spank them in public because they don’t want to cause a scene. Those clever little devils…
My wife and I don’t spank as a matter of course, but there are a handful of “crash landings” that are automatic spankings. Not because we necessarily want to hit our kids, but because it’s pretty much the nuclear option, and we’re saving it for these behaviors.
A good example would be running out into the street or running off when in a crowded place. Both of those could be lethal or very dangerous in a way that say… hitting the little brother generally isn’t. Or monkeying around near pools / running off near pools (the 4 year old is in swim practice).
Those are automatic spankings- by saving spankings for actions of similar gravity by the child, then it gets across that those actions are NOT DONE, and will be remembered well.
That said, I’m not averse to thumping/flicking my boys with a finger to get their attention while they’re throwing a fit or doing something knuckleheaded, or sometimes even swatting them on the arm or back of the head (Gibbs-style, if you watch NCIS). But it’s not a punishment; it’s an attention getter that is deployed when they aren’t listening to the words you’re saying.