Gotta chime in on the middle ground…as this issue bothers me greatly…
There is nothing wrong with spanking your child on the butt with your hand, in a reasonable fashion.* Spanking with switches and belts is pretty much abuse. Slapping a child is most certainly abuse. (IMO)
I was spanked at a child, not too hard by both mom and dad…so was my brother. We turned out to be reasonably ok. No amount of time-outs or whatnot would have been as effective a spanking for me. I’m certainly not submissive. If your kid is timid and fearful, it’s probably not a good idea to spank.
But if you are in the freaking supermarket with a whining screaming kid who is throwing a temper tantrum and your idea of dealing with that is threatening not to BUY the child a treat, I’m going to suggest that a spanking should be in order. Possibly for both of you.
What would anyone expect from the likes of Joe Cool or Jersey_Diamond? Terrible people, like Fundamentalists, make terrible parents. Thier kids will grow up as malformed, ignorant and as evil as these two are, their asses scarred from beatings and their heads filled to the brim with superstitious nonsense.
Someone needs to come up with a fundamentalist baptizing pool that automatically sterilizes all who step into it.
Ya know, I don’t have children. Perhaps someday - not yet.
However, I am in school training to be a Psychologist. A crisis counselor, in fact.
If I had a child phone me at a crisis line and tell me they were being beaten with a belt, I would recommend that they were removed from the home in a second.
Swatting a kid in the butt when they’ve misbehaved is one thing. Beating them with a belt is something else completely.
And for the record, my mom used to hit me when I was a kid (hit - not spank). She stopped when I got much bigger than she is, and started hitting back. You reap what you sew.
P.S. Ginger - I’ve met you and yer boy - I can say with confidence that your superb mothering has gone a long way to counteract any ill influence from yer ex - yer boy is a sweety.
BottleBlond, perhaps you missed the part where most of us said we said HAND SPANKING IS OK.
I have no doubt that a swat on the ass will have lasting psychological effects or turn a child dangerously submissive, but Jersey Diamond’s brutal story of being beaten with a switch until she was covered with welts is a different story, wouldn’t you say?
Fucking sickening. I’m of the no-smacking school of thought because I don’t think hitting people, no matter what size they are, is a good thing. I’ve never found that I needed to hit my kids to teach them to leave stoves and the like alone.
But this is in the category of child abuse. I’m also at a loss to comprehend how if smacking is so effective that it should be part of the armorentarium of all parents or our kids will be nasty tantrumming brats why anyone would need to escalate to using belts and sticks.
And before anyone tells me I must have easy kids, bear in mind that both my kids are diagnosed on the autistic spectrum. One was extremely violent between the years of 4 and 8. Hitting him would have simply legitimised his own violence. The other one is completely non-violent and always has been.
And perhaps that was an overly harsh reaction to your post. I just took you saying “middle ground” as meaning the rest of us were saying to wrap our child in swaths of candy and hugs, when really ALL of us are on the middle ground agreeing that discipline is important, but leaving marks or instilling FEAR is not necessary.
Actually jar that was put in there for newsgru not you. OK? Sorry if you interrpreted it as directed towards you.
But I still think I come in on the middle, because one side is NO SPANKING and the other is what the lovely pair suggest is OK. And butt spanking to me should hurt, but not HURT. Some people who agree that a butt spanking can be ok do not agree that it should hurt.
And this:
Was pretty much answered before you asked when I said:
Chill…it’s just an issue I feel strongly middle-of-the-road about
Oh and, that sea captain thing was for Alice not Ginger
Hmm … not having been hit with a belt by my parents doesn’t seem to have had any adverse effects on me… I don’t run around drinking all day, I’m not promiscuous, I don’t club baby seals…
Some of my father’s siblings, OTOH, got real shit treatment and didn’t turn out so well (unless you want to argue that being a pedophile/beating one’s children for no reason is a good thing).
My mother got the whole “beaten with whips/sticks/switches” thing and that’s one big reason we never saw her parents much when I was growing up.
Want to teach your child fear, resentment and that physical violence/superiority establishes who’s right? Go with JD and J_C on this one.
Want to have kids who respect you not out of fear but because you’re worthy of respect?
Be a real parent.
Anyone can whip a four-year-old. How many can raise one?
On the other hand, having been hit with a belt - and other things - by my parents doesn’t seem to have had any adverse effects on me. In my opinion, people are greatly overreacting in this thread.
This whole idea that leaving marks is what indicates abuse and using fore multipliers without leaving marks is horse shit. My aunt could torture kids and never leave a mark. She raised a couple of sniveling moral cowards that are bullies when no one stops them, just like she is.
I think that this is an important point. I think perhaps the point some of us are trying to make is that a little smack on the ass for pulling a pot off the stove is different than the humiliating torture of having to go out back, cut your own switch and being so instinctually afraid of that that you try to run away.
It’s possible to be the most abusive of all with words, neglect or silence.
