Wow – in my head, the default spanking is exactly two swats. The idea is to startle, not inflict pain.
Whoa, I think (with small fry, anyway) ONE swat is it. That’s the “startle” point. And it didn’t work with mine until they were about 2 years old.
There was a point, when they were exactly 2.5, when spanking started to seem like a good idea because I absolutely could not get their attention (much less get my point across). Problem was, they immediately started “spanking” each other - - - best to switch to time-outs. And shouting - lots of shouting. I’m toning that down, too; we’re communicating better now, and they don’t like it when I yell.
It’s a dance, the whole thing.
Now, when they do something stupid/destructive/irritating that’s clearly off-bounds and we ask them why, they say “Because is a good idea.”
I know people who do it. I can probably even find some long discussions of how it would work on the web and give a link.
You can negotiate bed times. Most parents say, “Oh, you have to go to bed for your own good at 7pm.” Nonsense. Most parents mean “Because I want time to myself” but don’t want to say it or don’t want to admit it to themselves. Children become tired when they need sleep. They’ll communicate this to you.
If a parent wants the kid to go to bed at 7pm for some reason (a perfectly reasonable wish in many cases, if you aren’t pretending it’s for the kid’s sake) and the kid for some reason doesn’t want to go to bed then, they can negotiate it. If there’s a warm relationship of give and take with the kid, it works out. If you have a hostile relationship that’s defined by “what we says goes,” you’re going to meet a lot of resistance if you aren’t rather careful about enforcing consequences consistently. I’ve seen both ways in action. I will say my way isn’t too common.
Of course, you may retort, “What happens if the kid flat-out refuses and throws a tantrum?” Well, such extreme, over the top fights don’t really arise in the few families I know that are somewhat like what I’m describing. Because they tend not to try to strong arm their kids into doing things they don’t want to do without any give and take and with the only justification being “We’re more powerful than you,” the kids never feel that hostile or used or desperate or angry enough to get their way at all costs. I suppose they would crack down if that happened. But it doesn’t. I think the more normal parents are essentially creating a whole raft of problems in their relationship with their kids.
From the child’s perspective, he’ll probably be pretty rational. If he eats too many cookies and gets sick, he’ll remember and be less fond of eating them to excess.
Of course, many parents like to say the child will ruin his appetite. Perhaps they are insecure about having the family together for a meal every day. But in that case it’s the parent’s wish and of course the child won’t behave “rationally” because they don’t want to to go to dinner for some reason–perhaps they aren’t hungry, perhaps they’re trying to defend their right to choose to eat cookies if they want (which the parents are trying to take from them), or maybe there’s other hostilities involved…
Still, if left to their own devices children will usually be hungry and ready to eat at dinner time. They have to get their nutrition from somewhere and hunger works well even without the interference of parents.
I can speak from experience on this one. I was never coerced. I grew up perfectly healthy and well-fed, eating dinner every night and not getting ill or ruining my appetite on cookies and candy. I’m know there’s many like me.
With a lot of these examples, the problems can be totally bypassed if the parents don’t get involved or approach the child’s impulses with respect and are willing to be flexible insofar as the children are too.
If a conflict arises, one child is taking advantage of the other, you get involved to protect the one that’s losing out. It’s simple as that. I’d try to explain how it would look but I feel I’m repeating myself.
I don’t mean to provoke, I do mean what I say in this case. Violence has a negative connotation but it really is what it is. I mean, even boxing is considered violent, and there’s mutual consent in that. I don’t want to sidetrack things, so I’ll stop using it.
Sorry, when I said “locking them in” I meant that, when at home, a parent who keeps the door secure ensures that a child couldn’t somehow sneak to the front or side door and run outside if the parent happened to be occupied for a minute or in the bathroom or something. It has nothing to do with punishment and everything to do with providing for the child’s safety.
I’m sure this is true. Most parents who have these kinds of problems with their children seem to me to be authoritarians who try to force their children to do various things but are hesitant to use as much consequences as is needed to enforce it. Either that or they’re lazy and self-doubting and don’t bother being consistent. Of course it creates an unstable situation.
Listen, if anything I’m not ignorant enough of scientific study. I personally know scientists and people who are high-level graduate students in the hard sciences. Few of the biologists or chemists that I know are naïve about the nature of scientific inquiry. Science is not a story of disinterested progress towards Truth. The scientific method is an imperfect tool. Humans inevitable clutter up and confuse the research their doing with their own parochial motivations, even in things like physics. The peer review process is far from perfect and sometimes stifles research that isn’t currently in line with orthodoxy in a field. People use science to buttress their various opinions, arguments (as I suppose we’re doing here in this discussion–I really have read various psychological works aimed at academics) and political objectives. Moreover, this problem is greatly amplified in the social sciences and psychology, where people are much closer to the subject matter and can never truly get any real critical distance.
Perhaps I know an somewhat unusual crowd who are quite intellectual, but there’s something to what I said and I could easily cite many famous scientists through the last hundred years saying similar things. While that view isn’t mainstream, it isn’t off the charts or unheard of. I can’t imagine why you’d be offended by this.
I mean, I don’t want to go down that road and would rather speak about the topic at hand. I’m not even really out to convince you or anybody else in some final way. If you want to look for more this in the literature, you can find it.
My example was quite clearly illustrative. People don’t look at this from a child’s perspective. They are relatively small, relatively weak, and their parents’ relatively huge and strong hands are hitting them in the buttocks. It’s emotionally shocking and also quite painful. But it was just to illustrate what I meant–the child is at the mercy of a giant. I don’t know why you criticized it as some sort of empirical proposition.
What’s more, if it’s really true that child feel emotions and sensations more strongly (which of course is true, and as WhyNot noted), then you’d think a spanking would hurt more for a child than an adult. After all, they’d feel it all so much more strongly.
Parents who’d laugh at this idea are probably not open to being convinced, which is a shame. I came here to discuss a topic, and as I keep mentioning, I know a few real-life examples quite well. If you’d rather criticize me more than engaging with what I’m actually writing, then we might as well stop talking about it.
That’s kind of the problem. What seems like a rational decision from a child’s perspective is frequently a Bad Idea from a more experienced and mature perspective.
As we say around here, though, “the plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data’”. I understand that it’s difficult to find more accessible, objective evidence to support the kind of assertions you’re making, because the subject just hasn’t been formally studied all that much. But it’s unlikely that you’ll convince people just by appealing to what you say your own personal experience is, rather than providing more accessible objective evidence.
While I don’t have children yet, nor am I a psychologist, I do have an interest in it and I have been around children (and their parents raising them) quite a bit through the years without working in any kind of child care field.
The thing you quote me saying there may have been a bit strong but I still stand by it. (I’ll explain it below.) And I do agree that you can condition children.
What I’m trying to say is this kind of thing isn’t teaching the kid about safety. It’s teaching them one thing: If they do a certain thing their parents will go out of their way to cause them pain. That’s the only connection they understand.
Why is that important? Even the child who is spanked and says “no street” isn’t ready to deal with the street. You can have them avoid the “square on the table” in the form of the street that passes by a house, for sure. But can they generalize that lesson? Is it worth it as well? There are other ways to ensure a child’s security that involve no conditioning with administered pain.
I even have an example I witnessed that illustrates part of what I mean. At a park a boy first wandered away a bit then ran from his parents who were sitting and chatting with some people. I knew them a bit so I got to see this from beginning to end. His father chased him down with anger and yelling and caught up to him before he got to the parking lot where cars were moving. On the way back to where they had been sitting, the father angrily upbraided his son for doing something that they’d already “talked about” and “we’re going to have a talk about this later”. The kid looked both ashamed and quite fearful. I can only assume that there was going to be some kind of “consequence” later. I must say I don’t know if he got spanked, but certainly the father was pronouncing “talk” like it was a euphemism for something horribly bad.
So what happened? Maybe the kid thought the parking lot wasn’t “the street”. Maybe he did understand that it was something his parents would spank him for not avoiding, but was so involved emotionally with running along on the grass that he never really became aware that it could be “the street” ahead. Maybe he was trying to test or rile up his parents. We don’t know, do we? Had the parents not spanked him enough?
Still, my point isn’t that spanking doesn’t work perfectly. My point is that the logic behind spanking is that children can (or should) be made to feel pain in order to avoid dangers that they learn to avoid in their own good time. A parent spanks in this situation because they don’t like the alternative of making the home safe and supervising and protecting the kids in more public situations. This is not good for the child. Maybe it’s good for the parent. But also poisons the situation more generally and there’s ways to do it that I think are clearly better for everyone involved.
…
As far as the rest of what you said, as I say, I’m not a parent nor a child care worker or anything, but I’ve been around children and their parents more than enough not to be naïve. I think there’s a logic here to what I’m saying. And moreover, I do have friends and other acquaintances who do more or less as I’m saying, and it works fine. They aren’t owned or submissive to their children, and while it isn’t as easy it certainly doesn’t take up immense amounts more of time.
No, WhyNot’s point was *not *that they feel things more strongly than adults, but that they *express *their feelings more strongly, they are not ambivalent - they only hold one emotion at a time and, most importantly for this discussion, they express many different emotions identically.
A toddler often will give the same display of tears, stamping of feet, screaming and hitting and kicking for things that we call “frustration”, “sleepiness”, “anger”, “annoyance”, “distress”, “fear”, “panic”, “boredom”, “rage”, “surprise” or “irritation”. My claim is that what you are interpreting as extreme distress is very often irritation or annoyance or surprise.
Sure, they feel things intensely, because they are totally in the moment. They are not considering anything other than the way they are feeling right now. But I don’t think there’s any evidence that they have greater pain sensations than adults - certainly they bonk one another or fall down with just as great a force and no tears.
I’m with you on the bed time thing, up to a point. We did this in another thread this week, so I’ll sum up briefly: you can’t make someone else unconscious. You can provide the time and the place for them to sleep. Ideally, this will coincide with a time that also fills your grown-up needs for alone time. I have no problem explaining this to the kids. But it’s not a negotiation: Mama needs some grown-up time, so you will be invisible and quiet in your room after X:00 unless you are bleeding or see flames. When you’re tired, there’s your bed, all ready for you.
So yeah, I’m with you there in that spanking isn’t a good way to set a bedtime. I consider tdn’s idea of spanking a horrible use of the term, far to the overuse end of the spectrum.
It’s this traffic thing we keep coming back to. There, you’ve found the other extreme that I can’t get my head around. So, instead of keeping on telling me what doesn’t work (spanking), suggest to me what does work. I’ll play the kid-role, and I promise on my good name as a Doper not to be false about it, I’ll only react as I’ve actually and honestly seen kids do. If you can get me to stay out of the street without physical restraint, then I’ll conceed the point.
So…here we are. We’re walking along the sidewalk, and I see a squirrel, and I pull my hand out of yours and run towards the curb. You…
chasm I don’t understand why you think they’ll generalize “too many cookies at 5:00 equals a stomach ache at 7:00” but not “running into street equals spanking”. Even the most pacifistic parents I’ve met will make exceptions for extreme circumstances involving danger.
There’s a name for the specific philosophy you’re espousing, “Taking Children Seriously”. Brain, Child did a piece on the founder a while back, but I can’t locate my copy.
There are these people who think that a small child should never be forced to do anything, no matter what. Don’t want to take medicine - fine; cookies instead of dinner - OK. The problems are (1) if children didn’t need the advice and judgement of more experienced people, they wouldn’t have parents (2) their memories are poor, so they’re not likely to recall previous experiences, (3) and their ability to relate action to consequence only works when there’s no time lag between them, (4) it takes time and practice to build judgement, and sometimes the consequences of a particular decision are too important to mess around. Kids need adults.
I’ll give you an example from this morning – my twins (age 2 years 8 months) play in the toyroom at the YMCA while I go workout for a while. Lotsa fun all around. I go to retrieve them, and it is time to leave (they’ve started serving lunch to the kids who’re staying longer, and we need to get home so mine can eat & get ready to go to preschool in an hour) but they don’t want to go. They’re having fun.
So I let them play for another minute, fine. Then I start persuading, with consequences and options - our lunch is at home, we need to go to school, your teachers and your friends want to see you there. Next they want to take the toy trains with them - absolutely not, those toys belong to that lady over there and she’s been sharing them with you; if you want to come back and play again, you need to behave yourself and put the toys away where they belong. Say bye-bye to the toys, kids.
Fine - got them out the door on their own two feet (actually four), no screaming. That time, it worked.
Now we’re in the parking lot and one of them decides to pitch a fit in the driving lane, where all the cars are. The cars are moving in fact, and my small child has yanked his hand away from mine and is laying prone, invisible to drivers, having decided to renew the battle on new turf.
Negotiate? Reason? Are you nuts? This is when you grab the child (holding onto the other one to prevent a complete revolt) and force him to do what he has to do in order to be safe. And, if you’re like me, you get a little exasperated (having tailored your whole day around their needs) and do a bit of scolding once you get to the car.
To which he’ll reply “Because is a good idea”.
I think that the important thing with these cites is to recognize that they cover the debate up to a few years ago. Please take them in the context with the other cites I provided. I just don’t think there is any evidence from studies that have suitably characterized types of spanking that would suggest that mild and secondary spanking is linked in any way to bad outcomes. I don’t exactly like this, it doesn’t fit with what I’d like to say about spanking and what I’ve said in the past. But facts are facts.
I can still tell parents that they should practice non-physical behavioral strategies first and foremost, and should only employ spanking secondary to that, in a very limited and specific way. I can then hope that they find success without needing to use spanking.
Believe me, if I thought that only the most patient of persons can be effective parents, I would have to have myself sterilized! But spanking doesn’t work unless it is consistent and repetitious, as my mother found out. Neither does anything else.
I’m saying suck it up, there is no “magic bullet,” and if there was, it wouldn’t be spanking. Kids don’t get the connection between their misbehavior and your reaction until it has happened repeatedly, all with the same response.
And a system of disipline that actually works, even if it takes 6 months to implement, strikes me as a solution indeed.
A few posts in this one.
I’m not pacific. Really not. And I agree with what you say here.
Well, when it comes to medicine, it is an issue of the child’s safety and of course you can justify using as much leverage as possible to get them to take it. Children who trust their parents generally won’t kick up too much of a fuss because they’ll believe them when they say “The medicine tastes bad but you need it to get better”. If they still do resist for whatever other reason, or they’re still to young to speak or understand and gag on the medicine, then of course you have to force it.
Generally, I agree with what you’re saying though. Kids do need adults, to protect them, guide them, provide food and shelter, look out for them in ways they aren’t ready to do for themselves yet.
The issue that started the thread is that it’s good for kids to be spanked. I think in almost every case it doesn’t really fulfill any of those things kids need from their parents. And it sucks for the kid.
Your example is a good one. I stated this in one of my posts (I think), that you don’t negotiate about safety. And certainly, once you find yourself in a situation like that, there’s no negotiation at all.
Part of what I’m trying to say is that revolts on the way to the car and similar things are minimized when the child is treated with respect. And by respect, I mean respect on mutual terms and with negotiation about conflicts that arise (though of course with exception for true safety issues). When they aren’t feeling constantly resistant and pushed, they tend not to make stands in the parking lot. In fact, you child probably was, in his own way, trying to negotiate through resisting.
Still, some dangerous situations are inevitably going to arise anyway and you’re of course going to pick them up and drag them to safety and admonish them or whatever else you got to do. But that’s a long distance from what many people have been advocating here.
Apologies. I believe I was confused by another poster referencing what you said to me.
I feel like I’m being talked to as if I just don’t know anything. Really, even though I’m not a parent and I don’t run a day care, I do have some experience with young children that involves seeing them in all kinds of situations over quite a long period with their parents, in more than one family.
My take is what you’re describing is all the same thing, really. The child is frustrated because he or she can’t act on some impulse in the current situation and it’s being left unresolved. I don’t know we can agree on this.
As far as the extreme distress I described, it was combined with being spanked by their parents. They tended to not act like you described after being spanked–they just cried and cowered a bit. During the act they were screaming. (I’m sure some children will act differently.) I think it’s a stretch to discount the pain they experience from spanking on the basis of this.
Well, the traffic thing is the classic example. What I’ve seen (and read about too) is when outside the house, walking down the street or whatever, someone holds onto the child’s hand. When in the house, ensure adequate supervision and/or have the residence secured enough that the child can’t get outside.
To be honest, I think a good deal of trust and good will between the child and parents probably helps. It would be extremely hard to do if the relationship has developed in an oppositional way and the young child is constantly trying to assert their independence and autonomy on these safety matters.
It works from what I’ve seen. But that’s anecdotal, unfortunately, so no cites.
In many cases, particularly when it has less to do with safety, a child is more than rational. For example, if you provide a kid with adequate food when you manage to cook it, they’ll satisfy their needs naturally. If a parent is demanding that the kid is adequately hungry at 5 or 6 o’clock or is trying to force broccoli on their kids by refusing to serve them anything else until they eat it, it has far less to do with rationality than the parent trying to get the kid to do things for some reason that’s ultimately irrelevant to the kid.
Well, I definitely think there are ways to do it without all of the spanking, and there are holes in the reasoning of the other side. (And I have anecdotes!). But I can’t “prove” it, and I don’t even know if one could prove or disprove it in principle. How do you measure something like that empirically? I don’t think it’s possible.
I tried to google a few sites that I read over the last few years that I generally agree with on this subject. I could only find one of them, unfortunately, but it’s worth looking at if anyone is still curious. Note: It’s not a scientific paper, but some kind of guide to child rearing.
http://nopunish.net/pwp-ch1.htm
What a URL.
Other than that, don’t think there’s much more we all can say. If anyone still wants to discuss it more, I’ll try to check back over the next couple days and respond.
I found one. In reading bits of my GF’s book (there’s a lot of reading there, so don’t expect me to be terribly comprehensive), a study done in 1982 (Embry and Malfetti, for a AAA traffic safety report) showed that children who were spanked for running out into traffic were more likely to run out into traffic when the parents weren’t looking than children who weren’t spanked. I’d like to find out more about that study, and perhaps newer findings counter it, but that right there seems like a good enough reason not to spank.
The gist of this book, and Hentor, I’d like to hear yor take on this, is not so much that spanking is bad, but that subsequent to it many parents tell the child to stop crying, get over it, “Shut up or I’ll give you something to cry about.” Or try to distract him with little tasks. It’s pretty much a pattern of being on the receiving end of violence and rage, and then having to deny that it even happened at all. And this very definitely does have negative consequences later in life.
Why don’t we strike rage off the list, because the type of spanking I’ve been referring to does not involve rage. Whether you need to use a loaded term like “violence” is, I suppose, up to you, but it does seem hard to keep our discussion clear. If you want to talk about angry and abusive violence, you’ll continue to get no argument from me.
Any disciplinary action needs to be delivered in a calm, controlled, firm and clear manner. I’ve seen many people screw up time outs because they feel compelled to go back to the child during time out and engage, console or make amends like you are talking about here. Of course, this totally undermines the “time out from reinforcement” that the child is supposed to be experiencing. My own research has found that, among clinic referred boys, timid parenting predicts increases in disruptive and non-compliant behavior, and that the reverse is true as well: disruptive and non-compliant behavior predicts increases in timid parenting. This is essentially the coercive process that Patterson has described for decades. Children learn that they can control their parent’s behavior, and specifically reduce the parent’s involvement in disciplinary efforts if they can outlast or overwhelm the parent’s efforts.
One needs to be able to select and implement an appropriate disciplinary strategy, and see it through without undermining it.
Not necessarily – and I think this is where people get into trouble. At least I have. Because kids don’t operate on quid pro quo. They’re irrational beings, and part of allowing them to be children (as opposed to mini-adults) is giving them latitude to be unpredictable and self-centered. There’s some reciprocity, true, but it’s on THEIR schedule, not according to your needs.
See, I’ve caught myself getting angry because I felt they owed me. The closest I’ve come to slapping my daughter (and I REALLY wanted to do it) was this past summer. We’d had a really fun outing, where I’d displayed tons of patience and negotiating so that they could explore on their terms, followed by a trip through the Drive-Thru for snacks (and a huge iced tea for me, I was dying of thirst), and then onward home for some outside playtime.
Knowing that I was tired and needed to relax for a while, I even set up their favorite paints (food coloring in old ketchup bottles). They emptied one before I’d even had a chance to sit down with the morning paper, so I delayed my thirst even further to give them a refill, and returned to our deck just in time to see my daughter pour a whole bottle full of green paint into my (as yet untouched) tea.
I guess I must be old. When I was a kid every kid on my street got spanked. Hell, my grandma used to say the old nugget “Go out in the yard and get me a switch!” (meaning go get a branch off of the bush so she could spank you with it) and she meant it. Don’t come back with some teeny tiny twig. I don’t have fond memories of those ass beatings, but I wasn’t fearful/resentful/hateful of my folks for doing it. If anything I stopped acting like a raving bratty lunatic. The kid across the street got spanked in front of the rest of the of us kids one day for being openly defiant to his mother.
None of the kids I speak of grew up maladjusted or crazy or anything. But I’ve seen uncontrollable spoiled little brats in stores/malls/restaurants with the parents saying “I just can’t control him/her” like they’re completely unable to discipline their child. I don’t know the answer, ‘cuz they surely couldn’t give the kid one of my grandma’s whoopin’s…trust me, nowadays my grandma would go to jail for it. (reminds me of the only line in the boondocks TV show that made me laugh…when a woman couldn’t control her unruly kid and grandpa asked "Ever try whoopin’ his ass?".)
But the flipside is I was in supermarket with a coworker and friend once and his five year old daughter. The kid got out of hand a bit and he lightly smacked on her the behind and said “Stop that and behave!”. He didn’t hit her hard or anything, it was like a warning tap. She didn’t even cry. But the next day he told me someone in the store had called social services on him. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Did you read my post 65?
Here’s a choice extract:
‘We had corporal punishment at my school in England 40 years ago.
The Headmaster could beat you with a cane for anything from fighting in the playground, kissing a girl, talking back to a teacher or talking in the corridor.
The staff could hit you (I remember one boy being knocked unconscious by the sports teacher), or throw wooden blackboard rubbers at you.
The net result was that we were scared stiff of the teachers and bullying was rife, because you never asked an adult for help.’
Do you really think that getting an improvised weapon to beat a child with is the way forward?
I’m afraid that anecdotal evidence is not enough to justify violence against children.
Why is beating a child funny to you?
Why do you think several countries have banned smacking?
Why have UK schools banned it?
As for an alternative answer, watch one of the ‘nanny’ or ‘child behaviour’ programs. Learn about time-outs, setting rules, giving rewards and being patient.
Actually we have more child protection these days. You seem to think that’s a bad thing. 
OK, agreed. If what you’re arguing is that non-damaging, controlled, nurturing spanking is non-damaging, controlled and nurturing, then I guess that I can’t argue against that.
I’m not sure what point you are trying to make here. Are you saying that such parents need to enforce stricter time outs, or that these timid parents should graduate to timid spanking?
Perhaps you should learn parenting from a more credible source. Like a sitcom.
I don’t advocate spanking. I don’t advocate spanking. I don’t advocate spanking.
I do advocate making statements about the effect of parenting behaviors on short and long-term child outcomes that are as accurate as possible.
My specific point above is that if a parent is troubled by intervening such that they give mixed messages or try to respond to noxious behavior of the child raised during or after the disciplinary effort, they are undermining the effect of the discipline. My guess would be that they have some anxiety about parenting and have difficulty tolerating tantrum behaviors, but these parening responses are quite self-defeating. Some parents are timid about engaging in discipline whatsoever, because they fear the responses the child will show to their efforts. So they tend to intervene reluctantly, and in inconsistent and ineffective ways, which I’ve found (and others have found) to lead to greater demonstrations of noxious and resistant child behaviors over time, making parents even more timid about parenting.
If you’ve watched those nanny shows, you may have seen parents who might send a child to time out, but then get concerned about it, or about the “distressed” response of the child, and go over to engage them or console them. This actually serves the purpose of reinforcing the child’s responses and defeats the purpose of removing the child temporarily from reinforcers.
I suspect that what you were getting at with your anecdotes about “shut up or I’ll give you something to really cry about” are parents who are more out of control, and actually engage in abusive or harshly punitive behavior. Shortly thereafter they recognize and perhaps regret what they have done. To then assuage their own guilt and shame, they try to minimize what has happened, console the child, and suppress the evidence of their misdeeds (e.g. get the child to stop crying).
You’ll continue to get no argument from me that this is inexcusable and harmful parenting behavior.
Was your post of such singular importance that I had to respond directly to it?
Well, if you have kids getting knocked unconscious, you have a real problem. I never said anyone knocked a child insensate. You’re exaggerating what I said about things that happened when I was a child. I suppose you think my grandmother was an ogre. Fine. She wasn’t and its your choice whether you think so or not.
Uhhh…right…what are you talking about?
Its a cartoon. I thought it was humorous. Theres a difference between a cartoon and reality.
Because you had kids getting knocked the fuck out? As I said, you had it worse than we did. Spanking is one thing, knocking a kid out is another.
I don’t have to. If you need a TV program to tell you how to raise a kid, maybe you shouldn’t have any. You sound like I said I spanked a kid or knocked a child out. I didn’t.
Actually we have more child protection these days. You seem to think that’s a bad thing.
[/QUOTE]
I didn’t say it was a bad thing. Just because I may not agree with your opinion on spanking doesn’t mean I believe that kids should be getting beat the fuck up. Hell, Social Services should respond to every call they get. But if you read my first post, I said that my friend had only lightly smacked his daughter on the butt and told her to behave. He didn’t knock her out or put her over his knee. (and knowing the family he never would). The problem wasn’t Social Services coming to see him…the problem was someone seeing him do that and automatically assume from that 5 second exchange that he was a bad parent. There are times when morally you have to intervene in a strangers actions in some way and times when its not your business. This was a time when it no one elses business.
Sorry. didn’t mean to make this 2 posts, but my cat was providing a really good distraction.