In this thread regarding a child with excessive sensitivity to sound and repetitive motion (i.e. gum smacking, foot tapping, et cetera), Case Sensitiveopines:
Great notion, asshat. While we’re at it, why don’t we beat our kids when the clumsily spill a glass of milk? Why not pull out the belt to stop them from squinting at the chalkboard? Hey, look at that one! He’s writing with his left hand. Let’s tie his arm behind him, lest he become one of those sinister types!
Erecting a strawman (that someone is holding the kid completely unresponsible for any action based upon a potential attentional disorder), and then cutting it down with some good old fashioned parent-on-child smacking action is just such a simplistically appealing notion. Not too useful, though, in actually addressing the reasons that some children perneciously misbehave, but it’s a great excuse for those prone to violence and it helps get some of the frusturation the parent feels out instead of actually having to put effort into doing something constructive.
But of course, Case Sensitive knows better than professionals studying the field. What more kids need today is some good, clean violence. That’ll cure behavior problems without having to get into all that messy root cause stuff. Org knows it works so well in training dogs.
Brilliant, dipshit, arfing brilliant. Anyway, here’s a Pit thread for you to shat your ignorance all over.
I’m in the middle on this one. While there a number of very real medical conditions in children, there are also just some behaviors that can be rectified with a spanking. In the umpteen-thousands of years of human history, a smack on the ass has been a proper and useful tool of parenting. But nowadays, everything must be treated with either drugs or psychoanalysis. Yet, kids still act up. Catch it early, correct with a little negative (and a lot of positive) feedback, and it goes away in the overwhelming majority of cases.
Let the wailing begin from all the Dopers who feel that children should never get spanked. It isn’t child abuse, people. It’s a caring parent correcting bad behavior. Deal with it.
I don’t see how spanking teaches them anything. It’s negative reinforcement, which is effective to a point, but if you’re hitting them for not knowing how to share, it would probably be more effective to teach them the right way to do things.
Spanking is a good way to show kid’s who is boss, which is what they need sometimes, but it is not at all a way to teach them social skills. IMHO, parenting is 1 % reining in the little fuckers - the other 99% is teaching them how to be social, for which spanking is completely useless.
Supernanny has some great tips on how to raise children without spanking, but without touchy-feely coddling either. I loved her book.
That’s why I added the positive reinforcement comment. Sometimes both are needed. It would be nice if you could do it all with positive, but a little judiciously applied negative when called for is most effective!
To add to that: it’s pretty much universially accepted among psychology researchers that negative reinforcement is a very poor method of teaching. It is limited to simple “good/bad” criteria, where as a positive reinforcement is progressive; that is, you can link a string of desired actions together to teach complex or compound behaviors. With negative reinforcement often comes a number of attendant behavioral and emotional problems as well, including depression, avoidance, isolation, and atavistic attitudes. We’re talking about lab animals here; rats, dogs, chimpanzees–but the behavior in humans is analogous despite the greater social complexity of the human ape.
A single, harmless swat to the bottom of a toddler, too young to reason or speak, in order to get his or her attention is not inappropriate. But smacking a 10 year old on the head, or taking him out in the garage and laying into him with a razor strop are the things that Russell Banks novels are made of. It doesn’t “teach” appropriate behavior; it penalizes “bad” behavior, i.e. that which the parent doesn’t like, without elucidating what is to be expected in lieu. This is bad enough when the behavior is intentionally disruptive, as in a child who talks back to a parent to assert or challange authority; but it’s terrible when the behavior is caused by an emotional trauma or a neurological condition. It teaches learned helplessness–that the child is not only doing something wrong, but is himself wrong because he didn’t mean to do the thing for which he’s being punished in the first place.
But hey, for a parent whose had a hard day at work and doesn’t want to deal with a lot of “psychobabble voodoo”, a nice punch in the face or a couple of dozen really satisfying lashes, complete with screaming and crying are just the ticket to let off some steam.
I didn’t agree with what Case Sensitive said regarding Garrett either, but I don’t really think that was what he/she was getting at either. In that particular thread, I don’t see how any type of spanking would be appropriate. However, I am not against it in other situations.
There’s a big difference between swatting a young child on the bottom, or smacking their hands, etc. and punching them in the face or giving them “lashes.”
I get that you didn’t like the remarks made in the thread, but I think you’re being rather dramatic in your expression of that.
So you think it’s OK to whip children to the bone with a red-hot bundle of coat hangers because they’re autistic and forgot to say “excuse me” before they left the table??? YOU MONSTER!!!
And if we don’t know how it works, by all means let’s abandon the practice of several milennia of human evolution.
“I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.”
It’s punishment, not negative reinforcement. Negative reinforcement is the removal of an undesirable stimulus when the desired action or behaviour occurs. Punishment is the application of an undesired stimulus when an undesired action or behaviour occurs.
Indeed. Generally the subject is too distracted by the constant undesirable stimulus to figure out what behaviour is being rewarded by its removal. The reward period ends, and the distraction begins again.
Punishment, which is not negative reinforcement, is as effective in shaping behaviour as positive reinforcement.
Well, Case Sensitive sounds a little ignorant and **Stranger on a Train ** makes a mountain out of a molehill.
Overall I’m a bit puzzled as to why this needs a pit thread. It’s not as if Case Sensitive was advocating mandatory beatings for everyone under eighteen.
I can personally vouch for the ineffectiveness of spanking, having been raised on the end of a paddle. Spanking seems effective because the child halts the behavior. But the reason the child halts the behavior is only to avoid the spanking. The behavior will resume as long as the child is relatively certain that the parent will not catch them. This method is only effective because the parent is larger than the child and at some point the kid will catch up, spanking will become just plain silly and the parent will not have established an effective way to discipline the kid. Then the parent just prays that the kid doesn’t veer off too far before their brain develops. It’s a scary way to go and I abandoned it altogether with my own kids. My parents raised four kids their way and I raised four my way and so far everybody is okay and nobody has done any jail time. The one difference that is glaring is that I am a lot closer to my kids and they talk to me about everything, whereas we rarely talked to my parents at all and still sometimes feel the need to shelter them. I know people that spank their kids and I don’t look at it as child abuse, but I don’t see any point in it either.
I don’t know that forcing people to behave by bullying them is an evolved behaviour; read Daniel Quinn’s books and you’ll see what kind of behaviour and values actually evolved among early (tribal) people.
There is no doubt in my mind that forcing people to fall in line by teaching them that “Might Makes Right” works, I just don’t know how wise it is to take that approach. That’s all.
I never got spanked, but I did see my brother get it upon occasion. The spanking was always prefaced with a statement about how he screwed up and what behavior was appropriate. I can safely say my brother never set fire to the brush pile in the back garden after that. He also stopped tormenting me by calling me names, and did stop writing on the coach house wall [spanking, and repainting there…]
