Should have started with that one. However, It DOES NOT say that 80% of NY high school grads are illiterate, as you present. It says that 80% of the NY city graduates who are writing the CUNY community college entrance exam need remediation courses before entering community college. This isn’t a fantastic stat, but it’s also not 4 in 5 NY city school students being unable to read upon graduation. A direct quote from the CUNY official commenting on the story is that they’re unable to read or do math “at the college level”.
well lets go to the dictionary and examine what the word means and how it’s applied here.
illiterate:
1.a. Unable to read and write.
b. Having little or no formal education.
-
a. Marked by inferiority to an expected standard of familiarity with language and literature.
b. Violating prescribed standards of speech or writing. -
Ignorant of the fundamentals of a given art or branch of knowledge: musically illiterate.
80% of the graduates have to relearn the skills they were suppose to master prior to graduation. That would fall under the category of not understanding the fundamentals or an inferiority to an expected standard.
And they can’t do college level math (the skill their trying to learn) because they don’t have the basic high school math skills.
You’re treating those 80% as a proxy for all the graduates of the NY public school system, and then treating the graduates of that school system as a proxy for children in the U.S. 11,000 kids in a troubled school district are an indictment of an entire generation?
yes, the 80% represents those who actually get a diploma. It leaves out those who drop out. That’s another matter. But it is a representation of the entire city school system.
Surely the problems high school graduates are now having in college is not new to you? In California, 84 percent of students enrolled in community college are required to take remedial English coursework.
Spanking may be appropriate for some children in limited situations… as the research seems to have shown. Not all spanking is bad.
It is nice to look at all my own problems and blame them on the fact that I was spanked as a child (by hand, by switch and by belt), though, isn’t it?
Frankly I’m not resentful of my Dad spanking me, and sometimes spanking me very hard. I think he went overboard and I wouldn’t take it as far as he did with me on my own children some day, but I can imagine it may sometimes be appropriate.
[QUOTE=Lamia:
If they came up over and over again it should be easy to provide a cite…
If, as you claimed, 80% of parents today spank their children then what does that tell us about the effectiveness of spanking when it comes to controlling disrespect…
Lamia, do you look at the links I’ve already cited? Some of the stats are already in there, if you bother to look. But here’s two more for you:
http://family.jrank.org/pages/1624/Spanking-Prevalence-Physical-Discipline.html
http://www.chastisewithlove.com/statistics.html
And while 80% of parents spank, there has already been a discussion on consistency. One of the links provided above goes into a detailed continuance of that too. When applied properly, spanking can be just as effective as other forms of punishment. However, if you aren’t consistent with punishment, if you arbitrarily ground or spank or take away a toy, then punishment as a whole is going to be confusing and ineffective.
If parents are spanking their kids but then half of those parents say they don’t approve of spanking, that may suggest a flaw or inconsistency in overall punishment. Or maybe it’s merely a suggestion that while parents don’t overall approve of corporal punishment, they too have run the gambit and used spanking as a reluctant last resort.
But children, especially young children, need not only consistency with punishment, but immediate positive and negative reinforcement to learn and sustain appropriate behavior. All other arguments for or against spanking aside, spanking is one form of punishment that can be administered immediately.
If your child throws a tantrum in the middle of the grocery store and you’ve tried taking them home and putting them in a time out and the next day they throw another tantrum, perhaps it’s because they didn’t experience an immediate consequence for their actions. By the time they get home, they could have calmed down, and especially younger children might not fully understand why they are being punished for behavior they aren’t currently displaying. It’s like training a puppy…you can’t discipline a puppy for something they did an hour ago. But if you catch a young child acting out and you immediately and consistently administer some form of negative consequence, the child is more likely to understand why they are being punished and modify their behavior.
The lesson learned from spanking is one of fear. “I’m bigger than you and can hit you anytime I like and no one will help you.” Plus it shows that the way to solve problems is violence…a great lesson. :dubious:
I’m not saying spanking is never, ever warranted. But it should be extremely rare and the last resort and used very judiciously. I am not a parent, but I’ve seen plenty of parents raise intelligent, sweet, kind children without ever spanking.
There is IMO a HUGE difference in a controlled, level headed and rational act of spanking as discipline as opposed to yelling and using emotions or hurtful words.
I have an amazing intelligent and beautiful 2.5 year old girl who has - infrequently - had to be spanked. Both mom and I do it in as a matter of course… action equals reaction and we try to convey that to our daughter.
I have two kids in college so this is not my first time around the parenting carousel and I believe that discipline is very important but must be levied in proper, fair and negotiated way so that the child feels and understands they have some level of control over it and make their choices.
Then why did you say you couldn’t cite your statistics when I asked you before?
I don’t see anything in that first link (which does not appear to be from a reputable source) about how many parents spank today, only an uncited claim that “almost all parents in the United States have occasionally spanked their children.” Your second link (a pro-spanking website) says that “A 1995 Harris Poll found that 80% of parents surveyed had spanked their children”, but 1995 was nearly 20 years ago.
So why do you attribute the (unproven) increase in misbehavior and disrespect among children today to a lack of spanking rather than a lack of consistent punishment? If a large majority of American parents spank their children then odds are that the kids you see acting up at WalMart do get spanked, but you say in the OP that when you see these children you think about how they need a spanking – not about how they need more consistent discipline from their parents.
As a side note, your posts would be a lot easier to read if you would use the quote feature.
I know this is picky, but the word you’re looking for is “punishment.” Reinforcement is something you do to reward a behaviour. Negative reinforcement would be the removal of an unpleasant thing to reinforce a behaviour; e.g. “you’ve done your homework for a week now, so you’re no longer grounded.”
Meanwhile, the word I’d like to present is “anecdote.” You saying you saw a kid do a bad thing and not get punished (and you don’t know the child was not punished later) is meaningless. Where is the evidence that children, are, as a group, worse behaved than in the past? “Everyone I know” means nothing. I’m older han 30 and disagree completely, and know dozens of people who would just as quickly say it’s a load of crap that kids are worse today. My anecdote is just as good as yours.
I mean, I’m no genius, but I do have an ability many do not; I don’t see the past through rose-coloured glasses. It’s a rare trait. I remember kids my age 25-35 years ago, and a lot of them, including me from time to time, could be goddamned monsters. And not for one instant do I think my parents’ generation was much better, based on the stories my grandparents told me. Since the very beginning of time old people have been babbling about how “kids today are just awful.” It’s baloney.
Do you have a cite for this usage? It comes as a complete surprise to me. In my experience, the term “negative reinforcement” is used as a synonym for punishment, except that it includes weak punishment cases like withdrawing attention (which is an effective negative signal when training dogs, but hardly what I’d call “punishment”).
I was punished by spanking as a child. In my case, it was ineffective in correcting repeated, habitual bad behavior. It may have been effective at a very young age, but probably wasn’t necessary and frankly wasn’t common either. My parents were at their wits’ end and were doing their best, the best they knew how (and I knew that). It didn’t do me any good, but didn’t do me any harm, either.
I only spanked my son once. It was before he was my son, actually, before I married his mother, and was left in charge of him. At age 4, he was being incalcitrant as I was trying to get him ready for school. After exhausting all peaceful methods I could think of, I told him he had to cooperate or he’d get a spanking. He didn’t cooperate, so I turned him over my knee and gave his butt a nice sharp slap, one I knew would sting but cause no harm. After that he cooperated.
I see a lot of cases where small children are out of control and parents are trying to plead with them to get them to behave and it isn’t working. I have a strong suspicion that making a firm requirement and enforcing it with a smack on the behind would be better for everyone.
I’m skeptical of studies; as mentioned above it’s a terribly difficult thing to study, and surveys are notoriously inaccurate. (I remember a study that stated that the average American hetero male had had 9 sex partners where the averate hetero female had had two. Do the math: this can’t be accurate!)
I worry that our society has anathemitized physical punishment to the extent it has of late. While I believe that most physical punishment is probably ineffective and overused, I don’t believe that it’s completely without value, and might be very important when used properly (which IMHO wouild be rarely).
The most damaging physical punishment is when it’s in a negative psychological context, and that context is the truly damaging part. To his credit, when my dad tanned my hide, he never said “This will hurt me more than it will you,” but I knew he hated it at least as much as I did. While I didn’t use spanking to try to fix the recurring problems with my own son, I don’t blame him a bit.
You have a valid point. However, I bet that if we could compare classroom behavior over the decades, we’d see a trend.
IMHO that trend has nothing to do with spanking and more to do with the evolving peer culture among the children.
It may be used that way in casual speech, but RickJay is correct about the technical meaning of “negative reinforcement”. Here’s Wikipedia on the subject and here’s About.com, but the short version is that when discussing conditioning “positive” and “negative” describe whether a stimulus is added or removed and not what sort of feelings the subject has towards the stimulus. Behaviors are strengthened through reinforcement and weakened through punishment.
This argument comes up a lot in these discussions and I am not convinced. It is just as likely that the child could be learning the more simple lesson that individuals in an authority position can impose punishment.
I have no strong opinions and I’m not a parent, but I’d think the correlation would run the other direction too: people with mental or behavioral problems are more likely to be spanked as kids, because they have mental or behavioral problems. Kids aren’t unformed lumps. They have personalities and attitudes. You’d have to be a horrible person to spank a kid who likes to quietly draw, doesn’t act out, and the worst thing they ever do is sneak cookies or whatever. But spanking a little terror who runs down the grocery aisle knocking everything over and shrieking loud enough to crack glass is pretty understandable.
Time-outs, withholding of privileges, lectures, stuff like that.
None of these are trivial for a young child. Most small kids hate being deprived of socialization, even when it’s only for a few minutes. Things like no dessert, no TV/videos/iPad, no playdate with a friend this weekend, etc. register with most kids. Lectures are more effective than you think, not in terms of the words registering with the kid, but in that the kid hates to have to just sit there and listen for several minutes while mom or dad tells him why it’s important for him not to do whatever it was that he did.
We spank too, when necessary, but I can’t recall the last time the Firebug got a swat on the butt, which means it’s been a few months at least. It’s just not something we need to resort to very often.
Lamia, I’m still new to the site and haven’t figured out how to use all the features.
There are pro-spanking sites and anti-spanking sites. It’s hard to find a neutral site, and it’s hard to find one that doesn’t rely on anecdotal evidence. You can’t exactly do a controlled double blind study asking parents to spank their kids. There is also a huge fallacy, imo, in how spanking is defined. Lumping a controlled slap on the wrist in with an enraged beating with a belt is like lumping in the guy who pees on a tree in a dark park with the guy who violently rapes the woman next door, calling them both sexual offenders.
And the reason my last post doesn’t match my original post was because in the original post I was throwing out a theory as to why kids are such brats today. But after debate and research I revised my theory, and agreed that it’s more likely that the disrespectful or entitled behavior is due to a lack of consistent and solid punishment, rather than spankings as a whole. I’m not one of those people who’s stubborn and determined to prove my original ideas, especially ones based on theory and opinion, are always right and my mind can never ever be changed by rational thought.
But while I’ve conceded that kids today need consistent and effective punishment overall, I still haven’t heard a good argument or seen any convincing evidence saying that a light and controlled spanking delivered to an appropriately aged child is a bad thing, or something that will screw up their little psyches. Of course if a study doesn’t distinguish between the child who got a light slap on the bottom at age 4 and the child who was beaten with a belt at age 14, there is going to be evidence that children who were spanked grew up with psychological or behavioral issues.
One of the benefits of a properly administered and controlled spanking is that it serves as immediate punishment, negative reinforcement, whatever you want to call it. It’s hard to immediately impose a punishment for a child screaming or throwing things in the aisle if the grocery store by taking him home and putting him in a time out half an hour after the bad behavior has ended.
Something else a friend of mine pointed out- pain or discomfort is nature’s way of saying “knock it off, this is bad behavior”. While older kids have developed a super ego and are capable of understanding the concept of not doing something wrong for the sake of not doing something wrong, younger kids who haven’t reached that superego stage react more to conditioning until their superego is developed. Spankings take advantage of nature’s way of classically conditioning a child not to engage in bad behavior. I’m not saying a parent has to inflict real pain on a child- I don’t agree with that at all- but if a light swat causes an instant of discomfort to punish bad or harmful behavior, I don’t see a problem with it.
I’m not quite old enough to be a parent yet but I did have friends in high school who instead of spanking them, their (military) parents had them do push ups and sit ups as a punishment. I am not sure what the result of refusing to do the workouts would be (perhaps spanking). But I do know that he and his brother turned out to be some of the most fit teenagers I knew. We were all born in the early 90s, for what it’s worth.
I think instead of a physical punishment of pain, a punishment of physical or mental improvement might be better. If I had kids I would make them write essays or run laps as a punishment. Why do something that could perhaps harm them, when you can do something that will definitely improve them?
Ignorance fought! Thanks.
Timeouts are remarkably effective, especially when the issue is attitude.
Have only skimmed parts of the thread.
Most of the stuff I see on the bad effects of spanking talk about kids being spanked multiple times per week. This would be (to my eyes) indicative of terrible parents. I have no objection to spanking if it doesn’t happen more than 1-3 times per year. If you are relying on it as a constant, you’re doing something wrong.