It worked for me when I was two…until I rubbed my eyes :smack:
Still love that spicy food though…not trauma here.
Airman once slipped Aaron a bit of hot sauce from a chicken wing. Aaron liked the taste at first, but once the heat really kicked in, he was in agony. The effects lingered well into the night, when he had some very painful bowel movements that led to a very red, sore bum, and that’s what we could see objectively. For all I know, he had indigestion as well. We’re not talking several drops, we’re talking the amount these women are talking about. A drop or so.
What got me about the article was the focus on what my ex called “pain compliance”. Pulling a child by the hair to cross the street or pinching his tongue with a clothespin for lying seems mean-spirited to me. It seems as though these techniques aren’t designed to really teach the child anything but to force the child to obey.
AFAIC, Lisa Whelchel can go back to making cheesy sitcoms and bad made-for-TV movies. She damn sure hasn’t a clue about parenting.
Robin
And he’s what? 3? How old was he when that happened?
Is that fair or comparable to using a drop or two of hot sauce to punish a potty mouthed 9 year old kid?
He was not quite 1.
My point was that hot sauce can have physical effects beyond the immediate hot feeling. I myself am 33 and can’t tolerate even a drop or two of Tobasco in a Virgin Mary. The last time I had one, I had painful esophageal reflux that took two days’ worth of Tagamet to completely get rid of, diarrhea from hell, and an irritated throat. I would’ve settled for watery eyes and a runny nose.
If that’s what two drops max of Tobasco can do to an adult, I’d hate to see what it would do to a child.
Robin
Oh please. The reaction of a 1 year old child to the hot sauce on some chicken wings (which may actually have had a higher Scoville rating than Tobasco) and your personal reaction which is far stronger than normal should be taken as the method by which to assume every single 9 year old out there can’t handle a drop of Tobasco or Durkee Red Hot on the tongue?
I guess my mom should be horsewhipped for letting my sister eat Red Hot brand on her fries when she was 5.
The age ranges of the children in the article are 18 months to 5 - not 9 years old. At 9, I could handle spicy food. At three or four, I couldn’t. Regardless of what I could handle, this seems to be a tactic used on children much younger than nine - and personally, I find it reprehensible.
And yes, I think Robyn’s experience is quite relevant - that was an accidental dosing of hot sauce that caused her son a great deal of pain. Why would any parent risk intentionally inflicting that kind of pain onto their child?
I just find it quite amusing that the parents in the article say they don’t believe in physical punishment or violence, yet see nothing wrong with causing their child pain in this way.
Ava
Great, so it’s probably stupid to use on a 2 year old, but then, any kind of punishment they’d have to think about is bad idea for a 2 year old kid.
Older kids? Hot sauce don’t seem so bad to me.
Hmmmm catsix, getting my mouth washed out with soap never gave me the runs. Then again, I didn’t swallow the soap!
Sounds like we have different reactions to hot sauce too. I love the stuff but it really does linger. I’ll eat spicey chicken wings till my whole mouth and my lips are burning. And only a lot of time dimishes that burning sensation.
Yep. I agree. Except I would also shoot the idiot parents who let it get so far without correcting the behaviors.
There is nothing wrong with a little pain as a negative reinforcement, just as long as you use lots of positive reinforcement as well.
As noted above, Blair’s Death Sauce is a leetle extreme. I myself wouldn’t use anything more powerful than say… Dave’s Insanity Sauce. 
This is my favorite part of the article: “He’ll say, 'Please don’t give me hot tongue, Mommy”
The mother gives the child a drop of tobasco. The child is in pain so he runs to the phone and calls 911 just like he saw on Cops. The 911 operator answers and the child yells “Mommy just gave me hot tongue again”.
Police cars speed to the house and all kinds of legal mayhem ensues.
I can’t believe there are those of you who don’t believe that this is a form of child abuse.
When I was a kid, I was abused. When I was young, it was extremely physical, belts, hangers, hot wheel tracks, hands, whatever happened to be handy. After my brother and I had been in and out of foster care a few times, my mom resorted to the hot sauce. I think her reasoning is that it was a way to inflict pain without leaving a physical trace. This isn’t to say she stopped hitting us altogether, but when it was a planned punishment, rather than a spontaneous one, she’d resort to methods such as this that didn’t leave bruises.
We were not “bad” kids, or terribly mis-behaved, but we’d be punished for all sorts of things. One day something might be acceptable and even encouraged, the next, it would be a punishable offense. Once, when I was seven or so, I was in trouble for not eating dinner fast enough and my mom said something about if I wasn’t going to eat dinner when it was hot, she’d heat it up for me and she poured what seemed like half a bottle of hot sauce on my mashed potatoes and forced me to eat it. Anyway, hit me with anything, but don’t bring that stuff anywhere near me. To this day I can’t stand spicy things. In my opinion, it’s even worse than spontaneous physical abuse because it’s a form of premeditated abuse, calculated to leave no trace.
There is a vast difference between a five-year-old voluntarily eating food with hot sauce and having it forced on them as punishment. Most kids have food preferences by then, and know what they can and can’t handle.
Second, most kids under (roughly) four have no concept of consequences, at least not in the same way that older kids do. Aaron, as a normal (now) two-year-old, does not understand that hitting is wrong. He gets tired, cranky, frustrated, and takes it out with his hands. I’m not going to physically punish him for normal toddler behavior. It’s up to me to figure out why he’s behaving the way he is and fix it. If he’s tired, he goes to bed. If he’s cranky, we sit down and watch TV to help him unwind. If he’s frustrated, he’s removed from the situation that’s making him frustrated. I’m a far from perfect parent. I just know how Aaron is, and am willing to take the trouble to help him get over his problem.
I think the problem everyone’s having with this article is that parents are resorting to some pretty extreme techniques to make their kids obey.
Robin
Yeah, well I guess that’s the point isn’t it? Your parenting decisions are up to you, and other people’s decisions are up to them.
I really don’t think anybody needs to be calling what my best friend’s parents did as a last ditch effort to clean up his language in elementary school ‘child abuse’. It certainly didn’t cause any lasting damage, and wasn’t even overly painful at the time.
It was intended as mild discomfort to discourage a negative behavior, and nothing more.
Is this society so freaking sensitive these days that anything that causes a kid to be the slightest bit uncomfortable as a consequence of their sentient actions has to be called ‘abuse’?
Neither does potty mouth. I think you are the one who is over reacting.
Yeah, cause you wouldn’t want to correct a 9 year old who thinks there’s nothing wrong with saying ‘fuck’ in any environment including school.
Guess my friend’s parents were just horrible people for trying to keep him from using inappropriate language.
Of course it’s abuse. Christ, it’s sickening and gross.
The purpose of appropriate physical punishment is, I think, being misundestood here. If you have to finally resort to giving your kid a quick swat in the ass, it’s effective without being abusive because it doesn’t really hurt. There’s no lasting discomfort. The purpose of an ass-swat is not the infliction of pain, but the shock and surprise, the combination of being struck, especially with the loud noise it makes. It’s an act that causes instinctive submission behaviour, which is why it works. It doesn’t work because of PAIN - if you hit your kid so hard the discomfort lasts longer than two seconds, you are hitting them too hard - it works because it’s shocking, an escalation of disapproval.
Putting hot sauce in your kid’s mouth is a deliberate attempt to cause them significant physical pain. And don’t say it’s not, because that’s the only reason you WOULD do it; otherwise what’s the point? It’s not swift and not surprising; you’d have to tell your kid you’re going to “hot sauce” them, get the hot sauce, open their mouths - shit, it’s disgusting. It turns my stomach. No wonder ordinary folks can staff a place like Abu Ghraib.
The people in the article are damn fools and so are you, catsix. If you can’t tell the difference between discipline and trying to actually hurt a child, you shouldn’t have kids.
Oh my god. Significant pain? What the planet do you people live on?
Unless you’re a really rare individual, less than a mL of Tobasco is not going to be the end of the world, it’s not going to be more than a little unpleasant, and it’s definitely not going to cause some kind of serious harm to a third grader.
Sickening and gross? What the hell? It’s a food item. It’s not as if someone’s forcing a kid to eat Drano or brush his teeth with Tidy Bowl for biting someone or cussing his head off.
Comparing a drop of Tobasco to the abuses at Abu Ghraib is right on the same level of low as comparing the meat industry to the Holocaust.
Grab your jerking knee before it gives you a concussion.
One of the neat things about human beings is that while we’re alike we’re also different. What works on one person may not necessarily work on another. A drop of Tabasco sauce on a kid aged 4 and up doesn’t seem all that excessive to me.
It’s painful? Yes, that’s the point.
The effects linger? Maybe for some and if it caused my child discomfort hours after the fact I’d stop using the hot sauce method. If it didn’t cause signifigant discomfort after a short period of time I don’t see the big deal.
It exposes kids to potential allergens? Big deal. Should I refrain from feeding a kid new foods for fear of exposure to allergens?
I wouldn’t use hot sauce on a kid for punishment because it’s just not a method I’m familiar with. A drop or two doesn’t strike me as excessive or abusive.
Marc
Punish someone for being potty-mouthed? Nyah! Not you, Catsix!
I can’t believe this is even an issue at SDMB.
I first heard about the use of hot-sauce in a child murder case. That was just one of the things that the father did to torture the child.
If parents burn the child’s hands or legs, that is considered child abuse. I see no reason why it is not child abuse if the esophagus is burned.
I was still a baby in my mother’s arms when I was placed in scalding water. I do not have an actual memory of that happening. But when my feet were scalded in another accident when I was forty, my “body” remembered that it had happened before and reacted in a strange stance. I asked my mother if I had ever been burned by hot water as a child and she told me about it. My body had reacted in the same way then as it did when I was forty years old.
My point is that burns are traumatizing. Babies and children experience things in ways we can’t understand.
Add to that the fact that most parents don’t know the first thing about the delicacy of esophageal tissues or the consequences of damage, I would go with the wisdom of a first year med student on this one.
Remember, we are not talking about the same sensations that you, as an adult, feel when you have a couple of drops of hot sauce on your tongue.
Agreed with MGibson. A drop or two of tobasco, tip of tongue, used judiciously and administered under the right circs… I don’t have a problem with that. Anything beyond that, yes of course there could be negative, long-term, and unintended consequences. I don’t think anyone is arguing with that proposition.
Some of the posters here, however, are way, waaay exaggerating the basic idea of what this could potentially involve. [No, I didn’t even read the original article to see what sort of degree these people are talking about; I’m just commenting on what I mentioned above: drop or two, tip of tongue, rare and judicious use; much like spanking].
(hey, RickJay, I am in absolute agreement with the main paragraph of your post. … not the Abu Gharib paragraph.) Geez, people, reasonable people can disagree about the basic premise here without getting all freaked out. Sheesh.