Sorry, I haven’t been able to get back here until this morning.
As far as it goes, I have no problem with the parents of my kids friends diciplining them when I’m not there. Time outs are OK, sending my kids home is OK. If they did any damage, I would pay for it, but it’s not OK to threaten violence to my children.
I have little kids playing here all the time. When they misbehave, I warn them that they should knock it off, if not, I call their parents. One mother told me to go ahead and punish her son. He’s eleven years old and my own son was acting up, so the punishment they recieved was to sit in the living room and they had to watch * Barbie and the Nutcracker*, that was the last time they were stinkers at my house. I only did it because his mother gave me permission.
People like you are the problem with this country: Nosy busybodies who look for the slightest reason to accuse some one of being a criminal and have them arrested and jailed.
that seems reasonable to me. i would definitely draw the line at physically punishing anyone else’s children, even with parental approval. the onlt time i would feel it necessary to be physical at all would be if i needed to stop a potentially harmful behavior (i.e. restraining a child). and that intervention would be followed by a call home for the parent to pick up their child. it does piss me off, though, that people are to be effectively ‘neutered’ around other people’s children, and simply grin and bear property destruction, vandalism, etc. because they are just kids. and yes, i’d rather pre-emptively reduce a child to tears (verbally) than have to wrangle payment for a broken window or ruined flower bed out of a parent.
however, i do not feel as though corporal punishment applied to one’s own children is cause for police action, even when a belt is used. frankly, my kids would rather i use the belt than my hand, because the latter hurts a whole lot more.
we’re expanding the nature of ‘abuse’ to encompass so much that it’s almost lost any meaning. wasn’t there a thread a few months ago where a mother that swore at her kids was accused of ‘abuse’ by posters on this board?
Some (not all, but some, and enough to disturb you) seem to be very willing to escalate things. Some dumb bitch neighbor says something upsetting to your kids, and you’d go over and trample her flowers? Threaten her? Goad her into threatening you?
This lack of civility, lack of willingness to be the bigger person, really makes me feel depressed. It’s not good for your neighborhood or anyone’s quality of life when your reaction to problems is to give it right back and then some. What’s the next step? What if your neighbor has the same modus operandi? How bad does this get?
I urge you to consider putting some of that fervor and energy into solving some of the real problems we face as a country, instead of creating new ones with your neighbors.
Hitting a child with a belt IS a crime. Threatening to physically injure a child IS a crime.
I spent a couple of years working with grade school aged kids in an inner city setting. I was a mandated reporter, which means that by law, I HAD to report any signs of child abuse to the authorities. Seeing a child being hit with ANY object obligated me to call CPS. It wasn’t a choice, it was the law.
Threatening physical harm against anybody (even an adult) is illegal. It’s assault by definition.
And you’re damn right I want to see child abusers arrested and jailed, why shouldn’t they be?
You’re quite mistaken, Diogenes, if you are asserting that hitting a child with a belt is a crime under all circumstances. Parents have the privilege to commit acts on their children that would otherwise constitute assault. If I were to swat your buttocks without your consent, that would be an assault and a batterty; it is not necessarily so if I strike my own child.
This is not to say that any act by a parent upon a child is never a crime.
But it is to say that the blanket statement “Hitting a child with a belt is always a crime,” is untrue.
I suppose that you think spanking your own child is child abuse too, correct?
I was spanked as a kid, and I don’t have any emotional scars, and I certainly didn’t act like a spoiled brat, which is what many kids these days act like.
A friend of mine used to get the belt as punishment, not regularly, but it was how his 'rents disciplined him. My friend didn’t turn out emotionally scarred either.
There is a big difference between being spanked with a belt and being whipped or beaten.
Like I can talk. Typical punishment in my house for making a big mess is that you have to clean it up, all of it, under parental supervision. One time, about half an hour into the cleanup, my son looked at me and asked, “Daddy, can’t you just spank me?”
Had my daughter come into my house crying that the neighbor mom said she’d beat her ass if she fell in the flower garden, I would reply, “Then you’d better keep away from the flower garden.”
Would I get my dander up? Yes, probably. At my daughter for not listening to the neighbor who undoubtedly POLITELY asked them 50 times to keep away from her flower garden before she got beligerent.
The neighbor likes her flowers. So what? She wants to have a nice garden. That is her right, isn’t it? If my daughter cannot respect the time and energy the neighbor puts into her garden, then she deserves to be yelled at. And then I’d threaten to spank both of their little butts if they had to be told one more time to stay away from the garden.
Kids are not above embellishing a story to spice it up a bit, just like adults with gossip. They just sometimes under-estimate when a little embellishment is likely to cause lots of trouble.
Kids sometimes don’t get adult humour. And when I say “adult”, I don’t mean smut, I mean saying something apparently in all seriousness, but not actually meaning it. It could have been your neighbour was just joking or winding them up in order to encourage them to stay off the flowerbeds. Maybe her children know when Mother is joking, but she misjudged how others might take it.
When I was a kid, I was in my fair share of scrapes, got black eyes, and was once hit hard enough that I was knocked out for a second or two.
None of those remotely compared with getting the belt. Not remotely. Nearly four decades later, I remember the extremity of that almost electric pain. If you can inflict more pain on your kids with your bare hands, I’m afraid to ask how.
Well, if you know she was serious, that’d be one thing.
But now, re-reading the OP, it could be like the time my uncle told us if we misbehaved on the way to a local street fair, he’d spank us with a sledgehammer. We KNEW he was kidding, but it was fun to pretend otherwise.
However, you shouldn’t spank or beat other people’s kids.
There was a thread a little while back about how there are some parents who don’t discipline their children at all, and how horrible these children come out. Now this one. Interesting.
So, on the one hand you have parents who will not discipline their children. People are irate at this.
On the other hand, you have parents who do, be it “time outs” (which, in my experience, don’t always work for every child) or gasp! spanking. When it comes to gasp! spanking, people are irate at this and ready to throw the parents into the clink and swallow the key. Hmmm.
I agree with those who think that dragongirl’s children (as wonderful as I’m sure they are) may have embellished the story a bit, as all children do. I’m willing to bet that the neighbor had asked these children multiple times to stay away from the garden. I’m willing to bet even more that the neighbor was ignored.
I bet after her little “threat” those kids stayed far away from that garden.
I too, had the belt (once) when I was growing up, and I turned out just ducky. There is a HUGE line between spanking and abuse, and to look at the two as one is very, very dangerous, Diogenes. It would’ve been far more damaging to see my daddy being arrested and in prison for spanking me when I was bad then to have recieved the spanking. Urging people to call CPS at the drop of a hat like that is irresponsible and stupid. Like the CPS caseworkers aren’t bogged down enough.
And for those of you advocating digging up the neigbors garden. Gee, I wonder where the children get their behavior from. :rolleyes: What a way to teach them to respect authority.
People who equate spanking with whipping (you know, hitting with a piece of leather, like a belt) are building a strawman. Slaves are whipped. Slaves are property. Children are not property. To reduce them to objects is monsterous.
IMHO, dragongirl should talk to the kids and ask them how they feel about the incident now that some time has passed. Maybe they are frightened enough that they won’t want to go near that lady again. As for calling CAS, I think she should sleep on it.
Just to make sure, I went back and read all of Dio’s posts in this thread. He was talking about parents whipping kids with a belt. He wasn’t talking about mere spankings. (I don’t know where Dio stands on those, but I have no problem at all with parents spanking kids.)
From my experience on the receiving end, I’d say there’s a huge gap between a bare-butt spanking and a bare-butt whipping with a belt, and I’d call the one ‘spanking’ and the other ‘abuse’.
I got the belt a bit more than once, and I turned out OK too. But definitely in spite of, and not because of.
Thank you, RT, yes, I’m talking about beating a child with an object. Studies show that the use of an object greatly increases the trauma and psychological damage done to a child.
and Hamlet, I should remind you that any form of physical discipline which leaves a mark is definitely illegal, no matter how it’s done, and a belt is a really great way to leave a mark.
