Agree with you here. I also could not see, when I was young, why it was not OK for me to smack my little sister when she bugged the crap out of me. After all, I got smacked when I annoyed my parents. I’m bigger than her? Well, they were bigger than me!
And, in my case, any corporal punishment ended before adolescence. I don’t think many people, even those who would spank younger children, really feel that spanking works with adolescents, do they?
My dumb thought: perhaps this kid needs to go to a school that doesn’t care what color pants he wears. How the hell does that help a kid like that?
If all I had read was the excerpt the OP quoted, I might agree with you, but when you read the whole article, you see the problem goes a lot deeper than pants.
To my knowledge, what generally happens with anyone (child or adult) when you try to control them with brutality of any kind (from spanking all the way up to torture) is short term compliance, with a long term increase in aggression. Simple restraint might actually help for all I know.
The normal human response to assault is the desire to lash out, regardless of why the assault occurred.
True enough, but I’m not sure scenarios where mainly non-violent, non-mentally ill children are randomly brutalized by parents or authority figures is a useful comparison for someone who is apparently dangerously mentally dysfunctional. He’s *not *retarded, he’s intelligent. I suppose the goal here would be per FlyByNight512’s note for him to “connect the dots”.
If, hypothetically, you had a man trained in the martial arts follow him around 24/7 for a year and whack the snot out of him every time he started to rage up what would the kid’s reaction be to that immediately hovering discipline and punishment?
Would he stop being a rageaholic and think things through before acting out? Would he just continue to rage out and take the beatings? Would he behave when under observation, and just pick up his rageaholic behavior again when the observation and threat of punishment was over no longer viable?
I suppose the question is can an intelligent, compulsive rageaholic learn not to act out, and can this learning persist even if the threat of punishment is removed?
But here’s the thing, trying to subdue him without hurting him is a courtesy these paramedics gave the kid because he’s only 13. As he gets older, it won’t be paramedics responding. It’ll be police who will put him down like a rabid dog.
I’ve worked both residential treatment, which has a therapeutic focus, and law enforcement, which does not.
Rage addict clients in residential treatment got “passively restrained” and, once they’d calmed down a bit, moved into a CDR. This was, of course, possible because they were in a setting where they were monitored every moment and could (usually) be swarmed by staff before things got too out of control. Some eventually learned to “connect the dots,” many did not.
Identical behaviors from a person on the street would result in a pepper spraying and/or getting struck with a baton before getting forcibly cuffed and taken into custody. Tazers are in wide use now, but were considerably less common when I wore a badge. Add in knives and such in the disturbed person’s hands and getting shot is absolutely not off the table. Failure to connect the dots here is, potentially, something where there are no do-overs.
Would beating him help? Probably not. If he learned anything at all, which is not a given, it would quite likely be only to be afraid of the guy who beats him down.
That is when I would cry bullshit … I know SEALS, having lived with one. Don would have looked at him pitching a fit, and bashed him until he was unconscious, then hauled him out to the van for a drive to the emergency room with his hands and feet secured with duct tape or plastic cable ties and gagged with duct tape. Not hurting the kid would not occur to Don at all, subduing him would be done efficiently and painfully for the kid.
And to be honest, I would not have an issue with Don doing that, that whackjob is going to either do serious harm or kill someone very soon.
Nope, I have a daughter on the autism spectrum (whatever that means).
She has a very high pain tolerance. Whatever way she is wired, if you spank her, she will just turn it into a game in the future. As in deliberately misbehave and asked to be spanked.
I’ve only spanked her a couple of times her whole life. For getting into life threatening situations, and for hair pulling of her twin. I learned real quick that spanking had an adverse effect.
Shouting/losing temper is not a good solution either. Have to be Mr. Spock and be extremely level and measured. My daughter hasn’t scratched for years, but a couple of weeks ago she drew serious blood from my face, and I didn’t react. Reacting reinforces the behavior.
You teach him that violence is an acceptable response to something you don’t like.
You teach him that being stronger is the most important thing: the strongest person is right.
You teach him to respond to and respect only people who are stronger than he is. Fat lot of good that will do his mother.
You do not teach him to suffer consequences to actions as they would occur in normal society: when he is an adult his boss is not likely to beat him when he does not comply. How will he become responsible for his action?
You teach him that you, the person beating him, are the bad guy. Beating him allows him to transfer his anger to you, rather than taking responsibility for his actions and realising that it was his own decisions that got him into a bad situation. What does accomplish that is the following: you were rude to me. You know that swearing at me means that a privilege is taken away. However, I love you very much and I know that you get very upset when you can’t have your playstation. So, you can earn back your playstation privileges by cooking supper tonight and clearing up after. It’s your choice! -> you are the good guy, you’re on his side, you are empathetic with the fact that he made bad decisions for himself, you allow him the right to set right his mistakes, he has the power to decide things in his life, he takes responsibility for his own actions.
It takes away all power and control from him, which will likely result in him attempting to violently take back power and control. Everybody needs a little bit of control over their own life.
Beatings in this situation are the very worst thing you could possibly do.
Rage is a symptom, the underlying case can be very different from person to person. For one kid, discipline may be an answer; discipline by peers has been tried in the Glenn Mills schools, that were all the rage a decase ago but who were not proven as effective as hoped.
For another, the problem may be medical. Friends of mine, who are perfectly good enough parents, have a 14 year old son kid that has been difficult and selfdefeating from birth; his siblings on the other hand have no problems at all. The kid had anger problems where he physically threatened his dad an mom. He was in therapy and got medication. It didn’t help enough; his mom told me she sent him to a kind of crisis intervention home. That was a couple days ago.
I think you are making the assumption that the desire to avoid pain is real high on any person’s priority list. But this just isn’t true, especially when raging. Their may well be no non-physically damaging level of pain that would have an impact.
I think this is a good question, but the problem is that there may not be any incentive one could provide to lead to learning. If the one thing you want more than anything else in the world is no one to ever tell you what to do in any way, shape, or form, and you’d rather sit naked in a cold dark cell that you were wrestled into than to ever, for even a fucking second, give in: how you you find out if someone like that can learn control? They don’t want control.
In my experience with children with behavioural problems, the longest they hold out is several months. After that, if the consequences are appropriate and consistent, there is some behavioural change. Sitting naked in a dark room is just no fun. If “no hitting” gets you playstation time, eventually they will make that choice.
Of course, you don’t want them to learn to accept your control, it’s not like you want to break their will or anything. You just want them to learn that they are responsible for their behaviour and certain behaviours work out well for them and certain behaviours don’t. Sometimes they will still choose to act out and accept the consequences (we do that too), but they can learn that it is in their interest to behave in a certain way.
Look at it this way – the kid flipped out over being grounded from video games. You honestly think corporal punishment is going to make things any better?
I’m not a psychologist but I have had a lot of experience dealing with violent people.
My personal opinion is that beatings don’t work as a means of changing behavior. Usually you just end up desensitizing the person to violence. And a person who’s desensitized to violence directed towards himself is pretty much guaranteed to be desensitized to violence he might direct towards other people.
I suppose it’s impossible to know what’s going to set a kid like that off.