I come from Earth. We must get some bad-ass kids in this atmosphere. What planet are you from that the average 2-year-old has what’s technically known as a theory of mind?
Oh, I read it all right. I also read the children are “dumber than puppies.”
“Should I try to help little Timmy understand why what he did was wrong? Nah, too hard. I know, I’ll smack him! YEAH!”
There are many ways to teach a child about why hurting animals are wrong, without resorting to an “ethics lecture.” Kids are a lot smarter than you think.
In fact, I think the major cause of many of the problems kids face today is that adults tend to think they are so incredibly stupid, and treat them that way.
So we have people who let their kids do anything, because after all, they’re stupid and don’t know better. And we have people that hit their kids, because after all, that was the only option because the kids are so darn stupid.
Someone who truly treats their child as intelligent will NOT let them get away with anything. People who let their kids get away with anything are treating them as if they are stupid, just like those… who smack their kids.
The average 2-year is starting to develop a sense of empathy. Do you really need a cite for that?
I’m sure spanking them is going to help them in this undertaking more so than a simple explanation about hurting poor Africa :rolleyes:
As usual with much on this board, I’ve read wildly divergent opinions and most of 'em have made sense of sorts. It’s a pisser. As usual, I’m still in process sorting this one out, filtered through my own experience but eyes-yanked-open by others here.
FTR, I’m not sure anecdotal experience is necessarily less valuable or instructive than the most rigorously controlled scientific experiment. Which isn’t dissing science, just allowing for…nuance. Good science includes that.
My parents were strict and spanked me though I quite honestly can’t remember a single instance. I’ve come to question their very individual lack of joy in me as a child but never their common sense allowances and acceptance that I was child safe under their responsibility. They had high standards but never thrust me into things beyond what I understood.
When I was a mere toddler my parents reserved a quick swat as the ultimate “attention getter”. They established boundaries, way before my conscious memory, and that set the groundwork. It was sheltering. I didn’t have to sort out all the whole scary, confusing, conflicting world. I had my parents. They gave me rules until I could figure out my own. Their early, sensible discipline was much kinder than what the broader world woulda handed out later.
Being a kid must be like a continual drug trip. (I’m too old to quite remember.) Nothing makes real sense, it’s all pretty much just sensory overload. I’m blathering but physical discipline is a sliding scale and “abuse” is even queasier. There are differences between pain, deprivation and trauma.
So there.
Veb
How many two year olds have you actually been around NightRabbit? The notion of not hurting the cat because it is WRONG (not because the cat might scratch or bite because the stupid animal wouldn’t stick up for itself) is not a concept my kids had developed by age 2. Left to their own devices, 2 year olds are bloody feral little creatures. Or mine were anyway…maybe I just had strange kids. 
I’ve actually gone through this situation of the toddler with the cat. My brother has cats. My daughter (who is now three 1/2) loves animals and when we visit her uncle she likes to pet the cats. We get her to sit on the couch and carefully show her how to pet the cat without hurting it. We use words like “careful” and “gentle” and she gets it. If she begins to pull he cat’s ears or tail, we remove the cat. It’s that simple. It’s a natural consequence. She is now very gentle with my brother’s cats and we never had to hit her once.
Don’t worry about it…we all do. 
Oh, no no no no. This is where you are wrong. We teach children in this precise manner because we know that they are so very smart. Before anyone yells, it’s very, very wrong to do this for a variety of reasons, but you can whack a dog with a rolled-up newspaper as many times as you like and it will learn absolutely nothing except its owner is unstable and not to be trusted. This is because a dog has almost zero ability to connect its actions with consequences that happen more than at most 10 seconds after the fact. Children, on the other hand, are extremely adept at just this sort of learning, namely, picking up patterns and making causal connections. Observe:
Dog poops on rug —> times passes —> Mom finds poop —> dog gets swatted Result: dog is badly confused
Kid poops on rug —> times passes —> Mom finds poop —> Kid gets swatted Result: kid learns to hold it
Obviously there’s not a one-to-one correlation here, but I trust you see my point. Kids are smart. That’s why they’re such a pain in the ass to deal with.
I’m not exactly sure where you’re going with this. Are you advocating no punishment at all? Then how do you discipline your kids when patient explanations don’t work? If you do use punishment, what do you consider acceptable? Because it has to be pointed out that just as there is a difference between the occasional smack and outright abuse, there is a difference between things like grounding, time-outs and the like and…wait for it…outright abuse. An argument could be made that any form of punishment, or restricting a child’s actions could be considered abusive by some people.
I think the point is drawing a line in the sand. I think spanking is a useful and sometimes necessary tool. And let me be clear: by spanking I mean a quick open-handed swat on the bottom or the wrist when all other methods have failed or there is some immediate danger to the child. No belts or switches, no bruises, never done in anger. And a follow-up: “I’m sorry to spank you, but you have to learn to listen to me. Here is why you were spanked, and here is how you can avoid it in the future, blah, blah, blah.”
Just as people can get out of hand with spanking, people can get out of hand with things like time-outs and deprivation. I personally consider taking a child’s books away to be a form of abuse. Dwelling on it is even worse. You discipline, you move right along. As in all things, moderation is key. Every parent and child, every situation, is different. You have to do what’s best for you and your kid, so that they learn well and fast. And I will not for one second believe that spanking, as I described it above, is abusive. It is simply one tool of many in a vast array available to parents that they must tailor to fit each child. Some kids will never need to be spanked. Some kids won’t listen to anything less. But your job as a parent, first and foremost, is to prepare your child for adulthood and keep them safe until they get there. To do this, they must respect you. They must listen to you. And to acheive this, you must use discipline. Otherwise it’s nothing but empty threats, and children, being so smart, will quickly learn this.
I’m not advocating a lack of discipline! Of course spanking is a tool- but it’s a tool that a lot of people use much too readily when there are much more subtle and non-violent tools available.
But, oh, wait, your kids are somehow rougher and harder to deal with than any other kids on earth…
… right.
Yes. Some people DO use spanking, (and miscellaneous other physical punishments) far too readily. Nobody is bloody-well denying that.
So what is your problem?
And there are some situations I have been in where I have mentally willed the parent to give the child a swat because they have been righteous little shits…and to listen to the parent try to reason with said kid would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad.
Anecdote (sorry, no cite). I was standing outside our local supermarket last week (waiting for a taxi that ended up taking an hour to arrive!!) when a New Age Dad walked past with his little girl. Little girl (age somewhere between 2 and 2 1/2 years) spied the Kiddie Ride and decided that she wanted to have a go. She pounded on her daddy’s shoulders to let her down, and pointed at the ride, whereupon NAD explained that they were in a hurry and it would have to wait until another time.
Well, the kid put on a Sight and Sound performance to behold. NAD was ever-so-patient, and finally got her to their car where a NEW performance unfolded as he tried to strap her into her baby-seat. Of course, she was not going to have a bar of it, so continued screaming and writhing and from my vantage point, I could hear the NAD STILL trying to explain why the kid could not have a ride tonight, but if she would please allow him to strap her in, she could have an icecream. Oh…this is now 20 minutes since she first pointed at the ride btw.
At first I thought it might have been a set-up for a comedy sketch, so I looked around for cameras and sound-sets, but alas, it was for real. Now, I am not one to condemn others for their parenting practices (unless they are completely whacko) but this bloke just seemed to be making a rod for his own back. A smack on little girls bum might or might not have stopped her tantrum, but watching him trying to reason with her was just pathetic. If she were my child, I would not be giving her a treatise on why we were in a hurry. And if she refused to be buckled into her booster-seat she would have had a sharp smack…while she was recovering from the shock, or taking a big gasp in (to fuel the next bellow) she would have been strapped in like a straight-jacket. 
I watched the whole thing and shuddered…then just thanked my lucky stars that I don’t have toddlers anymore. Mind you, they did keep me entertained while I waited for that damn taxi.
Actually, these two sentences made me laugh out loud. My son is nine years old. NINE. We’re not talking about a todler here, he should be beginning to make some cognative connections, right? I sit there and watch my nine year old son take hours to, say, pick up his room. I talk to him, I say “You just have to do this, this and this, and then you’ll be done and the rest of the day is yours to do with as you please, do you understand?” He says “yes”, and still wastes HOURS doing nothing but fucking around. He wastes an entire day, miserable in his room when 1/2 an hour of work would see him done.
Should I spank him? No, I don’t think so, and I don’t. I chew nails of frustration watching him make himself miserable over something that’s so damn SIMPLE, but I let him do it. I hope that one of these years he’ll learn.
Have I spanked him? Yes, I have. Rarely. The only time I have even considered spanking him is when he has been told again and again to do something and he refuses. I always hold it out as a punishment of extreme last resort. “If you don’t do this, you’ll be spanked”. “If you don’t do this, you’ll be spanked”. “If you don’t do this, you’ll be spanked”. “If you don’t do this, you’ll be spanked”. Etc… Finally, the time comes when he gets a whack on his butt. He dosen’t like it, although I’ll dare to say it dosen’t hurt him much, if at all. What it is is a definition point: you’ve pushed as far as you can push, and the rubber is meeting the road. I am the parent, sometimes, what I say goes and that’s the last word on the subject.
There is an interesting coralary to this story. As I’ve said, I don’t like to spank. I’m as liberal as anyone, I viewed spanking as a failure of myself as a parent. What happened was that I adopted a behavior that was much worse without realizing it. Thank God my wonderful wife pointed it out to me.
Spanking is wrong, right? It’s abuse, it’s teaching kids violence is the answer, it’s causing more problems than it solves, blah, blah, blah, right? Heh. What I had started to do is to yell at my son. I didn’t want to hit him, I figured that I could be all bombastic and shit and still make my point without hiting. About the second or third time I did this, I was faced with a VERY upset wife. “You’re screaming at Matt and making him cry and I HATE IT! It’s abusing him!”
Guess what? She was right. I WAS abusing my son without laying a finger on him. Yes, he cried, it meant I was getting through to him( and I was ). It also meant I was being a bad parent.( and I was )
So. Lesson learned. I had abused my son without hitting him. On those rare ocations when a spanking is necessary, it will be quick, clean and most of all, NON PUNATIVE. He may piss me the everloving fuck off, but it’s my job as an ADULT ( not just a parent, an adult, the two don’t always go hand in hand ) to handle things in context. I probobly fail every day at being a “perfect” father. If I can get Matthew to adulthood by being an “OK” father, perhaps even “good”…well, then I will be happy.
I’m still confused about anecdotal evidence not being “valid” in a case such as this.
There’s really no way to conduct a double-blind lab test in sociology or cultural anthropology. When studying cultural phenomenon such as methods of punishment, anecdotes are all you have to go on.
Phenomena, even.
I just wanted to chime in and say that I agree with you wholeheartedly, as well as say that I went through the same sort of thing with my two oldest. We’re a blended family (as opposed to fruit on the bottom, i guess) and it was very difficult to figure out how discipline was going to work. So i really avoided any sort of physical punishment for a long time, but verbally, i was pretty bad. Took some time to figure that out, but now, i understand that there is a constant balancing act between verbal and physical punishments, though i hate having to do either one. it’s also a matter of figuring out what works for each child- the two boys are as different as can be, especially in how they react to different punishments.
and before anyone asks, yes, i’m a stepparent, yes, i spank (and on VERY rare occasions have taken a belt to) my boys, and yes, their bio dad knows and approves, just as their mom approves of physical discipline by their stepmom.
This is the bestest part, IMNPFHO; she won’t shut up, and won’t and won’t and won’t and won’t, even after having it reasonably explained to her why she can’t have the ride, so after 20 minutes, to get her to do his bidding, the dad…
BRIBES HER!!!
And y’all think spanking sets a bad example? :rolleyes:
Oops…as a side note, bribery definitely has its time and place. We’ve been in the car for half an hour. There’s still an hour to go. Kids won’t stop picking on each other. RING-POPS FOR ALL! I mean, I’m a reasonable human being, but I know my limits.
Is it Illiteracy Week, and everyone forgot to tell me? To reiterate for hopefully the last time:
- I have not claimed that every beaten child becomes violent.
- I have not claimed that every violent person was a beaten child.
What? I do this all the time. There’s a paper to write, but I don’t want to write it, so I hem and haw and turn it into an all-night affair.
I don’t understand how the issue of intelligence comes in here at all. Or spanking, for that matter. Jeez. So your kid’s a procrastinator… that doesn’t mean spanking is going to do anything about it! Gee, if being spanked could cure procrastination, I’d hire myself a spanker!
Totally unrelated to the subject at hand, but I thought I’d share my “success story” here. I was exactly like your son in this regard; I’d waste entire days rather than clean up. One day my mother gave me an eggtimer, set it to an hour and told me to see if I could be done by the time it rang. Of course, I was. I used that eggtimer by myself every time I had to clean my room in the future.