Congratulations, you are more of a fucking moron than Price Guy, and dare I say it, a 2 year-old toddler.
Well, since I already KNEW you were a fucking moron, this is just further making my point. Most of everything that has come from you in this thread, HELL, this whole discussion board, is absolute stupidity at its finest. Congratulations, you’re still a fucking moron.
Crazy Cat Lady and Ratty are but a couple of rare and beautiful fulfilled hopes that I have in humanity. BRAVO!
There is a reason that I come in here to read posts after my physics classes. Because once you’ve been forced to choke down the foul-tasting tequila shot of your own abject ignorance, it’s refreshing to bite into the refreshing lime wedge of other people’s complete fucking stupidity.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to beat my children. No reason, this thread just put me in the mood…
Oh, for the love of fuck, this should be trivially obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together. I’ll expand.
[ol]
[li]Indeed, not everyone who spanks their children believes that they are an abuser. You knew that, of course, since people in this thread have admitted to spanking their children without admitting to being child abusers. Therefore, you’ll get anecdotes from people who do discipline their children physically.[/li][li]An anecdote, of course, proves nothing.[/li][li]10,000 anecdotes, of course, proves nothing.[/li][li]This should hardly be surprising, since nothing is ever proven in science.[/li][li]A sufficiency of anecdotes is obviously evidence nonetheless.[/li][li]Naturally, you cannot guarantee that people have been truthful when telling stories. [/li][li]However, for exactly the same reason, you cannot guarantee that people have been truthful when publishing the results of their work.[/li][li]In both cases, you must judge reliability for yourself. In such a way is error and bias introduced into science. Science, of course, is hardly free of error and bias.[/li][li]I presume that you did not carry out any of these studies yourself.[/li][li]Therefore, you rely upon anecdote to support your point (“I read a study that says…”),[/li][li]For us to believe that you are correct is for us to rely on your truthfulness and lack of bias. Foaming at the mouth is not a decent way of convincing us of the latter, to say the least.[/li][/ol]
I’ll grant that anecdotes have less value as evidence, but the fact remains that they do have some value. And more importantly, because there are far more experiments out there than any one scientist can hope to do, we all have to rely on anecdotes from our colleagues. That’s just the way it works, and that’s the way it’s worked for centuries. Anyone who thinks differently is either ignorant or idiotic.
Right. With my mom, spanking was not the problem. The spankings were justified, and the force was not excessive. The problem was the way she would strut around afterwards, like she’d beaten someone bigger than herself in a fight, and brag to her friends/my sister/my aunt about how she’d sure shown me who was boss.
It’s really a matter of how you spank. Spanking on-the-spot because your kid ran out into traffic is, as you say, effective in the short term. What’s destructive in the long term is the kind of scenario where mom says “Wait till your father comes home”, and when he does, the child has to walk, trembling, into the room where stonefaced dad is waiting, and dad hauls the much smaller kid up to put him over his knee, then lets fly with his hand/the belt/the razor strop/whatever.
It’s making a ritual out of it that teaches the kid to dread and fear, and eventually resent, authority. There have been, and probably still are, households where whippings were a scheduled event, regardless of what the child(ren) had actually done that day/week, with the number of strokes proportionate to what they’d been caught at.
We got whuppins in our household. And let me just say this: some of my worse memories from childhood come from those “punishments”.
Anecdote 1: I got you with the face in trouble one afternoon by stealing one of her Doritos (we were eating Doritos and beans for dinner…talk about child abuse). She screamed like a banshee. Daddy comes running down the stairs like a 250-pound boulder, his eyes bugging out of his head, and a strange grin on his face. Silly me, I almost thought he was amused.
I still relive the moment in slow motion. He must have slapped my sister a dozen times, splattering blood from her nose all over the place. My punishment? I had to clean up the mess on the floor–blood mixed with beans and Doritos that had spilled on the floor–while my sister bawled upstairs.
Anecdote 2: My mother told you with the face and I that we had to clean up our bedroom. Always eager to please, I got right to work. But my sister–bless her heart–was dilly-dallying. Mommy threatened to beat her with the Black Snake of Calcutta (what we called the Belt in our house) if she didn’t pick up the pace. Fast forward ten minutes later. You with the face and the Black Snake were going toe-to-toe while I crouched in the closet, glad I had been such a good little girl.
Am I against spanking kids? No. I agree with every instance that’s been given in this thread supporting the efficacy of spanking. But would I spank my own children? Well, if they were as well-behaved as my sister and I was, no. We were threatened with whuppins more than we were actually whupped, but the fear was always there. And it wasn’t a good fear. Even if my kids were hellions, I’d still be mighty apprehensive just because I would be afraid of losing control.
I blame the Dorito Slap[sup]TM[/sup] for my ambivalence.
Really. Well this next quote from you says otherwise…
So which is it Dio? Are all spankers abusers or not? If no ancedotal studies mean anything because no abusers will admit they’re abusers, that means that all spankers are abusers, right?
There’s no contradicion in what I said. I didn’t say all spankers were abusers, I said that not all abusers would admit to it. IOW, a telephone poll asking spankers about spanking will not elicit truthful information from * spankers who are also abusers*.
The Dorito Slap was definitely a case of “When Spanking Goes Wrong” (AKA “When Dads Attack”). Now, I can tell this anedote to friends and laugh about it. I recovered from the incident many moons ago. My father, on the other hand, carries a lot of guilt over his lapse of control that day and will probably have it until the day he dies. He apologized to me a while back and of course, I accepted it. That day was probably the last time he ever hit me.
The take home message is that while there is definitely a line between spanking and abuse, that line is still a fine one. Spankers need to know that and tread accordingly. My dad didn’t realize how far he could take things until his head had cooled down sufficiently enough to see the carnage wrought by his anger. That’s too late, in my book.
I agree with what monstro says here. We were generally very well-behaved kids, and a stern look was probably all it took to make us fly right. Too many parents don’t use spanking as a last resort; they just assume that it should be used because it’s the “toughest”. But just like doctors shouldn’t automatically reach for the vancomycin for a case of the sniffles, parents shouldn’t automatically reach for the switch. What works for one kid may be too harsh or too mild for another.
I am 27, and no, I do not have any kids, nor do I want them.
the 4 main reasons why would be:
do not want to have such a big responsability
do not want to make the sacrifices required
do not want to spend the money
do not want to do the time (as you say, 20 years or thereabouts).
My main reason, as you can see, is the responsability. I think the responsability is too big, I literally do not want to be responsible for another human being. So many things can go wrong, it requires so much energy and patience.
So i’m not willing to take the chance
well, first of all, i’d try and find out why you were doing what you are doing.
As a child i always found it infuriating that adults don’t talk to you (as in, reason with you), and if they do, they do so in a patronising way (ie, literally treating you as mentally imparied cos you’re not their age…).
My niece is misbehaving, sometimes, especially when she’s with her mother. The reason why is because her mother left her in the care of her dad for 2 weeks when she was only 2. They’ve split up since then, and whenever Luna is with her mom, she misbehaves so that her mother’s attention will be constantly focused on her. She does not want to share her mother with anyone (when I was visiting once, she kept interrupting our conversation, she did not want her mother to spend time talking to me.). The fact that her mother has a huge guilt complex about having so little time to spend with her daughter, means she always gives in to her daughter’s requests and behaviour. Which is teaching the child the wrong lesson.
So understaning why a child is behaving a certain way, goes a long way to help determine a punishment, if indeed a punishment is needed (in Luna’s case, her mother needs to make her daughter her number 1 priority in her life, and apply more discipline. We (the family) have tried to tell her, but she does not want to listen. And so the child remains unhappy…)
Since parenthood is aparently something that you not only are not doing but are agressively avoiding, it might be prudent to keep from forcibly inserting your uninformed opinion into a subject that you have just admitted that you are completely unwilling to even attempt to handle.
how can you avoid something aggressively?
I see myself as taking my responsability for NOT burdening society with kids I don’t want myself.
And the subject was how kids should be treated. You’re saying because I don’t want kids and don’t have them, I shouldn’t have an opinion about it?
Now that’s silly. I have been a child, and from that i have learned a lot on how not to raise a kid.
It’s like saying that men shouldn’t have an opinion on abortion because they don’t have a uterus.
And forcibly inserting an uninformed opinion?
My opinion isn’t uninformed, I have minded kids a good deal, and as I stated, I’ve two nieces whom I see/mind frequently.
If you’ve read my post carefully, than the reasons why I don’t want to have kids is because i’m afraid I’ll do them wrong, knowing that I don’t want to make the sacrifices required and don’t want the responsability because there’s so much that can go wrong with raising a child.
Like smakcing it because you lose your patience.
I just don’t want to risk doing to someone what has been done to me. In the slightest way.
I’d say that gives me enough authority to have an opinion on this matter.
Perhaps, but you have no clue on how to raise a kid. This isn’t personal, nobody does until they actually have one. It’s easy to say that children shouldn’t be beaten, nobody supports that, but it’s impossible to determine that a quick swat to the butt might be the best thing to do in a specific situation until you’re in that situation, day in, day out, 24 hours straight, day after day, of living with and raising a child. “Minding” your nieces isn’t even close to the same thing, it can’t be.
no, I agree, the responsability factor is not the same (after all, there not mine), and I wouldn’t feel the attachment to them as their parents should, but I’m sticking to my original opinion:
It’s not because I don’t want them and don’t have them, that i can’t have any opinions on how the best way is to raise them.
As I stated in one of my earlier posts, I think even a quick swat to the butt does more bad than good.
It is possible to raise a child without disciplining with muscle language.
I would never hit anyone, unless in self defense. I would never hurt or hit or smack animals, either.
After a VERY much needed long weekend (God bless those who died defending my freedom!), I returned to read these posts.
Whoa…
Amazing how vehemently some people will defend their right to beat their kids. Sad, really.
For the record, our daughter is 3 and our son is 6. Never struck - ever - by anyone. Not that they are as pure as the wind driven snow, but they don’t cause problems and are very well-behaved. (Whoever the booze-bag was that posted that I shouldn’t reproduce, blah, blah blah, kindly go shove a biblical rod up your rectum - and don’t spare an inch!)
This might help (I’ll make it quick):
I was “spanked” as a child. Daily. For talking back, not cleaning my room, making too much noise, et. al. The last of these took place when I was 13, almost 14. For not having my hair cut short enough. Seriously. At 5’10" and around 200 lbs, I knew that these “spankings” were just wrong. In a nutshell, after the dust settled, my dad had a broken mandible and a broken left orbital and my mom lost a tooth and a bit of pride.
I know some of you will respond that my folks should’ve called the police. They didn’t. They were the criminals and they knew it. I was a victim. Get over it.
They never, neverEVER hit me again. Nor did they mention that day. Ever. We got along pretty well after that until they died in 2000 and 2002. They never apologized. I had nothing to apologize for.
Wonder where I learned that hitting was the way to achieve a means to an end?
If you beat your kids - you are a criminal. Deny it all you want. Doesn’t change the facts.
Skid Row, as has been pointed out time and time again, no one is advocating the kind of physical discipline you lived through. As a matter of fact, if I recall correctly, several people have actually spoken up and stated the obvious, that being "NO ONE HERE THINKS BEATING THE SHIT OUT OF YOUR KIDS IS A GOOD IDEA.
It has also been noted - several times - that the people in this thread who DO spank use it only as a last resort, when other encouragements have failed.
I mean, sorry your life sucked shit and everything, but that kind of household is not what we’re talking about.
Also, I don’t think many people think the police should have been called. I sure don’t. Your parents punished you in a really extreme way for minor infractions, and I’m sure, had I been there when you finally socked it to 'em, I would have applauded.
