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We use it as a first resort. If you do X then the punishment is Y. Each time. Every time.
I am quite OK with it leaving some marks. It should hurt. The question is where is the line drawn. To me some redness is OK. Dark bruising is not. Marks should be gone within a day or two.
I agree that there are other punishments and that some work better than others and some are better for some kids / families / situations and so on.
I tend to use "time out" more as an opportunity for a child to have a rest and regain self control rather than an out and out punishment.
I am not so keen on counting although in recent years we seem to have gotten into this a little. A way of warning but if we get to 3 you know the miscreant will have a sore backside.
Persoanlly I am not into long drawn out punishments. Groundings that go on for days and days. I saw a thread here not so long back about someone who had grounded their kid for the entire summer. To me that sort of thing is mentally unhealthy. It breeds resentment and frustration.
I do not think that one needs to have punishments that fit the crime. Thats too hard.
I do not think you need to reason with a child.
Kids get warning after warning and yet they soon realise that there are no consequences. Then eventually they become little criminals, so something bad and end up in jail.
We need quick consequences each and every time.
And finally, personally, I would use corporal punishment on adults. I think locking up people in jail for sometimes 10's of years is cruel and inhuman and yet that is what happens to these kids. Yes there are some people in jail who are a real danger to society and for our own protection they shoudl stay there. But the vast majority have no social skills, no self restraint or self control.
We should cane them singapore style, then get on with rehab. Teach them life skills, help then get and keep a job. Spend the money we waste on incaseration on supervision and education. And each and every time they stuff up, we cane them again and send them back to work.
I do not consider it either really. In my view violence of any kind is where humans turn when they have failed to find an intellectual or peaceful means of resolving a situation... or are simply too lazy to even try.
So for me I would not rank spanking as either discipline or abuse, I would rank it merely as a personal failing in parenting skills.
Best post on this subject. Now I don't have to bother reading the rest of this thread.
Every parent has the right to do what they feel is best and works for their family. It only becomes anybody else's business when it becomes abuse, and by abuse I mean beating. Spanking and beating are two different things, which a lot of people have a hard time differentiating.
It's funny to hear spanking referred to as "violence." Yes, it's violence when a parent is angry and out of control, hitting the child for the purpose of hurting or injuring. Abusive parents, this would be the case. I hardly would consider a few swats across the bottom abuse. And the caseworkers that do, and the people who need to cry child abuse every time a child is merely spanked, are taking time, energy, and resources away from children who are starved, raped, beaten, choked, burned, even killed. Which is worse?
Recourse to violence is usually a failure - unfortunately, it is the failure of the spanked child or the aggressive country to understand all of the implications of living in a community where mutual respect and effort provides benefits for all.
Quote:
Originally Posted by NJGOAT
Ah, but the intellectual and communication solution requires two sides to participate and craft a mutually beneficial solution.
Not always. There are intellectual solutions to problems that can be implemented on one side and effect the other. There are many solutions to the problems of child undiscipline that can be beneficial on a case by case basis that does not require the overly easy recourse to violence.
However that said I am smiling a little wryly at the suggestion on this thread that some form of communication can not be established on that level with a 3 year old. I have an 11 month old girl at the moment and I am more than capable of establishing a communication with her on many levels regarding discipline. Children are smarter than some want to give them credit for and if a series of actions on their behalf leads to a conclusion that is not to their benefit, then next time the same scenario presents itself they are more than capable of harking back to the unpleasant consequences of their actions the last time and reconsidering their course of action this time.
I simply feel that in any scenario that violence is the last recourse of failure or lazyness. I am not saying it does not work, or that it is not one solution to problems which also results in an end game that we were aiming for. I just think that there are more satisfying, challenging, and useful courses of action should one look for them without recourse to the quick fix solution of mindless and all too easy violence.
I never meant to imply that communication is impossible with children, just that their impulses and desire to do certain things can often overload their reasoning, hence why punishments exist. As kids get older you can solve more and more issues through communication without needing to resort to punishment to achieve your result. Certainly you must admit that your 11 month old is less capable of being reasoned with than a 3 year old, or 7 year old or 12 year old, etc.?
If we break it down in simplistic terms discipline/punishment is a consequence for impulsive actions or undesired behavior. In order for it to work, the consequence must be considered worse than the pleasure derived from committing the act. This is the way it works no matter what you are talking about.
Different children respond differently in each situation. To some kids a simple "no" or the appearance of parental disappointment is enough for them to change their behavior. Others need time outs or losing priviledges. However, what do you do when your regular consequences are no longer viewed as a deterrent to a behavior that the child wants to engage in?
I posted about my daughter and ended with a question that none of the anti-spanking folks have responded to, so I will ask it again. My daughter at 2 1/2 decided it was fun to make her brother's face look like it got beat with a cheese grater anytime they had an argument. The first two times it happened, we sent her to time out and explained why her behavior was wrong and that she hurt her brother and everything was OK for awhile. The third time she came back from time out and immediately did it again. She went back to time out, came back, waited 5 minutes and did it again. I delivered a firm swat to her bottom and told her to never do it again and she hasn't.
How would a non-spanking parent have handled that situation? Time out was tried twice in a row and failed to work. Taking her toys, TV time, etc. away doesn't bother her. Being sent to her room also doesn't bother her. I could have separated them by sending my son to another part of the house, but that is punishing him for being hurt and gives in to what the 2 1/2 year old wanted, which was her brother to go away. Taking the 2 1/2 year old to another part of the house to separate them means someone would need to watch her and that is rewarding her with attention for negative behavior. I could have told her older, larger, stronger brother to simply haul off and hit her if she did it, but that would have negative long term consequences and confused him as he has had it drilled into his head not to hit his sister.
In this case I feel that getting her butt smacked was an extremely appropriate response given that she obviously had determined that sitting in time out and getting a lecture about not hurting her brother wasn't nearly as bad compared to the enjoyment she got from hurting him. I'd like to think the reason she hasn't done it since is that everytime she thinks about it she remembers getting swatted and decides it's not worth it.
I could count on one hand the number of times I have spanked my children and in each case, I believe it was a fully justified and reasonable response to what they were doing. I do not feel in anyway that my doing so was lazy or bad parenting. 99.99% of the time our discipline is constructive and positive, however, there is that .01% of the time that a major line gets crossed and the standard responses aren't working. In those times a firm swat is quite effective in delivering the message that despite whatever you think, mom and dad really do rule this house and there are lines that you can cross that will make us less than benevolent.
We use it as a first resort. If you do X then the punishment is Y. Each time. Every time.
I am quite OK with it leaving some marks. It should hurt. The question is where is the line drawn. To me some redness is OK. Dark bruising is not. Marks should be gone within a day or two.
Every time you post this I have questions. What kind of offenses do you spank your children for? From reading your posts it sounds like you spank them a lot. Do you? If you spank them a lot have you ever considered that spanking your children isn't influencing their conduct? I mean, if you cane them and they keep repeating the offense something isn't working. (When I was young I knew kids who were hit with a belt. They acted up just to spite their parents they hated them so much. They grew to where they didn't care if they were hit. They also left home at the first available opportunity and never looked back.)
I also cannot understand how you can repeatedly inflict physical pain on your own child who was, hopefully, conceived in an act of love. (I totally understand the swat on the bottom when they're about to stick a fork in the electrical outlet.) But please enlighten me because I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around your methods of discipline. If I've over-estimated how much you cane them please correct me.
My husband's mother spanked. Then my husband started laughing at her when she would spank them. So she started sending them out to the yard to get sticks and she'd spank them with sticks. If they got a stick that was too small they got a spanking and had to go out and find a better spanking stick. They again grew bored with that, desensitized. So she started using wooden spoons. One time she was spanking my husband with a wooden spoon and her spoon broke. He got in even more trouble then because she accused him of breaking her wooden spoon. I guess in her moment of upset she lost her ability to think logically.
He and his brothers had very different ways of coping with the spankings/beatings/whatever you want to call them. My husband rebelled, and tried even harder to get a rise out of his mother and continued to do whatever he wanted until she finally just gave up. His brothers, though, became depressed and fearful. It was really sad.
Every time you post this I have questions. What kind of offenses do you spank your children for? From reading your posts it sounds like you spank them a lot. Do you? If you spank them a lot have you ever considered that spanking your children isn't influencing their conduct? I mean, if you cane them and they keep repeating the offense something isn't working. (When I was young I knew kids who were hit with a belt. They acted up just to spite their parents they hated them so much. They grew to where they didn't care if they were hit. They also left home at the first available opportunity and never looked back.)
I also cannot understand how you can repeatedly inflict physical pain on your own child who was, hopefully, conceived in an act of love. (I totally understand the swat on the bottom when they're about to stick a fork in the electrical outlet.) But please enlighten me because I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around your methods of discipline. If I've over-estimated how much you cane them please correct me.
I ask myself the same questions. I noticed the other day he said that they don't have welts the next day or something like that, and he described that they are red for a day or two. How does he know that? Does he ask to see them naked? I am mostly troubled that he has bragged about beating his teenage daughter. That is weird. Is she not clothed? I feel like the way he talks about this stuff borders on the wrong side of normal. I don't think children should be beaten and I especially find it repulsive that a grown man would touch his teen daughter below the waist. I have said this before and I am saying it again.
The problem is that people get "not spanking" confused with "not disciplining"...children need discipline. Desperately. But it needs to be consistent, immediately follow the 'crime', and whenever possible, it should be a natural consequence to said 'crime' (you don't eat what mom cooked, you go to bed hungry). Physical punishment of any kind has been researched extensively for decades. A lot of that research is flawed, because it only studied prisoners, college students, or people who were spanked abusively (defined as spanking done on a body part other than the rear-end or leaving bruises or marks). However, the good studies do show that spanking in the name of discipline is harmful. Se of the things that have been observed are that these children are shown to have an average IQ score 5 points lower, have lower self esteem, are more likely to exhibit violence in their later relationships, and even (gasp) show sadomasochistic tendencies much more often than their non-spanked peers (this comes from the idea that love and pain somehow go together). The argument of "I was spanked and I turned out ok" is something I hear from every parent who spanks-abusively or not. It is illogical. If I say that I was beaten and left for dead when I was 2 but "turned out ok"; does that mean I should beat my 2yo and leave him/her for dead? Same idea. Most parents who spank do so because it's easy and they've never been taught any alternatives. If you can remember, specifically, any of the times you were spanked as a child, I can pretty much assure you that your thoughts weren't what you would want your child to think about you- generally, the child is angry, or fearful. That is no way to raise a child. I've never met a person who felt respect for their mom or dad after being spanked. Animal studies have taught us this too- punishment is not the best motivator for changing behavior, positive reinforcement is. And there are many, many other ways to discipline kids. Why even take a chance with something that could be potentially harmful? And what do you say to your child when they knock the crap out of a peer for not giving them back a toy- say even after they asked nicely and even counted to 3? You can't say anything, because you taught them that the acceptable way to handle it was through violence. Children misbehave for reasons; 4 specific reasons, to be exact. With a little effort, you can outsmart them-meaning respond in a way that counters their intent rather than reinforce it, and usually nip the bad behavior in the bud. The problem is, when switching tactics, most kids will protest in the form of acting worse (you always do x when I do y; so since it's not working, I'll try to do y a little harder) so parents just give up, say that it doesn't work, and revert back to the old ways. Spanking doesn't work, if it did, there wouldn't be any child abuse, nor would there be generations of parents still using it. Learn some new ways, use them consistently, and i assure you that not only will your childs behavior improve but your relationship will.
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