Children and corporal punishment

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GospelOfMatthew said:
Obedience is still not the right term. It implies degradation and servitude. It implies inequality. Parents are buddies, but buddies with wisdom. If your parent isn’t your buddy, that is sad 😞
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Negative, dude. Parents and children ARE unequal. That doesn’t mean it’s an abusive or contentious relationship, but a parent should be an authority figure. At least until the child becomes an adult.
 
It is wonderful when your children become mature adults, usually once they hit about age 25, and you can become friends.

It is disordered for a parent to relinquish their duty of authority over their minor child. It is an abuse to allow your children to go without discipline.
 
I will concede that once a child is an adult, CERTAINLY they are buddies, friends, pals. But still, obedience is not the term for parent-child. It is complying out of love not out of requirement
 
edwest211 said:
My father and mother weren’t perfect but they were good parents. They loved us
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Same here. My mom slapped me sometimes. Sometimes I deserved it, sometimes I thought it was unjust, sometimes she regretted it after and apologized for her temper. But she loved me very much, probably more than anyone else ever did except maybe my husband. And I loved her. I also never felt physically abused, never had a mark or a bruise or was in fear of actual injury.
 
GospelOfMatthew said:
I will concede that once a child is an adult, CERTAINLY they are buddies, friends, pals. But still, obedience is not the term for parent-child. It is complying out of love not out of requirement
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Again, those aren’t mutually exclusive.
 
niceatheist said:
All it taught me was fear.
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Did you not feel also anger at the adults? I remember being slapped once by my father (irrelevant reason) and all I felt was pleasure and anger that despite their expectations they did not defeat me. Which grew later on, from the left to the right, when I am religious while parents are not. I keep getting these uncontrollable vibes of “wasn’t I right?”
For me physical punishment is like the wind. You saw wind and rip a storm.
 
GospelOfMatthew said:
Obedience is still not the right term. It implies degradation and servitude. It implies inequality. Parents are buddies, but buddies with wisdom
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I don’t know about that. Certainly my father and I are more like friends these days, but when I was a child, he was Dad with a capital D. Though I have not seen eye to eye with my father on my things, even in my teenage years, there was certainly authority that came with his position. He wasn’t my buddy when I was a kid; he was protector, my guide, and as I got older, a bit of an interlocutor. Friendship was something that only really happened when I was old enough to, literally and figuratively, look him in the eye.

The one thing I’ve always tried to be with my own children is approachable. They’re still in their 20s, so there’s still a strong father-child relationship, but I’m beginning to see things changing as they mature, and they begin to appreciate much more the sacrifices and decisions I made when they were growing up.

One thing is for sure, you may be friends with your kids during that wonderful period between about 7 and 13 (the “they can make their own lunches stage”), but friends with my teenage daughters wasn’t going to happen. I spent more time enforcing curfews and inspecting their young male friends, and finding that delicate balancing point between friendliness, charm, and threat.
 
That’s ideal, sure. But sometimes a child needs to firmly be told “no.” Six year olds aren’t rational or mature enough to make their own decisions. You can’t always approach parenting as a colloboration between equals. Sometimes the answer is “no, because I’m the parent and I said so.”
 
I don’t know where you are getting this from, but my mother and father were always my Mother and Father. They were NEVER my buddies, friends, or pals.

My mother died when she was almost 90 and in the over 50 years she and I were together, she was Mom. That is a whole different status from Buddy, Friend or Pal. It’s not even in the ball park. Nor did I want her to be my buddy, friend or pal.

GospelofMatthew, I really think you have a lot to learn about parent-child relations. I’m muting this thread now as I think this is a case of a person who is a little too young to understand stuff repeatedly offering opinions that to an older person seem pretty naive.
 
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LawyersGunsAndMoney said:
That’s ideal, sure. But sometimes a child needs to firmly be told “no.” Six year olds aren’t rational or mature enough to make their own decisions. You can’t always approach parenting as a colloboration between equals. Sometimes the answer is “no, because I’m the parent and I said so.”
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I think my objective was always to get them to the point of rationality. Absolutely at age 6 there’s limits to reason, and sometimes you have to put on the dictator’s hat and just say “No!” Mind you, it was the teenage years I found the most baffling. In some ways a six year old is infinitely more reasonable than a 16 year old.
 
We need to think of it not as a single moment but within the context of the entire parent-child relationship.

What I don’t get is why it’s not o.k. to hit your wife when she burns dinner, and not o.k. to hit your husband when he stays out too late, but it is o.k. to hit a child (with decades less experience in how to behave in life) when he or she doesn’t meet expectations.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
I don’t know where you are getting this from, but my mother and father were always my Mother and Father. They were NEVER my buddies, friends, or pals.

My mother died when she was almost 90 and in the over 50 years she and I were together, she was Mom. That is a whole different status from Buddy, Friend or Pal. It’s not even in the ball park. Nor did I want her to be my buddy, friend or pal.
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My father was one of my closest friends in the six years between my high school graduation and his death. Before that, we were close and loved spending time with each other, there was an undeniable hierarchy there.
 
You don’t know me, my mother or the situation, and YES sometimes I deserved it. Now quit lecturing me about MY relationship with MY mother. It’s unwanted and it’s frankly, maddening. Good bye!
 
GospelOfMatthew said:
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Tis_Bearself:
My mom slapped me sometimes. Sometimes I deserved it,
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Nobody ever deserves to be slapped
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Sometimes people deserve to be shot. What in the world gives you the idea that nobody ever deserves to even be slapped?
 
When fathers and mothers were respected, and society was more respectful, the neighbors would tell my parents if I did wrong. And some were friends to my parents and me. Thanks to anarchists who appear to hate social stability, poison gradually seeped into our neighborhoods - our communities. Due to lies and deceptions, people became confused. Now, after several generations, we have this: junk, disorder, wrong thinking and wrong behavior promoted as somehow OK. It never was.
 
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@(name removed by moderator) have you ever heard Desmond Dekker’s ska song ‘Honour Your Father and Mother’? You should look it up on YouTube, I think you would like it (the lyrics are the verses you quoted).
 
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