**…Say “please” and “thank you,” don’t talk when someone else is talking, don’t throw a fit in the middle of a Walmart, and don’t run around like you own the place when you’re at a restaurant! **
Our culture seems to be going through this phase where we’re just like “let’s tolerate everything! Yay!”
…uh no.
So, any thoughts? Any advice? To spank or not to spank?
Thanks guys!
You’re gonna get a lot of common sense advice from people who have more experience with this type of thing, so I’ll just focus on what may be more individual experience.
In the things you mention (the part I bolded), it’s important that the child see the parent holding himself to the same standard as he holds the child, bound by the same rules. They say, “nice to you but not nice to the waiter is not nice at all,” or something along those lines. What should we say about nice to the waiter but not nice to one’s own child then?
In some situations parents may feel they don’t owe the child any sort of respect, that dignity is non-issue, basically that the child doesn’t have any rights. So they don’t need to do any fact-finding, they can just decide who’s guilty (on some kind of “golden rule”, e.g. always the older or young child or always the child vs an adult), they can follow up with punishments etc., and if it turns out they were wrong, then “**** happens”, no need to apologise (which could undermine his authority etc.). Or no obligation to speak politely to a child because, well, a child doesn’t have rights. So a child can’t speak openly to an adult (much less anything like an angrier tone or more colourful vocabulary) but needs to accept even what amounts to verbal abuse by an adult (parent, teacher or otherwise). And listen to that without interrupting. (While adults can interrupt at will, and will do so.) They’ll sometimes go on and on in their far-off, unproven and just untrue conclusions and accuse you of outright lying when you say, “it wasn’t like that.” Because, yeah, contradicting an adult that makes things up as he goes is lying when a child does it.
Whatever abuses of due process you can identify in law flicks, thrilles, crime stories etc., parents and teachers are liable to inflict on the children in their care. And it doesn’t stop being abuse just because it’s being done to a child in his family house or at school instead of a defendant in a courtroom or convict in jail. A classic example is forbidding the subject to speak in his defence. Or forcing a confession over denials. A parent or teacher can decide that 1) you did it, 2) you’re lying about it, then 3) force you to admit it, 4) force you to apologise for lying when you defended yourself. And then 5) not feel bound to say sorry when you somehow manage to prove it.
And then kids go to law school.
IMHO the above is much more important than spanking or not.
However, where it comes to spanking, spanking does involve the moment when you realise that your body doesn’t belong to you, it can be accessed by someone else without much fuss and your wishes, your limits, will not be respected. Also, in some situations children may feel sexually violated, This when it involves bare skin and/or a parent of the opposite sex. IMHO also an adult who is physically weaker than the child shouldn’t do it. It’s one thing when you know you can’t win, it’s different when you’re expected to take physical abuse from someone whom you’d be able to overpower normally (most mothers are probably already physically weaker than a boy in early teens and fathers
can be weaker than a sixteen year old or so).
I think spanking can be right but I have yet to see someone capable of making use of it without causing psychological damage to the child.
Speaking of which, the other problem with spanking is how often it involves a parent basically taking it out physically. A parent may very well first spank a child and then wonder where all the bruises are from. Maintaining control of oneself is extremely important. An adult with self-control problems should probably abstain from spanking, regardless if he can justify it on moral grounds. But the same is true for any punishment. It’s easy to come up with a big number, for example, “six months of community service,” or, “five years of hard labour,” in adult trials, same with children punished by parents, teachers etc., but it’s less easy to actually get any sort of sensible idea as to how much it really is, six months of this, five years of that. So I’d say bite your tongue, think twice, before you decide how long a punishment is going to last, or any other such parameters (e.g. how big a share of the child’s allowance is going to be forfeited). It’s extremely difficult to admit you exaggerated after you did. The issue of correcting your mistakes vs preserving your authority can get ugly.
But yeah, punishments need to be more than token ones. Children who are allowed everything and anything, don’t actually grow into happy people from all the liberty they “enjoyed”. Limits are going to be imposed on them by the society or even by the laws of physics when they grow up (well, if they actually do). And if they get away with token punishments, they might become cynical about the whole law & justice thing. IMHO punishments need to be swift, noticeable, memorable and rational. No out of the whack ideas. No excessive creativity (cruel & unusual, you know). When in doubt, shave some time off it. Show what was wrong and why. Involve restitution in the punishment (or at least I think this should be done). That way it will be easier to rationalise. And you’ve got to rationalise it because the kid sooner or later will question all of it. You need a proper notion of fairness in the punishment system rather than a crowd control device (or the child will think it’s all about authority and the strongest wins, basically jungle law).
He didn’t do it on purpose, but we were mortified.
