Discipline Daughter By Sneaking Super-Hot Pepper Into Her Food

[GEddie]

What ever happened to a good old fashioned, straight forward spanking?

Not acceptable any more.

ICXC NIKA

 

[LightBound]

What ever happened to a good old fashioned, straight forward spanking?

Because a man spanking the buttocks of his 12 year-old daughter is inappropriate. He should have taken her fancy- schmancy electronics away for talking back instead of tampering with her food.

 

[jmcrae]

He is in England and the atmosphere there seems to be different than in other places. My wife’s boss has a son stationed in England. A couple of months ago, they visited their son and, while at an ice cream store, one of the grandchildren (4 years old) started acting up and, when the dad (an Air Force pilot) verbally corrected his son, he was approached by two different people threatening to call the authorities on him for abusing his child. He didn’t do anything physically at all to the boy, he was just correcting him verbally. They were stunned.

Apparently, based on Oliver’s statement and the event I described, you cannot correct your children in England, at least in public.

Peace

Tim

Yikes. But wait a minute - if it’s illegal to give verbal guidance, then shouldn’t he be able to have the bystanders arrested for speaking to him and saying he was wrong?

 

[LightBound]

**What ever happened to a good old fashioned, straight forward spanking? **This is what you did, and now I’m going punish you.

No, this father is totally confusing his child by ambushing her with a sick, practical joke and then telling her it’s punishment. The child is going to be very confused by this nonsense!

He’s too cowardly to be an adult and lay down the law to his child. Instead he acts like a sadistic clown.

Because a man spanking the buttocks of his 12 year-old daughter is most inappropriate.

However, I agree with the remainder of your post. A more appropriate and effective punishment for being disrespectful would have been taking away her fancy- schmancy electronics instead of tampering with her food.

 

[paperwight66]

He is in England and the atmosphere there seems to be different than in other places. My wife’s boss has a son stationed in England. A couple of months ago, they visited their son and, while at an ice cream store, one of the grandchildren (4 years old) started acting up and, when the dad (an Air Force pilot) verbally corrected his son, he was approached by two different people threatening to call the authorities on him for abusing his child. He didn’t do anything physically at all to the boy, he was just correcting him verbally. They were stunned.

Apparently, based on Oliver’s statement and the event I described, you cannot correct your children in England, at least in public.

Peace

Tim

Oh, for goodness sake! That isn’t the case at all.

The only reason I can think of for strangers remonstrating with your son would be if he was using foul language. He suely wasn’t doing that, was he?

Or another reason has just occurred to me, could the strangers have got the impression that the child was autistic?

 

[Orogeny]

Oh, for goodness sake! That isn’t the case at all.

That was the case in this instance. Sorry, I’m just reporting what I was told by a very trustworthy source.

The only reason I can think of for strangers remonstrating with your son would be if he was using foul language. He suely wasn’t doing that, was he?

No. The parent in question is a devout Mormon. Trust me. He wasn’t using foul language!

Or another reason has just occurred to me, could the strangers have got the impression that the child was autistic?

I have no way of knowing what the strangers thought. I just know that the child’s parents and grandparents were dumbstruck by the affair.

Peace

Tim

 

[EasterJoy]

I do think bad tasting things can have a place in child rearing. They helped me break my son of a really bad chewing habit (used that special nail polish manufactured to stop biting nails, and just put it on things he was prone to chewing on.) It wasn’t the only thing I used to stop the habit, but it helped from having some toys destroyed in the meantime. And I wouldn’t have ever put it on something I wanted him to eat.

I don’t think I would do it, but I do know that it was common to “wash one’s mouth out with soap.” But here there doesn’t seem to be any relation at all - does the girl even know why the apple tasted the way it did? At least if you’re doing the soap thing, child knows - "say something bad, get mouth “cleaned”). It’s a known consequence for a known behavioral problem.

There are things that my husband has done (or I have done) that I have said to him (or to myself, I don’t think he’s ever said it to me) “don’t do it again,” but it’s never been in the “this is abusive” realm, mostly “that’s completely counter-productive to what you’re trying to accomplish.”

I used to tell my kids, “Hey, don’t forget: I have to feed you, but I don’t have to fix stuff that you like.” They got the point; that is, that our habit of choosing menus with their likes and dislikes in mind was an act of largess that they were not entitled to expect.

I also remember a story that Kathleen Norris related in one of her books. She was at a conference or something, and for some reason she and a Benedictine monk were in this kitchen, and she was making their meal. They were going to have eggs. She asked him how he liked his eggs. He looked at her blankly. No one ever asks you how you like your eggs at a monastery. They make meals for you, you eat the meals. The people cooking the food come to learn what the basic level of tolerance for pepper and that sort of thing is, but there are no made-to-order meals. My SIL used to put it this way, with a wall-hanging over her kitchen table: “We have two choices for dinner tonight: What I Made and Going Without.”

Besides, maybe being deliberately served unpalatable food is the natural consequence of upsetting a chef! I have heard of chefs getting into a snit because a customer thought their meat had been overcooked, coming out into the dining room with a large raw piece of meat and ready to pick a fight over who was most qualified to decide how meat was to be cooked in that establishment, LOL. Chefs have been known to be funny that way, so maybe this is not an unexpected consequence when your dad makes his living in a kitchen.

Still, I agree with his wife that effective parenting rarely makes use of consequences that people outside of your line of work would find arbitrary. Arbitrary pleasant surprises are the spice of life, but arbitrary throwing in a practical joke as a punishment is not. Practical jokes, when played by a person in a place of authority, sow the seeds of resentment in the underlings. A continuation of this habit would have been very likely to result in a child looking for the chance to return a practical joke of her own. (With a bright child who nevertheless only has the judgment of a child, the effects of that predictable outcome really could be disastrous!! )

 

[EasterJoy]

Makes sense. I’m a picky eater with a sensitive stomach and most peppers are on my evil list but it might not be the same as if this girl had never eaten a pepper before. But like you point out, she might’ve rubbed her eye and that wouldn’t have been pretty. uch: And it still seems too calculated and cruel somehow. My mother disapproved of practical jokes and I generally do too, unless the context is clearly fun, not spiteful, and the joke in question is pretty innocuous.

Yes. Practical jokes against someone who is not in a position to dish it back in kind can easily stray into cruelty, even when not meant as a cruelty. There have to be boundaries in place, and that takes people with more maturity and judgment than true lovers of practical jokes typically have. Still, in a social circle that loves them and keeps them in bounds, that is their business.

 

[VeritasLuxMea]

I can’t believe there’s more moral outrage here about a parent spicing up a kid’s food than there is about those who smack their kids around. LOL… palmface.

 

[EasterJoy]

I can’t believe there’s more moral outrage here about a parent spicing up a kid’s food than there is about those who smack their kids around. LOL… palmface.

I think the response came because they initially reacted as if his “joke” was more along the lines of actually slipping the Scotch bonnet itself into her food. Making a kid who was not used to it eat a raw Scotch bonnet would be a lot worse than a spanking. It would feel like a food-borne chemical burn. (At least, I know which one I’d choose, if I had to choose.) Judging by her reaction, however, the heat on her apple was nothing like that severe. The “joke” was that he got the peppery flavor onto the apple without the give-away appearance of black pepper. He was looking to give her a rude surprise, according to his own account, but at first blush it sounds as if he meant to inflict pain. I don’t think he did. If he’d wanted a painful level of pepper oil, he has the experience to have delivered it.

 

[3DOCTORS]

I used to tell my kids, “Hey, don’t forget: I have to feed you, but I don’t have to fix stuff that you like.” They got the point; that is, that our habit of choosing menus with their likes and dislikes in mind was an act of largess that they were not entitled to expect.

I also remember a story that Kathleen Norris related in one of her books. She was at a conference or something, and for some reason she and a Benedictine monk were in this kitchen, and she was making their meal. They were going to have eggs. She asked him how he liked his eggs. He looked at her blankly. No one ever asks you how you like your eggs at a monastery. They make meals for you, you eat the meals. The people cooking the food come to learn what the basic level of tolerance for pepper and that sort of thing is, but there are no made-to-order meals. My SIL used to put it this way, with a wall-hanging over her kitchen table: “We have two choices for dinner tonight: What I Made and Going Without.”

Reminds me of the joke about the monk who found a mouse floating in his soup. The monks weren’t allowed to complain about the food, unless it was out of charity for another monk. So he thought about it, and finally he got the attention of the monk who was serving, and said, “Brother Michael didn’t get a mouse in his soup.”

Besides, maybe being deliberately served unpalatable food is the natural consequence of upsetting a chef! I have heard of chefs getting into a snit because a customer thought their meat had been overcooked, coming out into the dining room with a large raw piece of meat and ready to pick a fight over who was most qualified to decide how meat was to be cooked in that establishment, LOL. Chefs have been known to be funny that way, so maybe this is not an unexpected consequence when your dad makes his living in a kitchen.

Still, I agree with his wife that effective parenting rarely makes use of consequences that people outside of your line of work would find arbitrary. Arbitrary pleasant surprises are the spice of life, but arbitrary throwing in a practical joke as a punishment is not. Practical jokes, when played by a person in a place of authority, sow the seeds of resentment in the underlings. A continuation of this habit would have been very likely to result in a child looking for the chance to return a practical joke of her own. (With a bright child who nevertheless only has the judgment of a child, the effects of that predictable outcome really could be disastrous!! )

There’s also the folk wisdom of not making the cook or server so angry that they spit in your food . . .

 

[EasterJoy]

Reminds me of the joke about the monk who found a mouse floating in his soup. The monks weren’t allowed to complain about the food, unless it was out of charity for another monk. So he thought about it, and finally he got the attention of the monk who was serving, and said, “Brother Michael didn’t get a mouse in his soup.”

 

[petitfleur]

Not acceptable any more.

ICXC NIKA

Spanking is not illegal. Believe it or not most people don’t object to a swat when a kid is out of line when done in the context of a good and loving home.
I do think it’s ridiculous when people act like you need to hit your kid in order to get good results.

I also am curious at to what is meant by “turned out ok” whenever spanking is discussed.

P.s I am not anti spanking I was spanked and have swatted a bottom myself.