Yeah, my mom was very violent, my second step dad as well. I remember the “look what you made me do”. The more I got beaten, the more my behaviour got worse.
I got placed into a foster home at 14 by childrens law (kinderrechter) because I came to school with bruises and black eyes, so my parents now are not welcome in my house or anywhere near my son…although they want to reconcile.
I have never beaten my kid and he is here at almost 20, loving his parents and doing alright. I learned from my upbringing never to beat my kid.
I am still seeing a shrink, depression from all that 40 years later. Fuck you if you beat your kids. You can set them straight by other means by taking away privileges, talking to them in a quite and composed manner, and show them ways how to do better.
I don’t think the paper is disputing the harm of abusively beating the shit out of your kids.
I’m all for legitimate papers and research challenging my views, however what kind of journal is “Marriage and Family Review”? It seems to be a little confusing with the “Marriage and Family Journal” which has been around for over 100 years. The “Review” variants has only been around since the 70s.
It seems to be primarily published through Taylor and Francis which has a mixed reputation when searching online. For others out there who are familiar with this publisher, please set me straight if my doubt is misplaced.
This is one of those papers where I look forward to having the research reproduced again in more journals, to alleviate my skepticism.
I don’t really remember any times being spanked, though I know I was. But I do remember the time my dad put my head through the drywall for reasons I don’t remember, and the savage beating my mom gave me when I told her I didn’t want to go to church anymore. Those definitely fucked me up. Especially the latter, when I got older and realized I was queer.
Preachers kid who also turned out to be queer. I was terrified of getting spanked. Years of my parents telling me my ass was part of my private area and no one should ever touch it then my father pulling my underwear down and spanking me seriously fucked me up.
I’m not sure how assaulting children is ever going to build an effective relationship between kids and their parents. Parents should represent safety and unconditional love because then the educational message will have an easier time being accepted by the kids.
Sure, positive reinforcement is great for encouraging good behaviors. What’s effective as a positive punishment for discouraging bad behaviors?
Who says you need punishment at all?
The vast majority of misbehaviour is down to poorly-developed coping skills. Which kids have, because, y’know, they’re kids.
We all do stupid shit we know we shouldn’t, even when we know it will lead to bad outcomes for us, because fuck it.
Work is stressful, fuck it entire pizza for lunch. I’m sad and lonely, fuck it I’m calling my ex. I have a shitty headache, fuck it imma chew this stupid customer out. Omg I need to know what happens, fuck it I’m binging the rest of this series at 1am on a work night. Partyyyyyyyy fuck it lets finish the entire bottle. And so on, and so forth.
Emotion management and impulse control is a learned skill, especially when you have to integrate it with all the social stuff. People have decades of experience, and they still fuck up.
What the flying fuck do you expect from a little kid? They’re hilariously incompetent at literally everything; why do you imagine that they’d be automatically perfect at probably the most difficult complex and nuanced skillset there is? They need strategies for dealing, they need experience recognising that they need to deal, and they need time to develop enough emotional resources to take the strain.
And since when did anyone get better at learning any skill when every slipup leads to some asshole deliberately inflicting pain and/or misery on them?
That’s not how you draw a dog, Emily. :thud: You made me do that.
You missed the ball, Billy. Now you don’t get fed.
No, Kate, 5 x 8 is not 42, now I’m going to throw out all your toys.
It doesn’t work like that. People need to learn from their mistakes just as much as from their successes - which means a safe environment with support and feedback, not anxiety, fear, pain and shame.
When my kid was about 6, he had the worst time with video games. He would get frustrated when he lost, frustration would make him worse at the game, he’d start losing more and more, get even more frustrated and he’d spiral into a meltdown and storm off in rage and floods of tears and be absolutely miserable for ages.
Getting angry and melting down because you lost at a video game is entirely unacceptable behaviour, but just heaping more misery on him for doing it would have been not only highly counterproductive but a complete dick move as well.
So instead of doing that, I taught him how to manage the emotion - how to recognise the feeling of frustration, how to recognise when it was building up past his ability to handle, and then to step back and take a break until he was out of the red zone before getting back to it. It took trial and error and a whole bunch of practice, but by god it worked.
Once he got the hang of managing it, not only did the meltdowns stop, but the breaks got shorter and rarer as he smoothed out the curve and got to practice increasing his tolerance without catastrophic failure blowing the whole thing up. Before long he was actively seeking out the most ridiculous rage-games like Super Meat Boy and VVVVVV just to revel in it (and beating the shit out of me at them too, little tyke).
And this principle generalises across the board. Teach them to manage the gigantic emotions and impulses that assail them from all sides. Give them a strategy for dealing with them - and when something gets past them, acknowledge the failure, make restitution if necessary, then postmortem what went wrong and how to handle it better next time. They may not like the process, but that’s worlds away from deliberately inflicting shit on them for the sake of it.
They absolutely do need the feedback, you can’t just give blanket approval to everything and expect results - you just keep it constructive. It’s that simple. Unconditional love and they need to do better than that what the fuck little dude.
And when they’re too little to reason about stuff, that’s what the Parent Voice and judicious use of Death Glare is for. You don’t need to yell, you just go full Mufasa on them as necessary. There’s a couple of cheap tricks you can use to de-escalate threenager tantrums, mostly by interrupting the self-talk loop.
And it works. My kid got all the way through the school system without ever getting in any kind of trouble; I don’t think I needed to even tell him off about anything past the age of 10 or so. We have a great relationship, I never had to be a dickhole to my kid, and I never relied on intimidation to maintain authority through his childhood, it just naturally tapered off into mutual cooperation as he got older.
You’re choosing to use escalating language, instead of accurate language; With the choice of “assault”, you’re attempting to arouse an outsized emotional response in the reader. As a debate tactic, It’s a dishonest manipulation. You should try to avoid doing that.
Besides, assault is a legal term, which includes merely the threat of violence. Battery is the actual use of violence. So even in what you were trying to do, you used the wrong term.
Ok I fail to see how battering kids helps them develop a bond of trust with the carers.
That’s better. It’s still escalating language, and dishonest. But at least it’s more accurate.
And the truth is spanking doesn’t build trust. Not on its own anyway. It’s all about the context.
Following through on an established rule with a known consequences does actually promote trust. It works as part of a holistic approach to reward and punishment.
Spanking generally isn’t needed with many children. But with some children, it can be a effective tool when used appropriately.when used appropriately
…and there’s the rub. Far too often it’s not used appropriately. And people’s ideas of what is appropriate is colored by whether they too were beaten as a child.
Agreed. But that doesn’t effect my point, or even the study.
Almost everything with an effective appropriate use can also be misused.
You’re choosing to nitpick something that wasn’t even in question.
“As a debate tactic…”
This isn’t the debate club, my friend. He just made a comment. You’re overreacting. You should try to avoid doing that.
Besides, the use of “besides” as a complete sentence with a full stop is grammatically wrong.
Besides, the use of “besides” as a complete sentence with a full stop is grammatically wrong.
That’s true. Apologies… And corrected
“Violence as a growth guide: a good thing?”
Hm, I wonder.
What does “effective” (ages 2 to 6) mean here? What do I want to show to a kid when I’m angry? That I resort to violence? Do people really think that kids don’t know that parents can be angry?
I cannot imagine one single reason to lose an argument to a 6 year-old kid, stop talking and just hit them.
You’re just a bad parent, if you do that. That’s all.
Idk I guess if this was like Dragonball z and we could put a power level on the spanking then maybe it makes sense? Like ok we’re going with a power level 5 spanking today out of 10000 lol idk though…some kids seem like they could use a spank on the bottom but I think that’s the extent it should go. When I see people hitting their kids in other ways I feel awful inside but a butt spank never seemed to bother me when I’ve seen it in action as long as it’s not like they are trying to hit the bell at the top of a carnival hammer game.
I’m not surprised at the study. It’s basically impossible to control for between individual variation sufficiently without an RCT, but that will never happen with spanking. There will always be this problem of which end to label the cart and which end to label the horse.
I guess I’ll also poke the hornet’s nest while I’m here…
I don’t really have a problem with corporal punishment. Not for children, or adults, when appropriately administrated. I say this a person who has firsthand experience with a public school that utilised corporal punishment and an angry parent just taking it out on you for being a kid.
At school a paddling was just another step in the process. You’d lose recess time, you’d have to clap erasers or write lines, you’d get sent to the principal’s office and then and only then get a paddling on you return trip if you kept it up. There always had to be two witnesses and the teacher who sent you down wasn’t allowed to do it. If that still didn’t work they would call your parents to come get you and paddle you again. The last one basically never happened
It was so different from someone who was angry at you just trying to make themselves feel better that I could easily recognize it even as a small child. It always baffles me when people deny any daylight between the two, I assume it’s born out of a very fortunate ignorance. I never felt unsafe at school. It never diminished my trust in anyone there. If I got paddled at school—I knew it was coming, I knew exactly why, and I knew I could have made a sensible choice to avoid it. That was not the case at home.
The other reason is the moral one. I never see people with well behaved children claim you can forego punishments entirely and I have yet to hear a reasonable explanation for why intentional emotional harm has more virtue in it than intentional physical harm. Because that is what the alternatives are: isolation and deprivation. A time out isn’t harmless, losing recreation and exercise time isn’t harmless, they just don’t leave marks you can see.
