With regard to the last paragraph, not only is healing later no excuse for harming now, but anyone who defends the “right” of parents to beat their children obviously didn’t turn out okay—they turned out as someone who thinks child abuse is defensible.

Another factor is the tendency among religious and social conservatives to be obsessed with social order.  Children are considered of lower social status because of their younger ages, lack of experiences, and/or lack of achievements compared with adults.  Thus, they “don’t have the right” to behave in ways grudgingly acceptable in adults such as disagreeing or worse….arguing/disobeying parents/parental rules.  In short, a continuation of the “children should be seen, not heard” mentality from a century or two in the past. 

It is also a reason why they vociferously hate any protests by those who oppose their agenda…..they see all dissenters…especially marginalized groups as people “not knowing their place”. 

Hence the police actions/conservative backlash on OWS and past progressive-oriented protests.

James Dobson believes you should beat children with a paddle or a tree branch, which he has somehow managed to rationalize into “loving” behavior.

That’s so BDSM. The Christian Right seems to really partake in BDSM-type sexuality.

Amanda, you are once again 100% right.

After the most recent death of a child at the hands of parents following the “Christian” child-rearing manual “To Train Up a Child”, I read the whole thing online. It’s clearly written by a sadist. And tons of fundies follow these philosophies.

It makes me want to cry. And hug my daughter. And hug my husband, who was physically abused throughout his childhood, though not by fundies. Secular people beat their kids too, but the fundies think that God’s on their side while they do it.

Abuse is the last resort of a coward who has lost the ability to earn respect. Is that much different than what we’ve come to expect from some on the radical right? Hmm.

Very well said, all of it, Amanda.

Really telling, her mother says, “Take it like a woman.”

@ atheist @ 3 - That’s a pretty serious insult to BDSM.  BDSM is play.  This is assault.  There’s a universe of difference between the two.

I’ve now seen this video posted on a few sites and I still haven’t steeled myself to watch it. I just can’t imagine how someone could do that to a child. I’ve worked with kids in various volunteer capacities and there have been times when I’ve accidentally caused pain to a child and I’ve felt horrible about it every single time. I don’t have any blood relationship with these kids, but the idea that I’ve hurt them, even accidentally, is horrifying to me. The idea that you could do something like this to someone so vulnerable…I just don’t get it, and I hope I never do.

My father was a Southern Baptist from Mississippi, and he used to beat us with his leather belt quite often, though in a more controlled manner than this guy shows here. It was just part of raising kids as he knew it. I’m sure his parents treated him the same way.

Amanda is entirely correct that this sort of a behavior is considered a “normal” part of child rearing in fundamentalist circles.

I walked away from my family as soon as I turned 18 and never looked back, but that’s a longer story.

Hitting animals doesn’t work.  Why would anyone think hitting people does?

My (terrific) parents would lose their temper with us from time to time and give us spankings, but it was always clear that it was because we made them angry with our bad behavior.  I’ve avoided spanking my own children so far, because I think it’s wrong, but I definitely understand being angry enough with a child to hit her.  Jocelyn Elders said, when asked about corporal punishment, that she’d only hit her son once, when he threw up on her on purpose, and that she regretted it.  But he’d never done it again.

Violence against your own children is wrong, is the point, but parents are only human.  It takes effort to control yourself and learn how to treat children like human beings, since they start out as more like really smart puppies.  It doesn’t become truly evil until you convince yourself that you’re applying some kind of moral code, instead of just using your superior physical strength and society-granted authority to beat on someone with whom you can’t reason.

There’s this odd thing in certain circles, which you saw during slavery, that you had to have universal participation in an activity to “prove” your authority. It wasn’t just the idea that slavery was supposed to be legal, but “being a slave owner” was one of the highest callings a gentleman could pursue—it was a sign that he exercised “leadership.” You see it today with gun ownership—it’s beleived by certain gun enthusiasts as not just a “right” to own a gun, but something that makes you an “independent man.”

And so it is with corporal punishment: the fundies here aren’t just saying, “some forms of spanking are ok,” they’re saying that to be a good Christian parent, you need to beat your children, and this is how you choose the right implements in order to beat them properly. I suspect that part of this kind of a means of ensuring “everyone shares guilt” if something goes wrong, as well as to make sure that no one questions beating children in extreme cases like this. If this guy’s church had some people that hit their kids and some people who didn’t, then when this video came out, guilt-ridden parents might go to the non-beating parents to ask them how to discipline their children without corporal punishment, and the appeal of corporal punishment might break down. But if *everyone* in the community has been taught and trained to use some form of corporal punishment on their kids, then there are no outlets when parents see cases like this.

I’ve listened to and read many fundamentalist Christians discuss things like beating children and submission.

The consensus among them is that they believe that they are saving souls, inflicting temporary pain to save from eternal pain. This, unfortunately for all, makes what they do a persistent evil that will not go away until the Christian religion dies or undergoes an extremely radical change.

Religion in general is more openly being challenged (at least from my USian perspective), and contrary to the accommodationists, tone-arguers, and fairy-tale believer’s wishes, I hope knocked from its privileged and protected condition from which it may never recover.

Re: dopus dei’s “using your superior physical strength and society-granted authority to beat on someone with whom you can’t reason.” - that’s exactly the problem. Having had siblings who were, shall we say, incredibly demanding, I can definitely understand the impulse of “oh god just make them be quiet just for five seconds please be quiet” (anyone who has been around howling children throwing a tantrum can probably understand that), but superior physical strength is no excuse for violence - you learn THAT right around the time you learn to stop throwing tantrums; why on earth would you voluntarily un-learn it for the people you supposedly care about/for? For that matter, even if, in your words, children start out “like really smart puppies”, it’s not like hitting a puppy is either right or productive, either.

I just… I’m honestly squicked by the whole “spanking your kids” thing. I mean: I’m kinky. Being hit with a belt is what I do in bed. It gets me off, it feels GOOD if it’s done right (aka: when I’m in the right frame of mine and I ask for it because I want it), it’s sexyfuntimes. So when someone talks about this in a family way, I’m just like… incestuous overtones, much?? People! It shouldn’t be that hard to keep your hands off your kids! *shudder*

Hitting animals doesn’t work.  Why would anyone think hitting people does?

In a mind of someone obsessed with social order and conformity, breaking someone’s spirit to the point they obey in fear is not failure, but a highly desired feature.  Not that far removed, actually than your average tyrants from the past…..especially authoritarian types running Fascist/Communist regimes during this past century.

(I hate calling it “spanking”, which allows people to equate it with painless bottom pats, which I still think aren’t such a great idea but can’t be meaningfully compared to whippings in any way)

This, this this. What you showed was horrific abuse (I couldn’t watch all of it, didn’t expect I would be able to), that completely ignores the “rules of spanking”: Don’t spank in anger, don’t spank with a tool, only spank on the bottom, allow the child’s behavior to correct, don’t spank for every little infraction. And *if you can’t adhere to these rules, then don’t fucking spank your kid because you can’t be trusted to do it without it elevating to outright abuse.* And I’d trust the developmental psychologists more than I trust James “let’s shower with our sons to keep them from being gay and beat the shit out of him with tree branches” Dobson. And the simple fact is that very, very few people, and I would wager *zero* people with authoritarian control issues *coughChristianPatriarchscough* can do this, and so they declare that what they do is “spanking” and somehow just another valid way to raise your kid. Because drowning your kid in the tub is just another way of giving them a bath.

Whenever I’m on forums of a more international flavor (mostly gaming forums), people are really amazed that what we in America call “Spanking” is legal and I’m inclined to agree. If what this criminal psychopath did to his daughter can be legally described as “spanking” (and the mom who sits there and admonishes her daughter to “sit back and take it like a 16-year old girl” jesus fucking christ), then it’s time to outlaw even the bottom-swats that conform to the rules.

Also, “christian conservatives,” if you scream “goddamn” at your daughter while you’re beating the shit out of her in the name of Christ’s love, you should be aware that your mask is pretty well slipped off and you’re not fooling anyone.

Oh, and IIRC, the rules of spanking also have a very finite time period that they are applicable, in terms of child development: The kid needs to be able to process verbal warnings but not yet have their empathy engines up and running when they can reason against bad behavior. No matter how much a teenager might appear to be a self-absorbed little shit, spanking is not an option.

Thank you for that last paragraph. The here and now matters, and children are people who (should) have the right to not be physically assaulted. Yeah, I was spanked and I’m fine, even have a good relationship with my mother who did the spanking. Still doesn’t make it right. What I find most frustrating about having been spanked as a child (always out of anger and frustration) is how it has made spanking my own child when I’m really angry a nearly automatic response that I have to fight regularly.

I was in a cab once and they were listening to some talk radio.  They had an actress on who used to be on the Facts of Life. (I think she was Blanche?) 

Anyway she was talking about how important hitting your kids was and blah blah blah.  And it almost sounded like a rational worldview for a minute, like they were using spanking as a reasonable punishment.  But then she told this story about her son. 

He was about to go and compete in a big spelling be, a regional one or something.  They were in the bathroom before it started and she asked him how he was feeling.  He admitted to being nervous.  Then she said something about winning, and he said he would do his best.  And then she THREATENED TO BEAT HIM TO MAKE HIM STOP BEING NERVOUS AND TO WIN.

She essentially threatened to hit her child for admitting his real feelings of insecurity.  That is NOT okay.

While evangelical christianity generally promotes this sort of thinking, I sent a link to my friends from high school who run their own evangelical church, homeschool their umpteen kids, and they were pretty horrified by this.  They don’t even yell at their kids, unless they are on the other side of the paddock or in imminent danger.

Of course it would be easy to fall into the “one true scotsman” fallacy that these aren’t “real” Christians who do this, but that wasn’t quite their take on it - their particular spin was that it is further evidence that Big Church and Big Religion aren’t quite what Jesus had in mind, and this sort of perversion is exactly why.

Then again, I reconnected through facebook with these folks through a gay couple ... so I guess there are some out there who live the Biblical life while actually reading the damn book and having a fairly strong grasp of religious history.  Too bad that too many “evangelicals” seem to miss that whole “build your own relationship with God” thing and fall into the ease of obedience to man instead.

Got about three seconds into the beating and had to stop the video.  I was spanked occasionally as a child, but this is just gross.  How anybody can justify this sort of thing is beyond me.

@Shinobi, good grief.  When it gets to that point, the parent’s moving in the direction of violence as some kind of cleansing or toughening experience.  Spartan shit.  We really need to advance beyond this.

I knew a guy growing up who was beaten by his football coaches in the locker room because he wasn’t displaying enough aggressiveness on the field.  They didn’t do it in an evil way; they thought they were doing him a favor.  THIS WAS IN MIDDLE SCHOOL.

The guy was so ashamed he quit football.  He turned out OK otherwise, mostly I think because his parents are wonderful people.  But he kept that beating incident to himself until years later.  He and his wife have only daughters, and he finally confessed to his mom that he’d been terrified of having a son, because of that experience with the coaches.

I couldn’t believe the bit of the video where the mother comes in and tells her she’ll lie on her stomach and “take it like a grown woman”.

Lady, a grown woman wouldn’t take it at all. She’d fight back, or call the cops. Or she’d have this filmed and put on youtube in order to sabotage the man’s re-election campaign. Good on that young woman, to recognize that what was done to her is wrong.

I’m inclined to have a little sympathy for her mother. With a monster of a husband like that, I think it’s safe to assume she was also beaten and if she didn’t actively agree with his “punishment” of their daughter she’d catch hell for it later.

Shinobi—Blaire. Blanche was a Golden Girl. :D

And yes, Blaire is sort of an interesting case in point about fundie child abuse. She actually wrote some book a while back about how to discipline your child without actually spanking, but the need to physically dominate was still a key feature, she would literally describe how it was acceptable to drag your daughter across the street by her hair if she wouldn’t hold your hand (“not spanking!”) and how if your kid used bad language, put some hot sauce on their tongue to cause them physical pain that was Not Spanking!

Hitting animals doesn’t work.  Why would anyone think hitting people does?

Hitting animals works just fine if you’re going for the junkyard dog model, i.e. angry and vicious towards anyone the owner doesn’t like.  Given that conservative Christians expect their children to grow up to be ideological clones of themselves, i.e. angry and vicious towards non-Christians, gays, immigrants, etc, etc, etc, I’d say it has exactly the desired effect.

Livi, you could see that she was trying to “lessen” the punishment for her daughter in her own warped way. “Take it like a grown woman” is basically “Just do what he says and it will be over quicker.” She says she’ll administer a lesser punishment instead (that didn’t work out so well).

Not a get out of jail free card, but I can only imagine the terror this household lived in.

I wonder, with a sick feeling, what kind of punishments he metes out to people who have the bad luck to appear before him in court. If this is what he does to someone he ostensibly loves for such a minor infraction, what does he do to people he feels that much more superior to?

He seems to quite get off on causing pain and terror. That’s not the kind of mindset you want in someone who is supposed to be dispensing justice.

James Dobson believes in hitting animals too, oldfeminist. There’s a horrible excerpt from one of his books where he describes beating his 12-pound dachshund into submission.

It’s not about it working, it’s about showing Proper Respect for the patriarch, i.e. about making the parent feel powerful rather than parenting the child.

I haven’t watched the video either. :(

I think there are lots of fundamentalist Christians who espouse spankings (a.k.a. beatings), but there’s also a crunchy granola evangelical set who is very against spanking. In one family where one parent grew up with horrific abuse, and the other with disciplined but still frightening “spare the rod spoil the child” spankings, they basically both agreed they’d NEVER hit their kids. That said, they still often chastise their kids with “you need to obey your father, mother, etc.” Obedience is still a primary virtue, they just don’t seem to think they can get it via physical intimidation.

I knew I shouldn’t have watched this video. I’m literally shaking with rage and horror. Still, this is what people should have to watch every time they advocate spanking as discipline. This is nothing but torture and abuse. And, although as mentioned, it’s not the same thing as consensual BDSM, I don’t think you can or should ignore the fact this this reeks of sexual abuse as well (the judge’s obsession and instance with whipping the girl’s bottom and constant commands to bend over the bed, not to mention the mother’s “take it like a woman” comment).

Conservative’s and christians are fond of promoting the death penalty with the idea that some people don;t deserve to live; that they have simply forfeited their right to be treated as humans. The massive amount of injustice in our criminal court system brought me around to being anti-death penalty, but then I watch this video and think….if these two people (the mother deserves just as much ire as the judge) were dragged into the street and beaten to death in front of the whole world, I would consider it justice well served.

As that isn’t going to happen, why aren;t these people in jail? If you attacked a stranger like that, you would be arrested, but because right wing christian culture thinks of children as possessions, it’s totally OK to do whatever you want to them (see also: “you can’t rape your wife”). Rigidly, violently enforced hierarchy and power: that’s southern hospitality in action.

Hilary Adams is my hero.  What a brave stance against tyranny.  It’s rare.  Wonder whether the Tea Party, which likes to align itself with righteous revolution, will be consistent and agree.
  Watching this brute beat his child for no reason (for as long as I could stand it—I didn’t make it to 2:00), I saw violent patriarchy in action.  Pro-spanking types talk about children and parents, but they really mean phallic power.  Fundies who think Pater has the right and privilege to do what he did would never approve of a mother whipping a child so hard with a big fat belt.  Mothers don’t seem to have that sadistic desire to harm their children, but if they ever did, their community wouldn’t support them the way Adams’ community supported him.

I thought the “take it like a grown woman” was the mom saying, “I get whipped for misbehavior.  This is what life is like, so get used to it.” 

I occasionally, but rarely, gave one swat to my kids’ behinds with an open hand.  When it was because I lost my temper I always regretted it and apologized when we both calmed down.  Very rarely it was intended and effective as a short shock, akin to a splash of water in the face. 

I was convinced early on by the argument against corporal punishment of what it was teaching, that might makes right and bullying is the best method to get your way.  Spanking or paddle swats is one thing, perhaps not immoral, but the whipping depicted in the video is criminal.

I couldn’t watch the whole video, but I watched enough.  It wasn’t spanking.  It also wasn’t assault.  It was battery.  First degree battery.

ames Dobson believes you should beat children with a paddle or a tree branch, which he has somehow managed to rationalize into “loving” behavior.

Well, that’s almost certainly what his father said whilst doing the same to him, and being an authoritarian type, he can’t allow himself to question that without destroying his entire world-view and sense of self. This is what makes it such an effectively self-replicating system.

Alice Miller has quite a lot to say on the subject.

I find the rule of “don’t spank in anger” to be rather creepy. I can understand the rationale (if you’re angry you’re not in control and you’re more likely to spank excessively), but to me spanking is what you resort to when you’re too angry to use other, better but more patience-intensive kinds of discipline. I don’t remember being spanked as a child (although I was) so I can’t exactly put myself in the shoes of a small child here, but I’d still rather be hurt by someone who was momentarily overwhelmed by their emotions than someone who was totally clinical about it and simply thought that hurting me was the right thing to do.

(that said, while I don’t remember being spanked, I remember being astonished when my mother told me that they only spanked me when they were really angry at me and not as a preferred form of discipline, so my small-child self obviously didn’t see the nuances involved)
(to tie in with the grown-woman thing, I also remember being astonished when my pissed-off mother once told me she wanted to slap me but wouldn’t because I was too old. I was like “you can be too old for being slapped ?” Still think it’s weird for that matter, and rather self-serving at the end of the day - I’m betting it’s not a matter of maturity, it’s a matter of the child getting big enough to fight back. But anyway, thank God my mother was my mother and not that woman in the video)

That Train Up a Child book talks about hitting you kid with a switch at the age of four months. Four! Months! Hard to see how that can be justified by anyone.

Wasn’t there a story in the Bible about Jesus walking away from his parents at the temple, and they searched and searched and finally found him lecturing the temple elders? Sounds to me like Mary and Joseph were a little lax with the child training themselves.

The Blair-type child abuse is the next step up, which is teaching your children that even thinking the wrong thought will cause them physical pain. If it’s done right, it will produce brainwashed little robots who never question anything they are told and can’t even admit to wrongthink. Why people believe a washed-up TV has-been knows anything special about child-raising is a very good example of this principle in action: take someone with a spoonful of unearned authority, toss in the word Jesus, and there’s a whole contingent full of people willing to do whatever they say.

MiddleageLiberal:

Really, paddles should be off the table as well. If you’re spanking a kid with a tool, you are disconnected from how hard you’re actually hitting them and it makes it really easy to go overboard. Tools are used so commonly in spanking discipline that people don’t realize that the use of a tool automatically crosses the line into the realm of abuse. The purpose of the tool is to maximize the pain without any feedback, nothing more or less, and spanking isn’t about maximizing pain. I think a lot of people think of spanking as “punishment” when really, it’s use should be a bit more subtle. It should be used as a bridge between when a child is autonomous enough to do some truly horrific shit to other children and to animals, but before they can really process that others should be treated the way they want to be treated.

Caravelle—Don’t Spank in Anger is very important.
1) If you are in anger, you are likely to lose control and make the spanking about PUNISHING your child for making you angry than for correcting a child’s bad behavior.
2) You shouldn’t spank your kid without giving them a clear warning that their behavior will lead to spanking so that they can desist. If your kid is going through a hitting or biting phase, that first hit or bite or shove is when the warning is issued, and then the second hit or bit is when the spanking is issued, so that the kid can draw a clear distinction between their behavior and the punishment, not “oh I did this thing and now I’m getting wailed on by angry dad.”
3) When it comes time to move away from spanking, the idea is that you have the talk about how they don’t like being spanked, because it hurts. And just like they don’t like being spanked, their friends (or the dog, or whatever) don’t like being hit, *no matter how angry you get.* If you spank in anger, you’re just a hypocrite, basically saying that it’s ok to hit if you get mad enough. Part of the not spanking in anger thing is that there comes a point where you create a contract with your child where they will no longer be spanked, so you have to be willing to table it even if you’re angry.

Caravelle, I was spanked as a child and remember it vividly. What hurt me then (which I also really remember) was that it was always because my mom lost her temper and I could tell she wanted to hurt me, even if all I got were some short, stinging slaps. I even thought at the time “she isn’t doing this because she thinks she’s helping me, she’s doing this because she is mad at me.” Who knows, but I think it would have been less hurtful if I knew it was just one of her disciplinary strategies, that she didn’t like to hurt me but honestly felt it was the best approach for a given problem.
And all of my friends who were abused as boys basically said the abuse stopped when they grew to be taller than their fathers. Or fought back. Once again, more proof that it’s not “discipline,” it’s just sadistic abuse—it stops once the person stops being totally helpless.

That Train Up a Child book talks about hitting you kid with a switch at the age of four months. Four! Months! Hard to see how that can be justified by anyone.

It’s not just the spanking though. They also have something called “blanket training”, which is sticking babies alone on a blanket with nothing to entertain themselves and punishing them whenever they try and crawl away.

Because sensory deprivation on little developing babies is AWESOME. o_O
No wonder they end up scientifically clueless afterwards.

I saw the mother and daughter on the Today show this morning. The event happened 7 years ago. The mother was also abused and attributes her statements to abuse and brain washing. The daughter has completely forgiven the mother and seemed to be proud that her mother has since left this tyrant and has been working through the issues caused by his abuse.

Also, the father is fighting to get custody of the younger daughter (the child in the video is no longer a child) and part of the reason she released the video was the custody battle.

Watching this video yesterday brought something into focus for me for the first time. What I think ‘spanking’ is a whole nother animal than what this guy thinks ‘spanking’ is. I had no idea, honestly. I thought we were all using the same language. Boy, was I wrong.

I read elsewhere that the mom in the vid was indeed abused at Williams’s hand, has since left him, and has made amends to Hillary for what she did.

Duh, Adams’s hand. William Adams.

I stood in a christian bookstore one afternoon and scanned through an entire chapter of one of Dobson’s books, looking for information on how proper christians discipline their kids, because I was physically abused myself… turns out what he espouses for discipline is even worse than what I endured.  My mother was careful to never leave visible evidence of what she was doing to me, but Dobson actually instructs his readers that if they aren’t raising welts on their kid’s back with their weapon of choice, they aren’t hitting hard enough.  His view in that book was that bottom swats are suitable only for infants.  Once the kid reaches a certain age, it should basically be caned, like they (used to?) do adults in the Phillipines.  (And I use ‘it’ deliberately, because fundies view kids as property, not as human beings.  I spent 3 years listening to that crap in person, and I will never, ever step into another church again.)

@Mighty PonyGirl : But why spank in the first place though ? You say there’s a specific time for it : after they understand verbal commands but before they have empathy. But that’s a time period where you can physically dominate them completely, if you can spank them you can also pick them up and isolate them, or take their stuff, or other disciplinary measures that are also more directly related to whatever their infraction was (hurting others, fighting over toys…).

And what is the difference between punishment and discipline, to you ?

@t-ster : Good to know. I’ve seen people report feeling differently so it might depend on the person, but it’s obviously not a subject I can speak to much.

Mothers don’t seem to have that sadistic desire to harm their children

I wish that were true. But it is totally not, not true at all.

When my brother and I were young, we got “spanked,” but not with hands.  My mother would grab whatever was nearby (fly swatter, yardstick, wooden cooking spoon) and hit us so violently that she almost always broke the utensil.  I was terrified of her as a child.

Then suddenly, it stopped.  It wasn’t until a few years later that she started talking about her abusive alcoholic father, and her nightmares wherein she recalled being awakened in the middle of the night and screamed at to “cook me some goddamned supper” when he came home from the bar.  I haven’t really talked about this with her, but I’m convinced that at some point, she realized she was becoming her father and it scared the shit out of her.  She never spanked us again.

So yeah, I was whipped and I “turned out okay,” so far as physical damage.  However, if my mother hadn’t stopped when I was still relatively young, I would not have the relationship with her that I do now.  Period.

Caravelle—If other forms of discipline actually work (as in, stop the behavior going forward), then that’s what you should do. That’s what I meant by Last Resort.

Not all kids are the same, though. I know a bunch of parents who have raised really fantastic little creatures by keeping all discipline in the non-physical realm. There are also kids I know whose parents are so committed to not spanking their kids that they’re raising holy terrors because their children simply don’t respond to other forms of discipline in a long-term, meaningful way. When I was a kid, I really couldn’t care less if I was put in a corner, or had something taken away, or sent to my room. Those simply weren’t things that I associated as “oh, this really sucks, if I want to avoid this, maybe I shouldn’t do that thing I did again” because I had a vivid imagination that I would just sail off into some fantasy and be perfectly happy. And while it DID get the behavior to stop, it didn’t do anything to cause me to contemplate my behavior going forward.

Being told “don’t hit, if you hit, you’ll get spanked,” however, was something that I understood and wanted to avoid. So I didn’t hit, because I didn’t want to get a spank. At the time, I could have given two shits about how me hitting made the other person feel because that person wasn’t me so what did I care? But I knew I didn’t want to be spanked, so if hitting another kid = spanking, then I wasn’t going to hit another kid. Not much later, I was able to really process that feeling of being hurt and sad from being spanked to another person’s experience, and so spanking was pretty much off the table from then on, because people were able to approach me from a empathetic place instead of a selfish place.

Punishment, to me, is about retribution, whereas discipline is about correcting behaviors.

My grandmother hit my dad, and he thought she hated him.  He swore that his children would not be hit.  Somehow my folks managed to raise three good kids by things like explaining why something is a bad idea.  My brother, as a teenager, once said “I’m bigger than you now.  I’m too big to hit”.  She said “I didn’t need to hit you when you were little, and I don’t need to now.”  And she was right.  She had that scary mom-look.  I never thought of her hitting me, but I didn’t want her mad at me anyway.  She didn’t need to hit to have authority.
I’m always puzzled by these people whose primary aim is to have their kids be obedient.  The parents aren’t going to be around for the rest of their lives, telling them what to do.  What are people who’ve never been allowed to think for themselves going to do when there’s nobody to tell them what to do?  This is the opposite of what I want for my kids.
One of my friends was abused by her parents, I think because they didn’t know a better way.  At her father’s funeral, someone said he enjoyed being a grandfather; it gave him a second chance to do it right.  He saw the error of his ways, and did better with the next generation.  Wouldn’t it be great to help the present generation of parents do it right now, rather than give them instructions on what sort of instruments to beat their kids with?

Oh, and on the “I was whipped and I turned out okay” front - I smoked for twenty years and didn’t get lung cancer. My old man smoked for 40 years and didn’t get lung cancer. Doesn’t mean that smoking isn’t a serious risk factor for lung cancer.

It’s fitting that Christians feel this way, because it didn’t strike me until just a day or so go how twisted John 3:16 was “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

It’s the big sacrifice for God to give up someone else? How hard it must be to love something so much you’re willing to send other people to die for it. Kids are nothing but possessions to these people.

@ atheist @ 3 - That’s a pretty serious insult to BDSM.  BDSM is play.  This is assault.  There’s a universe of difference between the two.

Atheist isn’t really wrong. You can view a lot of this fundie power obsession as BDSM done wrong. The Christian Domestic Discipline crowd (spank your wife to put her in her place, the more ritualistic the better) started spamming the forum for a well known BDSM fanfic author. They argued that BDSM was just an unnatural expression of the desire for the proper dominance and direction you get in a good Christian household. That’s just the soft side. I don’t think there’s a huge ideological difference between the monster in the video and a truly abusive dom.

I read Thomas Gordon’s Parent Effectiveness Training (no punishments, no rewards) before my child was born and things have gone really well for everyone involved.  Anyway, if I were to spank my child I would admit that it was because I was angry, not because god told me to.

Scrumby—when you add in the “bound 4 life” stuff…. yeah.

The idea behind training kids to be obedient is to train them to submit to authority. They believe the child who learns to submit unquestioningly to a parent will later be able to submit unquestioningly to the will of God.

“Unquestioningly” being the ultimate point of the whole process. The goal is to raise people who are incapable of thinking for themselves. A baby who learns that its job is to sit quietly on a blanket or Papa will hit is a baby who learns that it has no control over its own life and everything it has it owes to some vindictive authority figure.

It’s not hard to see what kind of adults this sort of childhood will produce. As in, people who feel that they are subservient to authority figures (such as our beloved “job creators”) and that any scraps they get in life they owe to the generosity of their betters.

My mother converted to right-wing fundamentalist Christianity relatively late in life, not out of an upwelling of faithful fervor but as a way to bring God’s blessing upon her hateful attitudes toward people who weren’t smug white SAHMs.  The right to “spank” was a huge part of that.  Lucky me.  And my brothers, to a lesser extent, but mostly me as a girl.  Let me just say there’s no way in hell I’m watching that video.

Ah, I must have edited Last Resort out of an original reply. So oops. But yeah. Part of “don’t spank your kids for every little infraction” is that spanking shouldn’t be the first resort, it should be the absolute last resort no matter what kind of kid you have.

They had an actress on who used to be on the Facts of Life.

That would be Lisa Whelchel (or Welchel?)

The fundie approach to raising children is all about instilling obedience through borderline or outright child abuse. I just had a baby, so I’ve researched different approaches to feeding and getting a baby to sleep through the night. I started looking into “scheduled feeding,” where you only feed the baby on a very regimented routine, usually every x hours. I found—surprise, surprise—this approach is strongly discouraged by the American Academy of Pediatrics and all reputable doctors, who all say “feed the baby when she cries for food.” The guy who wrote the scheduled-feeding manual has no medical training—he’s a fundamentalist Christian pastor. His book “Becoming Babywise” is almost exclusively used by Christians, who want to instill obedience in their kids by refusing to feed them when they’re hungry, and instead forcing them to eat on the parents’ schedule. This method has been linked to Failure to Thrive in babies, chronic dehydration, and underweight. But doctors report that fundamentalist parents refuse to listen to medical advice and keep following it anyway, to the point where they’re very secretive with doctors about the fact that they follow some fundie pastor’s dangerous prescriptions for childcare.

My brother and his wife are raising their baby on Babywise.  I registered my objection but they blew me off and now I feel like I have to keep my mouth shut if I want to stay in the kid’s life.  They justify it as a way of helping him learn self-discipline but I think the truth is that that’s the only way, logistically, they think they can manage to raise a Quiverfull (yes, that’s what I’m dealing with).  Haven’t been present for any scenes of physical punishment yet—not sure what I’ll do then.

Thank you for the last paragraph.  I couldn’t handle the video.  I have serious issues with anything that tries to minimize the impact of abuse, whether it’s “perfectly fine” anecdotes or “life lessons,” “making you stronger,” platitudes or whatever.

“For secular people, even those who have witnessed abuse, it’s really rare to see someone spell out their goals of inducing submission and obedience. (Or maybe not. I’m sure commenters have some thoughts.)”

Nope, I thought the same. I was shocked by the fact he would openly say such things, but I guess you explain it well enough (the Bible is pretty much the only place beside BDSM meets, over-the-top internet misogynists and dog-trainers where you can hear someone using the word “submission” transparently).

I was never given more than a literal slap on the wrist as a child (on the rare occasions my dad decided warranted physical punishment, he would only give one slap to the back of the hand), but a friend who was abused only got such justifications as “you need to learn that this behaviour is not okay in society”, where the parent used a sort of “parenting into the social contract” idea instead of direct obedience.

Of course given the harshness of the beatings he suffered, and the often harmless things that would set his dad off, such as his son crying* when he injured himself in an accident (!), it clearly falls apart as a bullshit excuse anyway.

*Abusers, bullies and sociopaths seem to really have a hard time understanding crying. The amount of times I’ve had someone be angered by the fact some people can’t just turn off the waterworks at will (and will assume you’re deliberately continuing for attention, or something) is astounding.

The same psychology professor who explained the rules of spankings pointed out that when a baby cries because it’s hungry, it’s not like how you and I experience discomfort and a little cramping, babies actually experience hunger as *sharp stabbing pains in the stomach* and not feeding a baby that is crying for food is monstrous. This, incidentally, is one of the reasons I’m so “hey, breastfeed that baby in public for God’s sake get a tit in its mouth.”

I’ve seen this video posted around but didn’t look till now.  Didn’t quite make it 5 minutes. 

If you’re screaming “god damn” and “fuck” I think you’ve given up even the slightest veneer of being “Christian”.  And the mom, while awful, hit the girl once on the butt as if to ‘fulfill’ the punishment.  I can believe she was trying to mitigate the punishment, though I don’t think she should have custody of any child, either.  Dad claimed he was beating her all over because she wouldn’t lay down on her stomach.

He quickly put the lie to the just wanting to punish her ‘correctly’ bullshit by coming back in and continuing to beat the shit out of her after the mother administered a correct whipping.

That was gruesome.  He should be in jail.  What he did was not “spanking” in the remotest sense.  The fact that thousands of parents do this makes me want to vomit even more.

What the fuck is wrong with these people?

@Caravelle The “don’t spank in anger” thing makes sense to me. Yeah, I agree w/ you that it prevents going overboard. And it may be creepy to plan out a spanking, but seeing your parents calmly explain why A led to B (spanking) is so much less damaging than seeing your parent lose control and get violent. That said, I have once had the urge to smack a child at a place where I worked (she decided to see if her pinky finger could fit in the opening of the automatic pencil sharpener on my desk, and I caught her juuuust before point-of-entry), and having that urge really shocked me. Of course, what we did was a Serious Safety Talk instead. Anyhow, my point is that seeing a parent violently lose control is something that will be at the back of your mind forever, it doesn’t go away.

oops, sorry Caravelle, I didn’t see a lot of people had already responded.

Yeah, the fundie Babywise program also puts a huge emphasis on how the kid MUST NOT BE FED if they refuse to eat at a scheduled feeding; they have to wait several hours for the next one.

@Caravelle The “don’t spank in anger” thing makes sense to me. Yeah, I agree w/ you that it prevents going overboard. And it may be creepy to plan out a spanking, but seeing your parents calmly explain why A led to B (spanking) is so much less damaging than seeing your parent lose control and get violent.

Is it? Something about “calmly” planning how you are going to hurt your child, then “calmly” explaining to that child that you are about to hurt them just pings “serial killer behavior” to me.

Since both spanking in anger and spanking with creepy detachment sound like monumentally bad ideas, how about just “don’t spank”?

If what this criminal psychopath did to his daughter can be legally described as “spanking” (and the mom who sits there and admonishes her daughter to “sit back and take it like a 16-year old girl” jesus fucking christ), then it’s time to outlaw even the bottom-swats that conform to the rules.

There is an interesting parallel here between the spanking debate and the capital punishment debate.  I’m for both in principle, but I’m against capital punishment in practice because innocent people invariably end up dying.  How do you say to someone whose friend or relative was railroaded into the electric chair that you’re a proponent of capital punishment - just not for their loved one?

Likewise, it’s hard to argue that spanking is okay when what a lot of people experience as “spanking” (as kids or, gods forbid, parents) is physical abuse.  If we can’t make a distinction between minor physical correction for young children who can’t/won’t respond to other forms of discipline and a grown man beating a (nearly) grown woman bloody with a belt, then it’s better to scrap the whole damn thing.

I suppose, at least in the case of spanking, you can make the distinction regarding the use of objects or closed-fist hitting/kicking/etc.  That won’t assuage people who are against any kind of corporal punishment, but I can’t imagine a blanket spanking ban succeeding in the U.S. any time soon.

Egnu, you’re being over-dramatic. To calmly lay out the terms by which a child WILL be spanked is not the same thing as “calmly planning on how you are going to hurt your child.” By telling a kid “If you hit Molly again, you’re going to get spanked” puts whether or not they get the spanking in their hands. The kid can choose to either hit Molly again and get a spanking, or not hit Molly and avoid a spanking. If the kid hits Molly, then the spanking was something they affirmatively signed up for. It’s really not that complicated.

Egnu, I dunno, I’ve been watching my young nieces lately and the older one (she’s two) doesn’t really respond to calm explanations. I don’t think she’s quite old enough to really understand them, and if I stick to a plain ‘no’ she will push how much she can get away with. So I’ve adopted her mother’s three-count tactic.  It warns her, and I’ve only seen it get past two a couple times.

There’s an interesting series of blog posts here: http://ayoungmomsmusings.blogspot.com/search/label/Discipline by someone who was raised as a very strict fundamentalist about how she stopped spanking her own children. One of the things that really stands out to me is how she comments in a couple of different places how “biblical discipline”, as she was raised to think of it, collapsed all childhood behaviors into a simple linear spectrum between “obeying” and “not obeying”. She writes about how she never had to think about whether something was even developmentally possible for a child of a certain age, or whether there was a reason they weren’t understanding what she asked them to do or choosing to behave differently than she wanted. If you think about it, it’s kind of a natural ingrowth of a fundamentalist biblical view of the world: it doesn’t matter if there’s a good reason not to do something, or what you might independently want, or even what’s possible - what matters is if you’re obeying the rules or not obeying the rules. In a worldview where people genuinely think that God makes you die of cancer for disobeying him, a couple of swats to the butt don’t look like much.

@MoseyMcShuffleson : Why apologize ? All the responses have been interesting, yours included

Comment #65: Mighty Ponygirl - Agreed. And it’s not only the physical pain a baby feels, but the fact that he/she does not have the ability to know that food will come. By the time a baby is crying for food, they are scared out of their mind that they will never be fed. Feeding infants on a schedule is cruel psychologically, and sets the child up to believe his/her needs are not as important as an adults.*

*Sometimes true, but like all people should be heard first and just summarily dismissed.

Okay - I told myself not to watch that Judge Adams video, cuz I knew it would be triggering - but I followed the link posted by a No Longer Quivering forum member to Pandagon, read this article - and then played the video.

All I could think was - what ever must Hillary’s mom have been thinking? And the horrible thing about it is that I could guess what must’ve been going through her mind when she actively participated in the beating of her daughter.

I can remember many occasions in which my ex-husband’s abuse of the children was so intolerable - I would actually jump in and take over because I knew that at least I’d be easier on the kids and their dad would be satisfied that he was right and the kid was wrong and I was acknowledging his rightness and being a dutiful Christian wife by upholding his authority - and so he would finally calm down.

::hangs head::

I noticed that the mother only gave Hillary one swat with the belt - and then thanked her for finally cooperating - and seemed relieved as she left the room.

That’s how it worked in our family too - especially with my oldest - I “disciplined” her in order to spare her from her dad’s beatings.

Eventually, I guess I figured out that this tactic worked quite well - so then when I could see trouble brewing - saw my kids defying their father, or even simply standing their ground when he insisted it was one way even though they could plainly see it was another way - so in an effort to head off the escalation of my Ex’s anger, I’d jump in there first and yell at the offending child and give them a “good talking to” - in the hopes that the child would respond “reasonably” to my more mild chastisement and their dad would be satisfied - abusive spanking session averted.

So my younger kids did not get nearly the number of whippings because I’d learned to abuse them first (to a lesser degree) in order to spare them from their dad’s spanking sessions which were extremely similar to Judge Adam’s - only often, far worse.

And now, I’m sick.

Vyckie from No Longer Quivering

http://nolongerquivering.com

sets the child up to believe his/her needs are not as important as an adults.*

That’s the whole point.

Ugh, Babywise. Among other things, it apparently leads to a lot of involuntary early weaning among mothers who meant to breastfeed for much longer, because one of the big reasons why there’s such a wide range in how often babies want to eat is because there’s a wide range in how much milk any given lactating woman can produce at once. Trying to go eight hours at night without nursing is going to wreak havoc on milk supply; it’s also a surefire way for a woman to go back to ovulating even though she’s nursing sometimes. Since fertility is such a huge goal for many people practicing Babywise, this makes some sad sense, but the fact that human women come with a built-in no-more-babies-right-now switch and they’re deliberately circumventing it is creepy to me.

Egnu, I dunno, I’ve been watching my young nieces lately and the older one (she’s two) doesn’t really respond to calm explanations. I don’t think she’s quite old enough to really understand them, and if I stick to a plain ‘no’ she will push how much she can get away with. So I’ve adopted her mother’s three-count tactic.  It warns her, and I’ve only seen it get past two a couple times.

Exactly.

Comment #78: Jayn Newell - I know, and it just breaks my heart. I have a 2.5 yr old now, and the few times I have really lost my shit and either screamed at her or swatted her I’ve been so devastated afterward*. The look of fear and confusion as to why mommy did that is gut wrenching. I will never understand how a parent can see that and think it’s a good thing.

*I don’t know if it needs to be said, but I always apologize (and cry) and strive to do better. It sucks being a human with foibles sometimes.

@Caravelle : I was concerned you might have felt piled upon, where I only had a simple disagreement.

But to be clear, I’m anti-spanking, as were my parents. They still did it twice, quite memorably, when I was a kid, because they’re human. They went the “calm explanation” route, and I don’t remember experiencing it as creepy or scary. It was just really embarrassing. I remember clearly being aware of a new concept of having dignity, and a responsibility to behave well so as to avoid embarrassment (none of which I expressed to my parents). I was two-and-a-half or three-ish, I think, and I’d run out in front of a car. I’m sure the same thing could have been accomplished by other means.

I remember my dad doing out-of-control things at other times even though it didn’t result in me getting hurt physically, and it was totally different. It made me think, “wow, I’ll never express that again/ ok, I’ll hide that from now on/ wow I really cannot trust him.” Very different outcomes.

This young woman is my new hero. It took so much courage to film this, and to post it. And it’s going to hopefully land his parents (and his mother is guilty too) in prison.

One thing that I suspect I don’t really disagree with Amanda on so much as it is a point of emphasis—I really don’t think they get this from the Bible. I think they JUSTIFY it with the Bible.

If you watch and listen to this table, this is two people who get off on dominating their child, showing her who is boss. To me, it played just like S&M porn, except it was real, not play. And that’s what the child abuse / spanking / striking debate really is. There a lot of of sadists out there—real sadists. And for them, having kids is a way that they can get off and practice their sadism without repercussion, because of the dominion that the law grants parents over their children AND the reality that even when parents DO break the law, children have little recourse and know it—they often get sent right back to a worse beating.

Conservative Christianity is bad because it justifies this shit, just like it is bad because it justifies gay-bashing. But where we start is with people who take pleasure from having power and control, and act out that fantasy on their defenseless children.

I thought the “take it like a grown woman” was the mom saying, “I get whipped for misbehavior.  This is what life is like, so get used to it.”

That’s right. It’s similar to the way that cultures that mutilate female genitals often enlist women to do the actual procedures, which are then vociferously defended by some women. It’s part of the screwed up psychology of being oppressed—“because I got oppressed, it would be unfair to me if the next generation has it easier”.

I don’t believe in spanking at all. The only time I ever felt like spanking was when I was furious, and by the time I calmed down, I couldn’t possibly hit my child. It’s not discipline, it’s punishment, and punishment doesn’t really help teach kids how to improve their behavior, IMO. I’ve had multiple people explain the ‘rules of spanking’ to me, but if the kid isn’t at the stage where they understand a calm explanation, I can’t see how they can understand why the person they love is causing them physical pain.

And I was beaten as a child, and I turned out okay! But that’s because my parents both apologized to me and my sister, they were raising us the way they had been raised, and they realized that it wasn’t helpful.

On the Maddow Blog yesterday, someone brought up the whole “There is no morality without God” line, and this whole discussion dovetails nicely with that.

If your only source of Morality comes from hope of reward or fear of punishment, then you’re really not as moral as you think you are. If you honestly believe that the only thing keeping you from killing a bunch of schoolkids is that God will send you to Hell, you’re just an evil person who’s kept on a thankfully short leash. Someone who actually takes everlasting punishment out of the equation of why you shouldn’t kill a bunch of schoolkids and reject it anyway is a much more morally developed creature than the person who takes their morality marching orders from an invisible friend.

So it fits that Christian conservatives have a penchant for beating the everliving shit out of their kids for the tiniest bit of disobedience. It’s right there in the New Testament that the wife and children must submit to the Man of the House as the Man of the house submits to God. As far as mom and kids are concerned, Dad is God, and so it falls on him that he should be able to administer the Heaven or Hell punishment as he sees fit.

Unquestioning obedience is important. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I think teaching kids healthy respect for authority is a good thing and part of your duty as a parent not to raise a monster. But again, if every single means of correcting behavior or enforcing obedience is to inflict incredible physical pain on a child, you’re really not doing the legwork to develop actual morality in your child by encouraging empathy etc.

@Comment #77: Vyckie Garrison on 11/03 at 02:11 PM

I’m glad to understand you have escaped from that situation with your ex-husband. But, thank you for sharing your story, harrowing as it is.

I’ve had multiple people explain the ‘rules of spanking’ to me, but if the kid isn’t at the stage where they understand a calm explanation, I can’t see how they can understand why the person they love is causing them physical pain.

Because there is a not-insignificant developmental stage where kids reject the rationality for the calm explanation if it doesn’t impact them personally. Saying to Billy “Don’t hit Molly because it will hurt Molly and make her sad” doesn’t mean a damn thing to Billy, because he really cannot fathom a consciousness outside of his own. Meanwhile, Billy is also boundary-testing, so “Don’t hit Molly because I said so” is just going to result in Billy trying to determine how close he can come to hitting Molly (or how serious you were about not hitting Molly). But in the same way that Billy cannot fathom a consciousness outside of his own, Billy *does* understand that he really doesn’t want to get spanked, so if you basically explain that hitting Molly will result in a punishment he *really doesn’t want,* that is something that might register with him.

And that’s the key. The kid has to be able to choose if this shit happens to them or not, and the “punishment they really don’t want” can be in any form so long as it is unpleasant. If they don’t see it as unpleasant (like me daydreaming in a corner or just finding another toy to play with), then they are never actually challenged to evaluate their behavior and whether or not hitting Molly is -that important to them.-

Comment from a Texas newspaper’s online coverage of this story:
———————————————————————————————————————
mrbigscott
I have no clue why the judge whooping his daughter is making the news. He
wasnt whooping her too bad if she refused to bend over. She should have
bent over and took her whooping. Matter of fact since she was illegally
downloading music whatever, he should press charges on her.

RedHand53 and 10 more liked this
———————————————————————————————————————-

Excuse me while I go vomit….

Poor Molly; what’d she ever do?

But in the same way that Billy cannot fathom a consciousness outside of his own, Billy *does* understand that he really doesn’t want to get spanked, so if you basically explain that hitting Molly will result in a punishment he *really doesn’t want,* that is something that might register with him.

I think it’s wrong. Billy will understand that the person who is supposed to protect and raise him will cause him pain by hitting him because he hit someone else? Can you fathom how that could be confusing, and possibly leave the child with the idea that it’s okay for the bigger, more powerful person to use physical violence?

I think it would make more sense to let Molly hit Billy back than to have a parent hit him to teach him tht he shouldn’t hit.

@Vyckie Garrison- what atheist said.

I assume he’s been removed from his position and arrested of course. No? Oh wait, I keep thinking I live on a sane planet.

Comment #91: maurinsky - Acknowledging that this may not be true for every child, I do believe that many, if not most, 2 yr olds can learn empathy. They do understand what “hurt” means.* The difficult part for a parent or guardian is to be patient and realize that it will take many, many, many reminders to the child that hitting/kicking/throwing thing hurts other people. It’s not a lesson that will sink in forever after one or two times, and it’s not willful disobedience when it doesn’t sink in. They have the ability to understand in the moment, but they either don’t have the ability to remember it. Or, maybe it’s that they don’t realize what hurt yesterday will still hurt today. Maybe spanking does get more immediate results, but the long term affects don’t seem worth it.

*What works with my daughter is reminding her that “it hurts mommy or daddy like when you bump your head.”

The only use of corporal punishment that I saw which worked (eventually) was when my little brother got it into his head when he was 2 that he liked biting people.  He meant it too—he left marks and occasionally broke the skin.

We had to nip that shit in the bud, and we ended up spanking him pretty hard in order to get the idea across that this was how he was making other people feel. 

The other thing is, if we didn’t respond pretty strongly, we ended up condoning his behavior to the people he was abusing.

I generally think he just kind of grew out of it, and that the punishment was as much for his victims as for him.  But it was still appropriate, I feel, as an expression of desperation with how awful his behavior was.

My parents spanked me (albeit VERY rarely—I have one actual memory of being spanked).  They were strongly in the no-angry-spanking camp, which in an of itself cuts way down on the spanking.  I always received a warning, and they always took the time to calm down before the spanking.  I wasn’t spanked after I was old enough to start school, I think, so we’re talking five or six at the oldest.  I never felt creeped out—it was clear that they thought they were administering an appropriate consequence for serious misbehavior, that they had zero desire to hurt me and really disliked spanking me, and that while the spanking was unpleasant, it wasn’t going to cause serious damage or really even leave a bruise.  We’re talking two or three swats, max, and never with any weapon, let alone abusive language.  It was totally different from being hit because they were angry and me being scared that I was going to be badly hurt. 

I’m not saying spanking is some ideal form of child discipline, but I agree with MP that there is a world of difference between my parents’ measured approach and beating the crap out of your kids when you’re pissed off.  It’s why I wasn’t strongly anti-spanking for a long time—because I had no idea that other people did this kind of horrible stuff to their kids.  I mean, this judge is a monster, and the fact that people are defending what he did is nauseating.

Good Lord that’s fucked up.

Livi @95, developmental psychology directly contradicts you. Children have to learn empathy and empathy comes after establishment of self. During the time when the child is establishing their self, asking a child to consider how another person feels, you might as well ask a child to describe the Higgs-Boson particle.  They may be able to mimic what they think empathy might look like if pushed to it (ie, the ok now go tell Molly you’re sorry - sorry, Molly) moments, but it’s pretty clear to everyone involved that Billy is NOT sorry for hitting Molly, that he feels completely justified in his actions (why did you hit molly? Because. I don’t know. Because), but if he’s put to it he will mouth a bunch of words to appease the parents in his life.

Also, I’m not entirely opposed to Molly being allowed to hit back, especially if Molly is a cat.

It’s why I wasn’t strongly anti-spanking for a long time—because I had no idea that other people did this kind of horrible stuff to their kids.

Yeah, one reason to ban spanking is precisely to draw a bright line around this sort of thing. It’s like police department excessive force claims—because police are (justifiably) allowed to use measured amounts of force in performing their duties, lots of people end up getting beaten to a pulp with no recourse.

The question that even if we assume there’s some marginal benefit some very responsible parents might obtain by spanking their children, is allowing it worth the cost of creating a huge line drawing problem that privileges sadistic parents, in a situation where the power imbalances and realities about parenting and our social service and foster care systems mean that violent parents are already going to get away with a lot anyway. Or do we just tell parents “you can’t hit your children” and leave them to figure out some other means of discipline?

Hillary Adams deserves our applause and respect for recording and posting this video.

What I could watch of that video brought a lot of memories back.  It’s weird seeing what I experienced as an observer and not a participant.  I think it’s worse being an observer.  It gives me a greater understanding of the powerlessness of the victim.  There is really no way she can stop it.

It’s clear that what this video shows is not punishment.  That’s clearly and indisputably abuse.  I hope he’s arrested and convicted for this.

At #92, what if Molly can’t?

@99 Ponygirl: thanks for correcting Livi’s <u>beliefs</u>.  Her beliefs do not gibe with research.

@99 Ponygirl:  thanks for correcting Livi’s ‘beliefs’.  Her anecdotal experience does not gibe with research.

Emmett—also, there is the chance that Molly will hit back in such a way as to actually like, damage Billy (break his nose, knock out a tooth, cause him to fall down a flight of stairs, etc). Spanking the bottom is a slightly safer option for Billy.

But really, teaching little girls to fight back when boys hit them is a-ok in my book :D

Comment #99: Mighty Ponygirl - Okay, not complete empathy then, but some level of understanding. I have recently told my own 2 yr old to “Pick that up because someone will trip and fall,” and she responded with, “And bump their head” in a concerned tone. Mimicking, maybe, but I also think that’s the beginning of learning empathy. I’ve seen it happen enough that I believe it is possible with at least some children, and therefore worth not spanking over. I just don’t think it makes any sense, even to a child, to be told “Don’t hit or you will be hit.” Like I said, it might work right now, but is not worth the distrust the child will have of the parent.

dammit…......

Livi @106—what you’ve said is important and illustrative.

Your 2 year old is beginning to connect the dots, and that’s good!

Or, she could just be telling you what she thinks you want to hear, which is what a lot of kids do. And that’s not a bad thing, because it’s actually a sort of anticipation skill of its own that she’s developing.

But just because she has made a one-time connection between “toys on the floor and people bumping their head” is a far cry from her understanding that she will have to sacrifice some pleasure (in that playing with toys and then walking away when you’re bored with them is a lot more fun when you’re 2 than putting the toys away) in order for someone else not her to not bump her head. That is a *really fucking long road for a kid to walk.* Yeah, it might be the start of empathy, but it can literally take years for a kid to click in with “hey, if I leave my toys out, someone could trip over them and hurt themselves and I don’t like it when I hurt myself so I should be nice to someone else and go out of my way to put my toys away.”

Oh.My.God.  I just watched the entire thing on my second attempt, and this soooo brings back memories….  I’ve lived this, minus the profanities.

He’s enraged not at what she’s done*, but at her “disobedience”.  “You used to be a good little girl and now you’re not” really stands out.  She was compliant (fearful?) on the surface, but once he felt she wasn’t toeing the line any more, she was disobedient and defiance and he needed to beat it out of her.

Vyckie @ 77:  welcome back from the dark side.  I have forgiven my mother for exactly what you write about, because as an adult I can see that it was her personal survival mechanism and her method for protecting us from the worst of the abuse.  It took me a while, but I finally could see it from her perspective, and I can feel compassion for a woman who was doing the best she knew how.

This also makes me wonder about the people who came before his court.  “You beat your kid but didn’t break any bones?  Why, that’s what a good parent does.  Your wimpy-ass ex - the one who left you for abuse - is obvious an unfit parent; you get custody.”

Great - an MRA with the force of the law behind him.  ::shudder::

* Re MsFloyd’s post at 89 (the comment on “why didn’t he turn her in for stealing?”): that’s because it would reflect badly on him and his parental authority.  Even if the community gave him a pass ‘cause what ya gonna do with teenagers these days?, there would still be whispers about how if he can’t properly control his own household, how can he be a judge…?

but it can literally take years for a kid to click in with “hey, if I leave my toys out, someone could trip over them and hurt themselves and I don’t like it when I hurt myself so I should be nice to someone else and go out of my way to put my toys away.”

And I acknowledged that it takes a long time and patience on a parent’s part in my original comment. So, I really don’t know what your beef with my comment is. That I haven’t studied child psychology? You got me there. I still don’t think spanking is a good alternative for having that patience and persistence when teaching children these things. I think parents need to understand that it takes a long time and not resort to hitting because they don’t think anything else is working. It will work, but just not today.

My anecdote is not a one time incident, and I’ve not only seen it with my child. I know it’s not hard data, but sometimes it’s important for an adult to show empathy even when the facts, i.e. spanking will make the kid stop now, contradict that.

Yeah, one reason to ban spanking is precisely to draw a bright line around this sort of thing.

We had this argument in NZ when we banned spanking.  The result is that physical violence to discipline children (including spanking) is illegal, but the police have discretion on whether to proceed with complaints.  It’s not ideal, but it does prevent swatting a kid on the backside in fear after pulling them out of traffic from heading for the courts.]

My mother was occasionally violent towards me, and when I was 12 or 13, I was occasionally violent towards smaller children.  It’s a cycle you have to consciously break.

Mighty Ponygirl’s point is that at a certain stage of child development they are literally incapable of feeling real empathy towards other person.  They’re completely egotistical, because they have actually yet to develop the ability to be anything but completely egotistical.  Patient explanations won’t do anything until they develop further.

That’s not to say that corporal punishment is necessary or even good, but only that during that stage of development, a child’s morality is based on punishment and reward.  At roughly 9 years of age (this can vary significantly) their morality develops further and they can grasp the concept of a behavior being wrong even if it doesn’t cause anything bad to happen to them, specifically.

Of course, some people never actually develop out of that, and authoritarian parenting seems designed specifically to retard moral development.

Egnu, you’re being over-dramatic. To calmly lay out the terms by which a child WILL be spanked is not the same thing as “calmly planning on how you are going to hurt your child.” By telling a kid “If you hit Molly again, you’re going to get spanked” puts whether or not they get the spanking in their hands. The kid can choose to either hit Molly again and get a spanking, or not hit Molly and avoid a spanking. If the kid hits Molly, then the spanking was something they affirmatively signed up for. It’s really not that complicated.

Point taken. Obviously I don’t think parents who spank are the same as serial killers. I was being hyperbolic. But I do think we should question the idea that we can rationally decide to hurt a child as a form of discipline. Making “rules” for how to do it just seems like a way to insulate us from acknowledging what we’re actually doing.

Livi—Do I think you should spank a kid for leaving their toys out? No.

However, leaving toys out where someone might trip on them is a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT BEAST than willfully and intentionally inflicting harm on another person or an animal, or doing something that is flat-out dangerous (playing with the fireplace, for example). And not to get all Hermain Cain on you, but dude. Apples and Oranges.

You have the luxury of time and patience when it comes to a few toys left out. When your 2-year-old decides that It’s Fun To Hit Other Kids, you don’t have that luxury of time and patience. You have to get that point across that YOU DO NOT HIT. End of story. It is your duty as a parent to put a stop to that shit.

And you know what? If you put Li’lLivi in a corner and tell her she has to sit there for 5 minutes because she hit Billy, *and she decides she really hates this punishment and if that’s the price for hitting Billy then she won’t hit Billy again* then you would be a fucking psychopath to spank her instead of doing that.

But if you put Li’lLivi in the corner, and she doesn’t care because she’s off being a princess in the imaginary kingdom of Corner, and there is nothing about being in the corner that’s bothering her so the next time she wants to punch Billy she doesn’t have something in her head saying “hey, remember the last time you punched Billy it really sucked” then you, as a parent, have to try something else. And your second step doesn’t necessarily have to be spanking, but at some point, your responsibility for Li’lLivi not being a demonic little shit might require that you spank her.

I think this is by far the best thing you’ve ever written.  Thanks so much for writing it.

Dr. Confused @4: I’m skimming through “To Train Up a Child” at your link, and I just love (sarcastically) their example of a policeman punishing speeders.

If State Troopers ceased writing tickets and instead started nagging and threatening, it would be tantamount to abolishing the speed limit. Picture a trooper pulling a speeder over and then explaining how sad it makes him feel for them to be going so fast. Can you see a trooper sitting on the side of the road shaking his fist and turning red in the face as cars speed by? After the sixth time of motorists being told, ‘Now I am not going to tell you again,’ all law would break down into ‘and every man did that which was right in his own eyes.’

All very reasonable—until you realize that what they’re telling parents to do is not akin to consistently writing speeding tickets. It’s akin to state troopers immediately tasering everyone they pull over for speeding.

Which these people probably think would be awesome.

Mighty Ponygirl, while I get what you’re saying, and a few years ago would have agreed, it really is nonsensical to tell a child “we don’t hit, so I’m hitting you to show you that.” It completely contradicts what you’re saying; if they can’t hit Molly, neither can you hit them. 

Which is something we had to figure out with ours; we don’t spank, or hit, anymore. Because we can’t teach him nonviolence through violence.  It’s harder, because we were not raised with a lot of examples of nonviolent childraising technicques, so we have to improvise, a lot.

In the Billy/Molly situation, instead of hitting, we used isolation/calming, in other words, a time out away from Molly or whoever he’d been hurting. Sometimes we had to hold him on his chair, but we did so in a way that didn’t hurt him. And we talked about feeling mad, and ways that weren’t hitting to deal with feeling mad. He now has techniques like walking away, stomping to his room, even going outside and yelling if that makes him feel better.  Throw stuffed animals in his room. Drawing angry pictures (last week, he drew a No Mommies Allowed sign that was fairly hilarious). Anything but hitting.

And he’s just fine, and has manners, as much as any 6 year old does.  After he’s done feeling mad, we make up and talk a little, then it’s over.

And no one got hit.

she’s off being a princess in the imaginary kingdom of Corner

Good times, good times.  My subjects adored me.

It also needs to be said that to a small child, often the experience of having a parent be angry and scared makes an impression long before cause-effect thinking or abstract empathy kicks in. Example from the “all toddlers are a little sociopathic” file: when I was three, I dropped a good-sized rock on my best friend’s head to see what would happen. (It left a bruise; she was otherwise unharmed.) She cried and sobbed and wouldn’t play with me. The adults there freaked out and I was carried away and shouted at by really panicked people who thought I was a complete jerk of a three-year-old. I had to go home from the park and everyone was angry at me all day. My friend and my friend’s family treated me with a lot of standoffishness until I could prove that I didn’t go around lobbing rocks at people anymore. These were all natural consequences that modeled that we just don’t throw rocks at people to see what will happen. None of these things were part of a discipline plan or strategy; I think it was the more powerful a lesson for it. (This is one reason why I’m dubious about the even-tones-all-the-time thing, though if it works for you….)

I feel like this is devolving into “is spanking ever okay?” and arguing with MP about it, when the fact is that this “Christian” child disciplinary stuff is a completely other beast.  Honestly, if all they were doing was giving their kids the occasional swat in the manner MP described (and the manner I experienced as a child) no one would really care.  That level of physical discipline seems to me to be well within the range of acceptable, even if debatable, parenting techniques for young children.  But the philosophy at issue here condones beatings, including the use of objects, on children of all ages.  It’s not about—is ordinary spanking an acceptable technique if nothing else works to deal with serious behavior problems, like biting?  It’s—hitting your kid is not only not the *last* resort, it’s up at the top of the list of options, something that’s not only acceptable, but positive.  There’s nothing in that that treats the kid like he or she has any personal dignity or rights.  It’s a philosophy shot through with patriarchal and oppressive values.  There’s no chance that spanking your kid in MP’s manner will cause serious, let alone permanent injury.  Hell, half the time there’s no bruise.  There’s a good chance that a kid who’s beaten by someone *who thinks that the goal is to raise welts* will be damaged.  I get that there is a reasonable debate about the efficacy of spanking, but this is not what’s happening here.  As Amanda points out, it’s really a misnomer to even call it spanking.

emjaybee@117:  Thank you for putting that into words so effectively!  There are so many other options besides corporal discipline, many of which are at least as effective, and don’t confuse the issue with conflicting messages.

Mighty Ponygirl, while I get what you’re saying, and a few years ago would have agreed, it really is nonsensical to tell a child “we don’t hit, so I’m hitting you to show you that.”

“You can’t fight in here! This is a war room!”

My mom also only ever hit me once, and she immediately apologized.  I can’t remember what I did to make her so angry, but I remember being just as humiliated as she was ashamed.  My mom was abused for most of her life, pretty much up until she was 30, when she finally left my dad.  Hitting her children has always been out of the question.  A couple of years later I slapped her, too, during an argument (about gay rights, because I didn’t have a normal teenager’s problems, but I was just as stupid).  I still wince thinking about it. 

Growing up, my mom’s method of punishment was to send me to my room until I calmed down, and then come sit on my bed with me and explain what I’d done wrong and let me ask questions.  I hear a lot of people, including my boyfriend, saying that you can’t reason with a child, and you shouldn’t give them a chance to do this because they’ll just think they can argue with you about everything, but it made all the difference in the world to me to be treated like a person.  More often than not, I’d agree with her that what I’d done was wrong, and I’d try not to do it again.  Her concern was genuine, and I loved her, so I didn’t want to let her down or upset her. 

It’s bothered me a lot to see how differently my sister has grown up.  Maybe it’s because her father isn’t the monster mine was, or because my parents joined a church (I found one of Dobson’s pamphlets on child-rearing in their van one day).  In any case, there’s a lot more “because I said so.” in the house than there was when I was growing up.

If a baby or toddler does something unsafe, and that child is not old enough to process a careful explanation, it is the parents’ role to remove the child and give the age-appropriate verbal cues, even if it is just “No!”

Example 1: Pulling the family pet’s tail—-remove the pulling hand and say, “No!” Then the parent can hold the child’s hand and help the child pet the animal, saying, “Gently.” If the child does the same thing again, another stern “No,” and take the child away from the pet for the time being. Bring the pet back later when the child is ready and practice the “gentle” interaction again.

Example 2: The same basic script applies to playmates. Sometimes the parent has to be exactly next to two children playing, facilitating and supervising. If a child is hitting another child, start with the initial stern “No,” followed by additional information the child can understand, like “That hurts Sally.” Encouraging Sally to say, “Don’t hit me,” if she is able, makes her an agent in her own defense. If a child persists in hitting, she should be removed from the other child, given her own space, or redirected to some other activity after a brief explanation. “I can’t let you hot Lucy any more, you will play over here now.” No need to make a child apologize, most times they are not sorry, this is simply teaching them to lie to placate others. Ask, “Are you going to hit her again?” If the child says “No,” then instruct him or her to “Tell Lucy you won’t hit her again.” Most kids don’t care if the other kid is sorry, they just want to know they won’t get sucker punched with a shovel again. If the child says yes, he is going to hit again, go back to the “I can’t let you hit Lucy response and give the child his or her own space apart form the friend. (I should make a flow chart!)

Example 3: A child who is disobedient or runs away unsafely in public places gets the same “No!” and must hold the parent’s hand until he or she can demonstrate this is no longer necessary. A child who refuses to do something can be told, “You can put your toys away, or I can come help you put them away, but I think you’d like to do it yourself.” If the child still refuses, physically wrap the child’s hands around the toys and help the child place them in the bin. A further consequence could be that that particular toy is not available for play for a specific length of time—-if the child is old enough to understand a future consequence.

Children want to make their own choices and want to be independent, and telling them you will do it for them, or make them stay closer to you than the prefer is a pretty big deterrent if parents are consistent and follow through with what they say.

To change ANY human behavior requires innumerable repetitions, and if you are parent or teacher this is what you have signed up for. It can be mind numbing and tedious and aggravating, but hitting a child is not a short cut to achieving the goals of better behavior, development of empathy or reasoning ability. It simply is not.

Hitting someone to demonstrate hitting someone is not okay is utterly indefensible and oxymoronic. Hitting someone to punish him or her for some other infraction is unnecessary and just brings violence into a situation where it did not previously exist. The parent who hits his or her child from a single swat on a reaching hand, to a butt spanking by hand, to a brutal belt beating, is doing it for his or her own personal sense of satisfaction, whatever that may be, not because it is a benefit to the child. Period.

Mighty @99: hahahahahahahahahahaha ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhaahha

And some more: hahahahahahahahah

My dad let a cat scratch me for fucking with it once, and then we had a talk before and after about being nice to cats. It took.

@Amanda—-there are definitely natural consequences for messing with animals and it is one way to learn! I almost mentioned allowing this to happen as a learning experience, but then again if the pet is a dog, one wouldn’t want a child to get bitten as a result.

Also, argh typos in original post, d’oh.

At last I have decided to register.

Passive voice, in this context, amounts to minimizing language.

“Show them that their behavior will lead to spanking” is like trying to distance yourself from your own agency as the one who inflicts upon a child.  As the parent, you have the free will to not want to hit (I consider ‘spanking’ to be disingenuous minimizing language as well.  Some will say it ‘can’t be compared’ but it’s still the principle of dominance of the strong over the weak.)

Also…

A couple years ago there was an ABC remake of “Raisin In The Sun,” I don’t know if it’s the same as in the original but there was a scene where the daughter declared herself to be an atheist, and they slapped her and forced her to pray against her own atheism.  At the end one of them said ‘If you act like a child you’ll be treated like a child.’

How often do we refer to our opponents as children?  Manchildren, etc?

Clearly, even as progressives, we still have a long way to go.

Watching this video made me sick.  I was raised in your classic, far-right, evangelical, “off the grid”, homeschooling, Dobson-is-next-to-Jesus home.  A belt hung in our kitchen - and it was used often.  usually only three or four whips with the belt - but I can recall at least a dozen times where it was about as bad as this video.  It’s totally fucked up.  Yeah, I “turned out OK” with the help of therapy and seeing this fucked up ideology for what it is.  Not to mention a nice BDSM kink that helps me re-claim this kind of experience on my own terms.  Anyone saying that this kind of abuse is not a given in this sub-set of Christianity doesn’t know what they are talking about.  No Longer Quivering is something of a therapy blog for me.

People have already touched on a lot of the things I wanted to say, but I have to make one important point.

Things like this are exactly why I loathe the Duggars, and why I loathe TLC for giving them a platform.  They are Evangelicals who practice “lifestyle Egvangelism”.  This basically means that you pretend you are happy and your life is perfect so that others will want to know how they can be like you, have constant bliss, have perfectly obedient children, etc.  And they have a brand to sell so they lure people in with a wholesome facade and make very sure that others don’t know about the horrible parts until they are too far in too get back out.

The Duggars have used blanket training on their children.  Someone else mentioned it, but to summarize they put an infant on a blanket, and hit it any time s/he leaves the boundaries of the blanket.  The Duggars have claimed that they “only” hit the floor beside the child, but the effect is still the same.  They make the child terrified to move so that the parents don’t have to bother watching them.  I think that if you have so many children that you can’t be arsed to watch them then you have too many children and need to stop having more.

But this really goes far deeper than many people realize.  Fundies, and especially Quiverfullers, do not want normal children.  They don’t just want good children; they want children who are instantly and joyfully obedient.  They will have “obedience training” where children are told to do random things, and if they hesitate or even frown while doing it, they get hit.  Lisa Welchel, as mentioned upthread, is a fan of this.  She will tell her kids to do things, not because it’s the right thing to do, but to make sure they will instantly obey.  She will even occasionally refuse their requests to go to the bathroom, and she is proud of this.

QFs and other fundies have varying levels of strictness, and the Duggars seem to be more on the neglect side of things instead of the constant hitting side now.  But there are families where children must request time to use the bathroom even in their own house.  The parents will even tell them to do something wrong, and then hit them if they don’t obey and do the wrong thing.  This can really set kids up for other types of abuse too.  There is one girl who escaped from a family like this, and she says that when she was a kid, an adult at a party told her and her brother to perform sexual acts on each other while he watched.  Because they were trained to be obedient, they didn’t even hesitate.

But the Duggars and others like them will never tell you about all the hitting and soul-crushing involved.  Instead, they will promise you teenagers that never rebel, kids that never make you look bad, and a perfect husband.  Only once you are hooked do they reveal how you are supposed to achieve this, and even then it doesn’t work particularly well.  These people are dangerous.

If you’re screaming “god damn” and “fuck” I think you’ve given up even the slightest veneer of being “Christian”.

What the everloving fuck?  You’re really gonna come to a blog full of atheists and claim that Christians have some kind of moral high ground, and that therefore someone who acts badly can’t be a true Christian?

Christians are people who identify as Christians.  You’re not the supreme decider of who counts and who doesn’t.  Some of them are bad and some of them are good.  This man is a Christian and he’s also an abuser.

But in the same way that Billy cannot fathom a consciousness outside of his own, Billy *does* understand that he really doesn’t want to get spanked, so if you basically explain that hitting Molly will result in a punishment he *really doesn’t want,* that is something that might register with him.

This is simply flat-out wrong.  People do not work this way.  We are not rational and we do not make decisions based on a simple risk-benefit analysis.  Think about this way.  A baby is learning to walk.  She takes a step and falls down, and it hurts a lot.  She does not think “Ok, attempting to take a step hurts, so I will stop doing that.”  Instead, she tries again but with modification.  If a kid is at the same stage where doing something bad results in pain, then they will continue to attempt that bad thing but they will modify it to try to avoid the painful aspect of it.

I am constantly amazed at how far some progressives will go to justify spanking.

If your kid doesn’t understand empathy yet, hitting them will delay that development, not foster it.

And the cliched hypothetical about a kid running into a street is as inane as the “ticking time bomb” hypothetical to justify torture.  If your kid can’t understand “running into the street will hurt because a car will hit me”, then they also won’t understand “running into the street will hurt because Mommy will hit me”.  If your kid can’t understand that risk, then you need to do a better job of supervising that child.

Every single day millions of parents, teachers, babysitters, and other caregivers manage to get kids to behave and manage to keep them safe without ever hitting them.  There’s just no excuse for it.  It is never necessary, and very rarely effective.

So stop bending over backwards to justify it just because you’re so in love with the idea of doing it.

Hitting someone to demonstrate hitting someone is not okay is utterly indefensible and oxymoronic.

Building empathy requires shared experience. You can’t know how unpleasant it is to be hit when you don’t want to be unless you, yourself are hit when you don’t want to be. But it’s nice to see so many people ignoring a child’s natural stages of growth; a three year-old who cannot empathize is not going to be confused by apparent hypocrisy and once they get around ten most kids grasp “learn to the rules so you know when to break them.” Also consciously controlling the force of a blow is a very necessary thing to learn so the fun roughhousing doesn’t get broken up on account of a bloody nose. Maybe most kids can realize looking back that a few light swats on the tockus from mom is very different from the punch that knocked the wind out of them.

Maybe most kids can realize looking back that a few light swats on the tockus from mom is very different from the punch that knocked the wind out of them.

Different, but still unnecessary and wrong.  This is like justifying shoplifting by pointing out that it’s different than armed robbery.

Building empathy requires shared experience. You can’t know how unpleasant it is to be hit when you don’t want to be unless you, yourself are hit when you don’t want to be.

That hit doesn’t have to come from Mom or Dad though.  In fact, a kid starts using hitting because they already know it feels.  They do it to hurt someone else, so they must already know that the other person won’t like it.  This is really stretching it.  Why are you so committed to justifying spanking anyway?  Why is it so hard for you to let it go?

“a three year-old who cannot empathize is not going to be confused by apparent hypocrisy”

Why is it reasonable to assume that if a person cannot think rationally about what is happening when they are hit, that they are somehow impervious to its effects?  There is evidence that spanking young children (like two and younger) causes behavioral problems later in life.  So whether or not toddlers can be reasoned with or identify hypocrisy is completely beside the point. 

It really surprises me that it would be at all counter intuitive that being hit is generally not good for a person.

Amanda @125—I seriously cannot stop watching that clip.

  My dad is a lawyer and basically thought that corporal punishment of children was not only immoral but contrary to all legal logic. Since the law generally only allows adults to be physically violent against other adults in self-defense than it makes no sense to allow adults to hit children since it is never going to be in self-defense.

I heard a segment <a >on the radio recently</a> about some researchers who were recording parent-child interactions in order to study yelling, not spanking, and ended up finding that a lot of parents who reported spanking only as a last resort, and only when it’s a matter of bodily harm, actually spank all the time for really stupid fucking reasons.  One of the examples given on the radio was the case of a parent spanking her child for trying to turn the pages of a picture book (presumably to look at the next pictures) while she was reading to zir.  And this was when she KNEW she was being recorded!

When spanking is considered an acceptable last resort, inevitably some frustrated parents will gradually relax their definition of “last resort” until things like this happen.  And I don’t see the harm in just letting it go, since in an extreme situation where violence is truly necessary to prevent bodily harm to the child or someone else, I am pretty sure parents would do it anyway.

Why are you so committed to justifying spanking anyway?  Why is it so hard for you to let it go?

Because I don’t think raising a monstrous little sociopath is worth preserving a parents non-violent ideology. If a form of discipline effectively curtails bad/dangerous behavior while doing no long term physical or psychological damage to the child then there is no reason not to use it especially after everything else has failed. I’ve yet to see any evidence that spanking as laid out by Ponygirl above does any long term damage to a child; the only studies that do link spanking with trauma fail to sort out abusive beatings which renders them invalid.

And for your information I’m not pro-spanking for the reasons quite a few people have pointed out already: while corporal punishment is not by definition abuse, it provides a cover for it. As a kid who was spanked mildly a few times, that’s what soured me on the practice. Not your self-righteous preaching that labels my parent’s abusers and myself some sort of victim in denial.

There’s no chance that spanking your kid in MP’s manner will cause serious, let alone permanent injury.  Hell, half the time there’s no bruise. 
Comment #120: Kit-Kat on 11/03 at 06:01 PM

Because my mother spanked me, I was convinced she hated me.  It took me years to figure that out and I ended up losing a lot of time with her when I could have spent that time being friendly and loving with her.

If that’s not permanent injury I don’t know what is.

Jesus oldfeminist, there are so many ways to fuck up your kid. When I was a kid, if I did something wrong, even if I was genuinely sorry, I got the line “Well, sorry isn’t good enough.” You want to talk about permanently fucking someone up? Sometimes sorry is all you have to offer. When you basically tell a person “apologizing is useless so why bother,” that can really seriously hamper their future relationships.

You can permanently injure your kid without laying a finger on them.

The idea that your caregiver beating you on a private part of your body when you are tiny and helpless won’t do any long term psychological damage is utterly amazing to me.

I vividly remember, by the way, my father expounding to others on why it is appropriate to spank me, often with reference to what he assumed to be my stage of cognitive development.  So to compound the fear and humiliation, I also got the pleasure of hearing about how I didn’t have reasoning ability or empathy.  It was also lovely to hear his smug assurance that he knew precisely what was going on in my head.  Good times.  I am mystified by how the average parent is supposed to know precisely what developmental stage their child is in.  Mine certainly had no idea, although they sure thought they did!

Also, spanking parents ALWAYS think they spank in exactly the appropriate way, unlike those other spanking parents they deem abusive.  And, maybe, just maybe there is one magic way to do it in a way that won’t risk damaging the child’s psyche, the neural pathways in the brain, his or her sexuality or the ability to learn empathy and moral behavior for its own sake.  But boy, I sure don’t trust my fellow citizens to correctly identify and then adhere perfectly to that one correct way that doesn’t risk serious long term damage.

Laurie, considering the Rules of Spanking were actually determined by real-life developmental psychologists, yes, there is a way.

I wonder, is the desire to dominate and enjoy overbearing power over others, especially those smaller than weaker than you, an innate human drive?

In before yet more endless contortions meant to contradict the plain truth I just stated.

The idea that your caregiver beating you on a private part of your body when you are tiny and helpless won’t do any long term psychological damage is utterly amazing to me.

I’m not sure you can really consider it to be a ‘private’ part of the body when the child is still in diapers/training pants.

I’ve been a little torn on how to deal with my older niece. There are things she knows not to do, but she’ll pull the old ‘I’m not touching this’ game. For the most part I try not to restrict her, but there are things I don’t want her into because she’ll hurt either them, herself, or her sister, and not all of them can be removed from reach. I don’t want to resort to spanking, but I haven’t ruled it out as an option either.

Heh, life is tough, eh?

I would wager that the majority of corporal punishment / abuse is administered by women.  Now its mainly for the reason that there are more women who have primary physical custody of their children than men as well as that are far more stay at home moms who are with kids than stay at home dads.  For your old school Catholics most of the violence towards children was at the hands of the nuns.

As I think about the corporal punishment I received most of it was done by my mom.  Now neither parent was remotely as violent as Hillary’s but they had the moments that they lost control and became violent.  My parents are decent people and all in all genuinely meant well but there were fucked up moments.

My mother used the wooden spoon and would give a few hits on either my ass or thighs.  My father would slap me with his hand across the face or he’d give a few punches in the ribs.  I would say 90 percent of the time my father hit my brother or me was because you ‘upset your mother’.  I would guess that my mother didn’t hit me after maybe I was 12,  she would have my father do the dirty work as we got older.  Whoever said it was cowardly an about dominating someone weaker is absolutely right. 

My mother would use the old ‘wait until your father comes home and then you will get it routine.’  Sometimes it was a bluff and sometimes it was real.  She did this so she could be perceived as the ‘good cop’ to his ‘bad cop’.  If my brother or me did something and she thought my father went overboard she would warn us about upsetting him and would out of guilt give us some extra dessert.

When I hear about the stories of “Elder abuse”  when grown kids physically abuse their parents as they are in nursing homes or shutins,  I wonder if those parents were abusive towards their children and are on the receiving end of bad karma.

“the Bible is pretty much the only place beside BDSM meets, over-the-top internet misogynists and dog-trainers where you can hear someone using the word “submission” transparently”

amen amen amen.

kudos to all you of you, but especially #40 (amazing how the discipline stops once you can fight back, isn’t it) & #119.

My first reaction to this video was, well, that’s why I never wanted a family—that’s the reality of family life!  Kid downloaded some stuff from the Internet.  She didn’t cut school, she didn’t hit anybody, she didn’t arson the family house, she didn’t even discover alcohol.  She just downloaded information. 

All I can say is, her crying and screaming is for the camera.  This is too usual an occurrence for quite so much crying and screaming.  She does put herself where the camera will be focused on on daddy, which is partly why she won’t get on the bed (the other reason is to show how enraged her father will be when she doesn’t get on the bed).  Mother is mostly anxious to please daddy (I’ll hit you once & then I’ll leave and this will be over, ok?) but the kid is expendable and both mommy and kid know that when it comes to Daddy.  Daddy is genuinely angry.

I hope this video gets Daddy genuinely f*cked.  Because sometimes sending Daddy to jail really is the best way to make Daddy angry.

I was in elementary school in the 70’s, and the principal of that school used to beat kids.  I say to everyone that this guy reminded me of the Headmaster in Pink Floyd’s The Wall.

Now I was never hit by him,  as a kid I tended to be quite well mannered and deferential to authority but I sure as hell witnessed stuff. 

There was one time when I was in 5th or 6th grade I got in a fight with another kid.  The other kid was blamed but in reality I’d say the culpability was close to 50/50 slightly more him but I was far from blameless.  It was broken up and we were taken to the principal’s office.  The guy came in and said “I heard what happened you can go back to class Brian” and as I was leaving se just started to beat the shit out of the other kid.

This guy was a real pillar of the community.  Almost all of the parents liked him and thought he was great.  I know he was an elder in his church.  My family was Catholic and I think he was presbytarian but my parents especially my dad had a respect for him.  I went back to town and he is long since dead but the school building is now named after him. 

There is a facebook page about the town I grew up in..  there was a thread about people talking about how he were beaten by this bastard.  Its funny now but its really fucked up that the damn school is named after him.

As far as the dad being arrested,  more than likely the statute of limitations has expired from that incident.  Most crimes has a five year statute of limitations.  Still I would like to see him arrested and have to sweat it out a while even if there was no conviction.

Now one area where its possible that he could be in trouble is that he is going through divorce proceedings.  If he has been deposed I wonder if he made denials about abuse or said something that is contradicted by the tape.  It would be sweet to nail him on something related to perjury.

“And for your information I’m not pro-spanking for the reasons quite a few people have pointed out already: while corporal punishment is not by definition abuse, it provides a cover for it. As a kid who was spanked mildly a few times, that’s what soured me on the practice. Not your self-righteous preaching that labels my parent’s abusers and myself some sort of victim in denial.”

Thank you.  My parents spanked me, and I honestly don’t think I was damaged in any way by it, but I know there are people who use the term “spanking” to cover what I would call “beating.”  But I really don’t appreciate being told that my parents were hypocrites or abusers, or that I’m somehow damaged without knowing it.  I’m 34 years old—I’m pretty sure that whatever issues I have, including those with my parents, are not the result of the occasional mild spanking I received.  It wasn’t the result either of their inability to control their tempers or of a patriarchal worldview that accepted brute physical force as an acceptable way to compel unthinking obedience from children past the age of reason.

Bananacat@ #131: PRECISELY. And all your other comments, too. The sheer contrivance and convolution of progressives’ attempts to justify spanking is indeed similar to the “But surely SOME torture is okay! SOMEtimes, at least! If there’s a ticking time bomb and we know he knows how to turn it off and NYC will be blown up and the stars are rightly aligned and Jack Bauer is real!” nonsense. Usually I see it coming from progressive Christians, though I don’t know if that’s a factor or a coincidence. It would be hilarious, if it wasn’t giving aid and comfort to the abusers. So long as abusers think there is such a thing as “acceptable” spanking, they’re going to think that’s what they’re doing, and they won’t be wrong—because the “rules” are a bunch of highly subjective crap. “Don’t spank in anger”? Okay! I’m not angry, honest, I’m not! This hurts me more than it hurts you, really! See, I’m not shouting, you disgusting little hussy. And when I call you that, I’m saying it calmly.

developmental psychology directly contradicts you

Really, MightyPonyGirl? What developmental psychology, precisely? Because the developmental psychology I’ve read says that spanking is, at best, harmless (and that’s only “conditional spanking” done according to strict rules, within a very narrow window of a child’s life, after they’re a baby and before they are 5); that even the “good” spankings aren’t as effective as the combination of reasoning and non-physical punishment (even for kids under 5!); and that NOTHING shows that it’s necessary to hit one’s child into submission. Which is what any hitting for “correction” or “punishment” (and DAMN, that distinction is both phony and a mind-fuck—“I’m not doing this to hurt you, honey! No, this pain is for YOUR OWN GOOD!”) is.

Because I don’t think raising a monstrous little sociopath is worth preserving a parents non-violent ideology.

If having severe physical pain inflicted on your child (and don’t tell me it’s not severe—why on earth would a truly mild sensation be a deterrent, when every single other non-physical option wouldn’t be? It would have to be severe) is necessary to prevent you from raising a monstrous little sociopath, then I’ve bad news for you: you already have a monstrous little sociopathic child.

There is no research showing that spanking is necessary to prevent kids from being monstrous.

And the “Rules of Spanking” are a set of highly contrived, highly artificial conditions that are just not going to apply in any case where your child can rightly be described as behaving like a monstrous little sociopath, or even like a normal Bad Kid. Because in that situation, you’re going to be angry. And you’re not going to follow the rules exactly.

You can permanently injure your kid without laying a finger on them.

And you can do it a lot more reliably, and more clearly and obviously, by laying a finger on them. Which is important, for legal rules and social norms. “Don’t hit” is a fairly simple bright-line rule to teach and enforce. “Don’t say mean things” isn’t.

All I can say is, her crying and screaming is for the camera.  This is too usual an occurrence for quite so much crying and screaming.

Yup.  Not that I’d blame her - she may be acting a bit when it started, but she obviously planned it to have documentary evidence of a regular abuse.

The bit that gave me a grim sense of amusement was the father drawling “That computer has been nothing but trouble”.  Oh, Judge Adams, if only you knew…

But I really don’t appreciate being told that my parents were hypocrites or abusers, or that I’m somehow damaged without knowing it.

Well, nobody ever does. That’s part of the problem with talking about abuse by loved ones—they’re still loved ones, and nobody wants to be a victim. And even if it is really abuse, no one’s going to want to admit it.

So I really don’t find the “I was spanked and you’re mean for calling my parents abusers” argument to be at all relevant. Most parents do engage in some kind of abuse, at some point or another. It doesn’t necessarily make them bad people or bad parents. It’s impossible to raise a dependent, vulnerable person without fucking up in some way. That shouldn’t lead us to accept contrived excuses about how some hitting doesn’t count.

If you truly believe that “most parents engage in some kind of abuse,” then I honestly question your definition of abuse.

I’m not sure you can really consider it to be a ‘private’ part of the body when the child is still in diapers/training pants.

Ah, but “Never Spank A Baby” is one of the rules of spanking.

And if a 1.5 year old in diapers doesn’t count as a real baby, then why would a very light swat on the butt (as opposed to on the arm, or as opposed to being picked up and moved) be particularly effective?

I think spanking generally depends on the privacy violation and humiliation involved in exposing and touching one’s butt to be effective.

If you truly believe that “most parents engage in some kind of abuse,” then I honestly question your definition of abuse.

At some point in their child’s first 18 years of existence? Well, yes, I do believe that.

The difference between an “abuser” and an ordinary parent who fucks up and does an abusive action once is, of course, frequency and severity.

But I think it’s a dangerous mistake to say that the abusive action isn’t an abusive action because the parent is a really nice person otherwise.

Even if the daughter was playing it up a bit for the camera, and even if as some have theorized, she released this for unworthy reasons (not going to repeat such things myself), what HE did is not changed by that, and that’s what really matters.

I really find it ridiculous that some kind of parenting style is a marker of being a “true progressive” or not.

And you can do it a lot more reliably, and more clearly and obviously, by laying a finger on them. Which is important, for legal rules and social norms. “Don’t hit” is a fairly simple bright-line rule to teach and enforce. “Don’t say mean things” isn’t.

So starving your kid is fine as long as it’s not obvious. But roughhousing, boxing, some pre-coital spank action are all just abuse that our twisted psyches convinced us to enjoy.

Actions speak louder than words, Tyro.  You either reject all social darwinism and ‘might makes right’ mentalities of ANY kind, or you don’t.

I would say that those who don’t are hardly progressive.

“Building empathy requires shared experience. You can’t know how unpleasant it is to be hit when you don’t want to be unless you, yourself are hit when you don’t want to be.”

Kids know how hitting and pushing and hair pulling feels, because little kids do it to each other. Everyone gives and takes their licks in a nursery school yard, believe me.  Intervention and socialization in an age-appropriate manner, giving children simple words to process their experiences, or helping the person who was hurt feel better, are ways that help children build empathy.

Being hurt worse by someone five times your size as a lesson teaches nothing. As someone else mentioned, teachers working with young children in large groups, not just on an individual, family basis, manage to maintain order and fashion a primitive society every day, and teach without using hitting as a tool.

You either reject all social darwinism and ‘might makes right’ mentalities of ANY kind, or you don’t.

Convenient that this is apparently the metric that puts you on one side of the line or the other. What about being a vegetarian? Truly, Mighty Ponygirl has the best of the argument here. The rest of you are arguing over “what would a true progressive do?”

<blockquote>All I can say is, her crying and screaming is for the camera.  This is too usual an occurrence for quite so much crying and screaming.
Yup.  Not that I’d blame her - she may be acting a bit when it started, but she obviously planned it to have documentary evidence of a regular abuse.</blovkquote>

Really eastvillagechick and PIATOR? You’re first thought was “she’s acting”? I invite either of you to let a grown man whip the shit out of you for ten minutes an see what kind of noises you make.

Too bad she didn’t establish a safe word, right PIATOR?

Had to stop the video two or three times to brace myself for watching the rest.

Seeing these serial defenders of beating children is just depressing.

@bananacat and @LR, thank you for fighting the inexplicable tide.

For those wishing to rush to defend the rightness of “spanking,” please, PLEASE read Alice Miller.

You will read that one of the most pernicious aspects of parents using corporal punishment is that children have an impossible time reconciling the two ideas of “this person loves me” and “this person is hitting me, which I’ve learned one should never do and in fact no other adults are permitted to do.” And given that tough paradox, children instead take on the responsibility for the parent’s choice unto themselves. Assign themselves fault for having *caused* the beating. And may cheerfully go their entire adult lives saying things like, “Ha ha, well I was just an unruly child and my parents had no choice but to spank me!”

And continue to justify corporal punishment in your continuing effort to shield your parents, and thus your entire worldview of family and love and all the rest, from dispassionate examination or blame.

For those defending “spanking” children, read Alice Miller and just see if you see yourself in those words.

And maybe, like I did (at nigh-40-years-old) you will be arrested in that moment of recognition.

  Even if spanking and other physical forms of assault were an effective form of punishment, which I really seriously doubt*, they should all still be illegal. When a husband hits his wife we call that wife-beating and recognizing it as a crime. When an adult is an disagreement with another adult and resorts to violence to settle it, we call that assault and treat it as a crime. The same principle should all true with any adult and child, physical violence is not a proper way to deal with any situation where an adult and child are in disagreement. It is assault and should be treated as a crime.

Really eastvillagechick and PIATOR? You’re first thought was “she’s acting”?

Mi fist thoot waz thet shee had sit it upp to kapture th vilence on cemera, und thet shee waz plying fur the cemera it thee biginning.  Pritty clover uv herr relly.

I just saw that the father is now saying that Hillary went public because he took away the Mercedes he was providing and he wouldn’t be financially supporting her.

When he runs for re-election, someone in his community NEEDS to buy airtime for this. Run the video, fade to black, and “Paid for by Citizens Against Abuse” or whatever. When he loses the election, find out what law firm hires him, send each of the partners the video. Let that video haunt him the rest of his life.

I don’t see how demanding your daughter lie on her stomach so you wan whip her arse with a belt is not considered sexual abuse. He wouldn’t be allow to make her do that and put his hand there but it’s ok if he is WHIPPING her? That guy is fuuuuuuuuuuuucccked uuuup.

“What the everloving fuck?  You’re really gonna come to a blog full of atheists and claim that Christians have some kind of moral high ground, and that therefore someone who acts badly can’t be a true Christian?”

Just to nitpick here, bananacat, I think what they meant is that verbally damning your own God (and using oaths, which fundies say is wrong) while supposedly doing something in his name is hilariously transparent of the fact your true motives have nothing to do with any religious ideology. Not that he’s No True Christian because he did something bad. It would be like someone beating a dog “to train it into obedience” while yelling “I LOVE DISOBEDIENT DOGS!!!” at the top of their voice.

“Convenient that this is apparently the metric that puts you on one side of the line or the other.”

I would certainly hope that rejecting the notion of social status and ‘might makes right’ is the baseline for progressiveness, yes.  After all, isn’t those things more or less the root cause of all war, slavery, and oppression since the beginning of history?

“What about being a vegetarian? Truly, Mighty Ponygirl has the best of the argument here. The rest of you are arguing over “what would a true progressive do?””

When her so-called ‘argument’ doesn’t entail the defense of ever hitting children, let me know.

I’m not saying that a parent who spanks cannot possibly be progressive. I have raised two lovely, non-sociopathic, empathetic non-monsters without ever laying a hand on them (except for hugs and hand holding and that sort of thing). I think spanking is lazy, uncreative, illogical, and not really defensible. I don’t think a parent who swats their kid on the butt once or twice is a monster, either. I just think they could do a whole lot better, and it’s depressing to see people defending this is a parenting technique.

The only people we’re allowed to legally hit are our children. That’s just nuts.

@MightyPonygirl

You’ve done an amazing job of explaining the facts and being reasonable in the face of so much disingenuous bullshit.  I wouldn’t have had the patience for it.  You’ve made the thread better for everyone reading it.

Thank you.

mamram@139:

When spanking is considered an acceptable last resort, inevitably some frustrated parents will gradually relax their definition of “last resort” until things like this happen.

You said it better than I could, and had been attempting to.  As we all know, the easy, swift, and satisfying option will only ever be used by tired, frustrated, overstimulated parents as a last resort.  And that’s even before one gets to people who use “spanking” to cover all sorts of bullshit.  (Like my dad using a belt on me and my sister, which I called “spanking” for the longest time until enough people reacted with mild shock to it to convince me otherwise.)  Humans: consistently capable of not choosing the easy way out, to the point where we can be trusted with knowing when to, and when not to, physically strike a child.

Gah, just typing that weirds me out, because I can’t imagine ever, ever, thinking it’s okay to strike a child.

As for zoning out during punishments, I used to do that.  That should mean that my parents learn more about me to figure out what would actually work on me.  Too bad for me that spanking was still on the table!  At least until I was 12, and stopped showing any reaction to the pain.  (Putting stickers on my own desk: so transgressive.)

I once took care of a couple of kids for a summer, 10 and 4 years old.  They would occasionally bicker, so I told them that while I do want to take them to the pool and suchlike, I have no problem taking them home and reading a book, so knock it off.  They didn’t knock it off, so I took them home, sent them to their room (they were active sorts, so), and I read a book.  They were so used to ineffective punishments—like counting to three (“you can do this two more times”) or being yelled at or whatever—that they didn’t know how to react to someone actually using their brain.

But sure, let’s leave spanking open as an option.  I totally trust people to not fuck it up.  And hitting children to say it’s not okay to hit, absolutely sensible!  Kids: no empathy, also no long-term memory or general capability of learning about the world!  It’s a common thing, really.

“I was out in the front yard with my boy the other day and he was playing with his little friend, and he hit his friend and I went up to him and I said, “Hey, (smacks his boy), we don’t hit.” He looked up at me like, “Here’s your sign, Dad.”“
—Bill Engvall

Comment #124: gogo - Yes! You have laid it out so much better than I did. Spanking of any kind is not necessary to raise a child to not be a sociopath. And, I say this as someone who has done it in moments of weakness. It doesn’t make the situation any better and it doesn’t teach her anything accept mommy is mean and scary. To use your example of a child running into the street, as young as 20 months old, I was able to explain to my child that if she runs in the parking lot, cars can’t see her and they will bump her head. And she gets it. No one can tell me she doesn’t. Any time she has taken that first running step all I’ve had to do is catch her arm and remind her and she stops.

Also, bananacat and others who spoke up about spanking always being unnecessary and wrong, your comments are spot on. I really don’t understand the need to defend spanking. The same arguments I see here for spanking children have been used in the past to justify wife beating. Children are treated as if they have no rights to not be bodily harmed and it’s sickening.

“The Christian Right seems to really partake in [nonconsensual] BDSM-type sexuality” makes perfect sense when you consider that their image of a deity is an abusive parent who regularly sets his offspring tasks he knows (being omniscient) they won’t be able to complete successfully and then punishes them for it. And then insists they come crawling to him for “forgiveness” before starting the cycle all over again.

On the some-corporal-punishment thing, I have to admit myself somewhere in Ponygirl’s camp. Spanking need not be abuse, and there are so many nonspanking ways to abuse. As a kid, almost never spanked, I sometimes wished I would be, just because it would have meant some physical contact. Wrongheaded, but there you have it. As a parent, I think the idea that there are totally-nonviolent ways of enforcing physical rules is wishful thinking. If you’re holding a kid down so they stay in time out, or picking them up and removing them from a situation where they’re acting unsafely, or just holding their legs on the diaper table so they don’t kick crap all over the room, you’ve already violated their physical autonomy. (And if they start screaming “Ow, you’re hurting me” you either have to be willing to deny their perception that what you’re doing is painful, or acknowledge that yes, you are inflicting pain, or let them run into traffic or fling crap all over the room.)

For anyone who wasn’t hanging around at Pandagon as far back as December 2006, here’s the thread where Phoenician in a Time of Romans wants to know why a woman didn’t have a safeword with which to stop her boyfriend raping her. He starts out just looking a bit gormless, but later in the thread moves directly on to victim-blaming the woman for “being stupid”.

I don’t understand why Amanda didn’t ban PiaTor years ago, but perhaps his creepy admission that he assumed a child being beaten by her father was acting will get him turned off.

Jesus oldfeminist, there are so many ways to fuck up your kid. When I was a kid, if I did something wrong, even if I was genuinely sorry, I got the line “Well, sorry isn’t good enough.” You want to talk about permanently fucking someone up? Sometimes sorry is all you have to offer. When you basically tell a person “apologizing is useless so why bother,” that can really seriously hamper their future relationships.

You can permanently injure your kid without laying a finger on them.
Comment #142: Mighty Ponygirl on 11/03 at 09:35 PM

Well JESUS Mighty Ponygirl, how does that in any way prove that my mother spanking me didn’t permanently injure me and my relationship with her?

There really is no foolproof way to get a child to obey first time every time.  Children are all different and some are harder to deal with than others.  Sometimes you have to be really patient, sometimes you can’t go out or have to go home, sometimes there is no easy answer.  Sometimes a kid isn’t obviously bothered by being hit, others are really traumatized by it.  You can’t tell by looking; those of us who were traumatized are often really good at hiding our terror.

And no, a three-year old probably doesn’t understand “we don’t hit people” followed by a smack to the bottom as hypocritical.  A few years down the line they will.  It’s not like we forget what happened to us.

I did some reading, and there is disagreement on the subject amongst developmental psychologists, from what I read, although there are several who think that mild, non-abusive spanking done effectively doesn’t have harmful effects, and that sounds like what Mighty Ponygirl aims for. But I’m still opposed to spanking, and I am glad I never spanked my kids, but came up with alternatives that apparently were just as successful.

It doesn’t, and I’m not saying it does.

And, as I keep saying, if you just haul off and whack your kid without giving them any chance to avoid the spanking, then I can totally see how a kid will think “holy shit my mom hates me.”

It’s not hypocritical to deliver a short, controlled spanking to a child who is throwing haymakers. When kids hit, it’s because they’re angry, or confused, or just being selfish little pricks. A spanking that is part of a structure of consequences for egregious actions is not the same as losing your shit and wholloping your kid at the first sign of disobedience. Kids operate on a very simple “If I do this, this will happen” basis when you lay it out for them.

If you finish your vegetables, you will get dessert.

If you finish your homework, we can watch some TV together.

If you break that toy, I’m not buying you another.

If you hit Molly, you will get a spanking.

When I was spanked as a kid (which, I might add, I could probably count the frequency on one hand), I had Clear Warnings To Stop Doing That Shit that I *chose* to ignore. Maybe I thought my parents were big hateful meanies at the time of the spanking, but kids think that WHENEVER you stop them from doing something they want to do. For me? Maybe I was trying to play with the fireplace. Maybe I was pulling the dog’s tail. Maybe I was shoving or biting (I don’t think I was much for that, but who knows. We all want to think we were better kids than we were).

And you know what, if you have the luxury of watching your kid 24/7, and never, EVER have to worry about leaving a 3-year old to play on her own in a room where the fireplace is going while you start to get dinner ready, then you are free to keep yanking your three year old away from the fireplace every time she starts fucking around with it and having the talk about how fire hurts and she needs to leave the glowy warm place alone. And if you know that the dog will take endless abuse from the kid without turning around and biting the shit out of him or her, then by all means, keep reminding the kid that the dog doesn’t like having his tail pulled when you happen to see it. But my parents didn’t have that luxury. If they spent a half an hour with me in the living room with a cozy fireplace going and I went over to play with it and they said “no,” and gave me a warning, if I kept going over, they were like “you know what, this needs to stop.” So I got a spanking so that I stayed the fuck away from the fireplace and they didn’t have to hover over me and fret about how close I was getting anymore.

Now, if they had spanked me for every little fucking thing, like not finishing my vegetables and breaking a toy? Spanking would have been meaningless, and probably the second their backs were turned I would have been back over to the fireplace checking it out. But having the *serious line* drawn is a good thing for kids. The adult world is a lot less forgiving than spankings when you assault someone.

@159 Ok, the source might make my point suspect, but as part of being into BDSM I attended a workshop on safety, telling us what parts of the body are safe to hit, with what. I believe it was broken into hand/whipping/caning. The buttocks was the only part that was safe enough for all three. It is a big fleshy muscular thing containing no bones or vital organs. I imagine concerns about safety are intensified when it’s an adult striking a child, so while humiliation might be part of the punishment for an older child, parents probably strike young kids on the butt because they won’t break bones or damage nerves or vital organs.

MP, you believe you weren’t hurt by spanking, and I think it is quite possible this is true.

It hurt *me*.  Psychologically.  Deeply.  For a long, long time.

I just don’t think it is worth the chance.

If you were playing rough with the dog, or getting too close to the fire, then there should have been a place away from them where you couldn’t get out of that your parents could have put you. 

Sometimes separating a child from danger (to zirself or others) isn’t going to teach them a thing.  They go to “happy corner land” or whatever.  Why is that a problem?  They are also not around the dangerous thing any more, or they are not doing the dangerous or violent thing.  It may take some time for them to get around to understanding what’s happening.

A baby doesn’t understand that rolling off the bed will hurt.  You don’t scare or spank them for it a la that frightful “blanket training.”  You just don’t put them in the dangerous situation in the first place.

I had a neighbor playmate who decided he didn’t want to wear clothes.  His mom didn’t make a big deal but he had to play inside and couldn’t have me over to play.  Eventually he got bored with it.  He didn’t “snap to it” and she was fine with that.

Kids who don’t understand consequences aren’t being little shits.  Kids who test their parents aren’t being little shits.  They are normal kids doing normal things.  Punishing them for being normal kids is not helping them.  Learning to be a good social being isn’t easy.  When they don’t get it right away, escalating punishment can make them fearful and despairing because they believe this means they are not good enough.  THEY are not good enough. 

Why is the chance of doing this to a child who is psychologically not to mention physically totally vulnerable to you okay?

Just because this didn’t happen to you doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen to millions of kids every fucking day.  It happened to me and several others just on this thread.  Do you not believe me?  Do you not believe us?

As vernonlee wrote:

one of the most pernicious aspects of parents using corporal punishment is that children have an impossible time reconciling the two ideas of “this person loves me” and “this person is hitting me, which I’ve learned one should never do and in fact no other adults are permitted to do.” And given that tough paradox, children instead take on the responsibility for the parent’s choice unto themselves. Assign themselves fault for having *caused* the beating. And may cheerfully go their entire adult lives saying things like, “Ha ha, well I was just an unruly child and my parents had no choice but to spank me!”
Comment #169: vernonlee on 11/04 at 06:38 AM

I see myself here.  That you don’t doesn’t make it false.  It makes it something you may need to grow some empathy for. 

Perhaps your parents didn’t spank that into you quite hard enough?

or maybe I didn’t need it.

Because despite your pretty outrageous reply, I actually believe you when you say that your spankings hurt your relationship with your mom, and have said as much, which is a lot more than you’re giving me by rounding back on me and saying my parents didn’t beat me hard enough.

We are two different people, and spanking didn’t work for you, but it did work for me. And maybe you can completely monitor your kids 24/7 and when you have to go get dinner ready and don’t want them underfoot but also don’t want them unsupervised in the living room where the fireplace is going, then they won’t see being told to go play in their room for a while as a punishment, or just wander out on their own accord because they’d rather play in the living room with the fireplace. My parents didn’t have that.

I get that you want to think that all children are the same and operate by the same basic formulas, and will respond exactly as you did to discipline, but they don’t, and you’re wrong. You may be right about what happened to you and how that hurt your relationship with your mom, but you’re wrong to declare “and therefore all spanking in all situations is abuse.”

Comment #188: Mighty Ponygirl - Or the parents could not light the fireplace, or if it’s the only source of heat there are many safety gates and other devices that can protect a child. There are so many alternatives to keep a child safe. It doesn’t have to be “monitor 24/7 or spank”. I don’t know what kind of meals your parents cooked, but it’s usually pretty easy to step in and out during meal prep to check on the kid or just have him/her in the kitchen. Almost every parent I’ve ever known has a drawer of tupperware the kid can play with for just that reason.

You don’t have to be a sociopath or a narcissist to lack empathy for others.  Lack of empathy can be LEARNED.

What do I mean by that?  I don’t know, just giving the pro-hitting faction a new gymnastic bar to contort themselves on.

Livi, that’s taking a LOT for granted, and you’re pretty much coming from a default helicopter parenting model, which my parents rejected and frankly, if I were a parent, I would reject.

And “I don’t know what kind of meals your parents cooked” is just a nasty, bullshit, mother-hating thing to say. A mother who tries to cook a healthy, homemade meal for her kid that actually incorporates vegetables in such a way that the kid likes to eat them shouldn’t be sniffed at by the likes of you because it interferes with her all-important hovering time.

The disclaimer in the last paragraph was unnecessary: if he is defending this judge, then he didn’t turn out OK after all.

Mighty, do you know if there’s any evidence that spanking actually does sometimes improve behavior?  Spankers and their adult children often say that they are certain it helped in their case, but that’s basically the definition of a situation where self-reporting is unreliable, and it’s obviously uncontrolled.  Without that, all we have is that spanking is harmless at best and possibly harmful.  It also seems that everyone here agrees that the relative social acceptability of spanking provides a cover for abuse.  So that’s harm there.  If there isn’t any evidence that there are positive outcomes balancing the possible harm, none of the defenses provided are sufficient reasons to treat spanking as an acceptable way to discipline a child.

Livi, that’s taking a LOT for granted, and you’re pretty much coming from a default helicopter parenting model

Dissent. Requesting that parents find an alternative to beatings to keep their kids out of the fireplace (!) is not ‘helicopter parenting.’

The alternative to helicopter parenting is calmly hurting them? With physical dominance, restraint, forced nakedness and humiliation? Well call me an HP then.

The alternative to not calmly stalking and beating your kid is dooming them to ‘monstrous little sociopath?’ Fucking please.

The Rules for Spanking are tired and contrived pseudoscience. It’s this kind of bullshit that gives psychology a bad name.

Parenting is frustrating and daunting? Somebody call the whaaambulance.

Nobody HAS to have kids. NOT deliberately hurting them is a prereq. Can’t hack it? Then step the fuck back. Too many people who don’t want kids have em already.

I’ve got a two year old and it is trying in the extreme at times. I’ve never hit her and god willing I never will.

For GOD DAMN sure I know I’ll never icily explain why I’m about to inflict pain upon her for her own good. (Sound familiar?)

GB Shaw had it right about striking a child. Far and away best never to him them. But to do it in cold blood? Most unforgivable.

Livi, I think you delude yourself- all you have to do is catch her arm - and the day you aren’t there to catch her arm?  NO, I don’t agree with spanking, I do agree with the distinction Amanda has made.  Corporal punishment for pre-verbal children is similar to the behaviorism employed in animal training.  A swift-simultaneous and unpleasant/painful negative result that hopefully leads the child to associate the behavior with the negative and internalize association. 

The stove is hot and will burn you is likely meaningless or too abstract to be meaningful enough to the child that it will override whatever desire motivated the kid to get too close in the first place.  In the case of a stinging swat on the hand or bottom, the parent is choosing a lesser pain so the child can use that as an association.  There are two alternative - never, ever, ever, leave your kid on their own, not for a second - impossible for most of us, particularly in multi-kid homes, and psychologically bad for the kid. Or, let the kid suffer the consequences - horrific burns or becoming a pancake in the street -don’t think most of us are willing to go there-nor should we. 

The problem with spanking is that once the kid is verbal, it should stop-explanation and other, usually deprivation punishments should replace it.  It’s lazy parenting not to do so, IMO.

MPG re post 188 - Kohlberg - moral stages of development?

I get that you want to think that all children are the same and operate by the same basic formulas, and will respond exactly as you did to discipline, but they don’t, and you’re wrong. You may be right about what happened to you and how that hurt your relationship with your mom, but you’re wrong to declare “and therefore all spanking in all situations is abuse.”
Comment #188: Mighty Ponygirl on 11/04 at 10:53 AM

I specifically said that children are not all the same.  I said I believe you when you say you weren’t harmed. 

How do you know which children will be harmed and which won’t?  That is my question. 

This is different from “which children will be obedient and which won’t” by the way.  Obedient children may be terrified or just naturally more obedient.  Rebellious children may be terrified or just brazenly not care.  So you really can’t tell which children are being terrified until they can explain it to you.

Again, what kind of empathy are you showing me and other children who were traumatized by spanking?  You have no answer to how to avoid that.

Others have answered your “let the child DIAF or get spanked” red herring so I won’t even delve into it.

Corporal punishment for pre-verbal children is similar to the behaviorism employed in animal training. A swift-simultaneous and unpleasant/painful negative result that hopefully leads the child to associate the behavior with the negative and internalize association. 

Except I can train a puppy not to bite, chew or piss on the floor without once resorting to beating or humiliating it.

Also, artful use of the word ‘hopefully.’ 

Please reboot with less tired arguments.

“let the child DIAF or get spanked” red herring

Win. This captures it completely.

Seriously, I’m noticing, again, how yuppified many of these comments are that are anti-ANY corporal punishment.  Put the kid in the corner and hold them there for a time out - Real nice when you have five minutes.

LOL Win doesn’t mean win in the real world.

Sister came out to visit me in Philly with the family, and had the 5-year-old neice with her. We all decided to take the subway across town. Sister, not being familiar with the subway system, thought the best thing for it was to send the niece through the turnstiles first, so niece bolted through just as a train was pulling into the station. My sister gave a very clear, very stern, very unequivocable “STOP RIGHT NOW” lest the niece decide to go right up to the edge of the platform. Niece stopped, everything was good. Oh yes, I’m sure my sister is a horrible parent for sending the kid through first, instead of in the middle, but fuck you, she wasn’t used to subways, and you can substitute this for any new situation where a kid could be in a particular danger not having been prepared for.

Now, I actually don’t know if my sister and her husband spanked their kids or not. If they do, it’s definitely not often.

But I do know that they had gotten my niece to heel to a certain tone of voice, and whether or not that tone of voice was “STOP RIGHT NOW [or you will be spanked]” or “STOP RIGHT NOW [or you will have to have a conversation about how oncoming trains make owies]” But the point is, my niece halted in her tracks and waited for my sister to make it through the turnstile and hold her hand.

This was not a time for “let’s experiment and see what works” or “hey, in time, she’ll get the message.” There are going to be times where you are not going to have the luxury of second chances with your kid. And if your kid responds to STOP RIGHT NOW [or else we’ll put you in the corner] without *any* equivocating or boundary testing, then more power to you.  Some parents do not have that privilege.

Seriously, I’m noticing, again, how yuppified many of these comments are that are anti-ANY corporal punishment.  Put the kid in the corner and hold them there for a time out - Real nice when you have five minutes.

Oh please. You know who says hitting is bad? DRUM CIRCLE HIPPIES. Boogah-boogah!

For my part, I’M noticing how put-upon many of the pro-beating comments are. You haven’t got five minutes, but you have time to calmly explain why you’re going to hit your kid, then hit her, then explain again why?

I think instead what’s happening in many if not most of these scenarios is people are at the end of their tethers so they haul off and hit their kids, sans explanation or icy calm, then apply post-hoc memory recreation to make it feel like they were calm and deliberate. Rules for Spanking are a crutch to escape the resulting (deserved) guilt.

If you can invest the time into having a spanking strategy and full blown philosophy, you can invest the time to come up with another approach.

If not, the world is your oyster - you don’t need a kid. And not having kids is a much surer path to yuppiedom, since you brought it up.

Sometimes separating a child from danger (to zirself or others) isn’t going to teach them a thing.  They go to “happy corner land” or whatever.  Why is that a problem?

Because they haven’t learned that that is a Bad Place To Go. Personally, I have a gas fireplace, and while it’s not a danger generally speaking I also want to dissuade my nieces from touching it at all, because hey, sometimes I’m busy with something else and can’t get them away right away, even if I’m in the same room. It doesn’t take long for a 2-year-old to get herself into potential trouble. So far it hasn’t been an issue, but I need to be able to trust that I can leave her be for 3 minutes while I change her sister or whatever.

My sister gave a very clear, very stern, very unequivocable “STOP RIGHT NOW” lest the niece decide to go right up to the edge of the platform.

Wait, so she DIDN’T hit physically hurt her daughter as a way of ‘explaining’ that she was worried her daughter might get physically hurt?

Instead she used tone of voice and sense of urgency to communicate that this was a situation not to be trifled with?

Well, fancy that! I approve.

Assuming the mom is a helicopter parent because she doesn’t spank? That’s just silly.

My kids “helped” in the kitchen when they were little. Preverbal mostly they played with pots and pans and plastic spoons on the floor while I cooked. Or they were in the living room with the couch pulled across the doorway and plenty of toys on the floor and nothing that could hurt them while their dad watched TV.

Both kids tried tantrums—once. I totally ignored it and walked away. You have to work with kids, model the behavior you want and then get them to do it (pat the kitty, pat the kitty nicely) over and over again. As they get older, you let them make all the non-important choices (like clothing, or how to have their hair cut) or, if that’s not working, you give them a choice of two things (the red pants or the blue pants? the green shirt or the pink shirt?).

My kids are great adults. I made mistakes—all parents do, none of us are perfect—but I did not spank. We had discussions for minor things, time out (grounding when older) for major things.  Both kids got tired of the discussions, but it worked pretty well. They could say anything and I wouldn’t get made, just explain why their actions were wrong. I had to do it a lot in the early years, less as time went by and they “got it”.

And I often heard, half jokingly, “oh no, not another Mom talk!”

Seems like I talked constantly when they were little, explaining why I wanted particular behaviors, and when they were old enough, we’d discuss behavior and negotiate boundaries as we came to things…and some things were not negotiable, but of course, they’d try anyway. It was a little annoying, but seems to have served them well as adults.

This made them both a little more difficult as teenagers, I think, because they weren’t scared of me and were in that zone of “nothing bad can happen to me”, but it also made it easier because they knew they could come to me when they made mistakes and needed help. The communications lines were open because they’d been open from before the time they could talk.

Different kids need different approaches. Perhaps there are a few kids for whom physical punishment is the only way. But I think that most parents don’t need to go down that road.

The adult world is a lot less forgiving than spankings when you assault someone.

Well, that’s just not true.  One of the most striking things about spanking is the fact that we would never treat even the most hardened adult criminals with the brutality that we treat small children.

phylosopher—kids are time consuming. If you don’t have time to raise them, please don’t have them. I found enough time despite being a working mom. So what if sometimes we had cold dinners or I didn’t get to watch TV? At that point, the kids took precedence. And let me tell you, that time is all too brief. I love it that they are adults, but I miss having that constant daily presence.

“This was not a time for ‘let’s experiment and see what works’ or ‘hey, in time, she’ll get the message.’ There are going to be times where you are not going to have the luxury of second chances with your kid.”

In such a situation, it’s not the spanking that works (if that’s what it was), it’s the fear of spanking, which only works if the child has been spanked enough in the past to immediately recognize what that tone of voice means.  This is why I have trouble buying the whole spanking as last resort when danger is imminent thing.  You would have to condition the kid into having the desired response BEFORE you can actually use it as a tool in a critical situation.

you give them a choice of two things

Heh. I thought I was clever for hitting on that one. Damn you, male ego!

This made them both a little more difficult as teenagers, I think, because they weren’t scared of me and were in that zone of “nothing bad can happen to me”, but it also made it easier because they knew they could come to me when they made mistakes and needed help.

This is clear-eyed IMO. I hope to emulate this, though already I anticipate it being unbelievably hard. Luckily I’ve got lots of time to screw it up before then.

This was not a time for “let’s experiment and see what works” or “hey, in time, she’ll get the message.” There are going to be times where you are not going to have the luxury of second chances with your kid. And if your kid responds to STOP RIGHT NOW [or else we’ll put you in the corner] without *any* equivocating or boundary testing, then more power to you.  Some parents do not have that privilege.

But spanking NOW doesn’t stop the child NOW.

And you said you don’t know if her parents used spanking.

And lots of kids whose parents spank still do bad things and are disobedient.

None of this says that spanking is the solution.

  Sometimes separating a child from danger (to zirself or others) isn’t going to teach them a thing.  They go to “happy corner land” or whatever.  Why is that a problem?

Because they haven’t learned that that is a Bad Place To Go. Personally, I have a gas fireplace, and while it’s not a danger generally speaking I also want to dissuade my nieces from touching it at all, because hey, sometimes I’m busy with something else and can’t get them away right away, even if I’m in the same room. It doesn’t take long for a 2-year-old to get herself into potential trouble. So far it hasn’t been an issue, but I need to be able to trust that I can leave her be for 3 minutes while I change her sister or whatever.
Comment #203: Jayn Newell on 11/04 at 01:25 PM

If the child can understand, explain.  If it can’t, hitting isn’t making it understand.  Otherwise, since a baby can fall off a bed, why not spank it for rolling over the edge?  Is the blanket training model really a great idea?

Why is ignorance the child’s problem, to the point of hurting it, if it doesn’t understand something?  The lasting effect could well be fear and shame.  If the child doesn’t understand then don’t make them have to understand.  It’s not like they still won’t understand when they’re 30.

Either remove/protect the child from that situation or be prepared to spend time watching it and pulling it away.

Just to prevent yet another derailing—hastily yanking a child away from a danger doesn’t count as punishment if the yanking actually is required to avoid the danger rather than just doing it to fuck with the kid.  Pulling a child away from a speeding automobile isn’t spanking, and it wouldn’t count as okay under the whole “rules of spanking” cold punishment routine anyway.

Sorry, meant “If the child can’t understand then don’t make them have to understand. “

I’m pretty surprised by comment #200.  Being short on time is an acceptable reason to hit someone, but not an acceptable reason to eat food that isn’t made from scratch with organic produce from a local CSA?

No, NO NO.

You don’t spank in imminent danger. I have stated this over and over again.

You only spank when you have the luxury of issuing a clear warning that the kid can choose to ignore. Why can you not understand that.

If your kid is bolting for the street, you stop the kid from bolting for the street, and hopefully if you are not physically able to grab the kid and hold them from going to the street, you better hope your kid can respond to STOP RIGHT NOW and not decide to pick that particular moment to boundary test. If, before you left the house or the business or whatever you told the kid “Now you stay close to me, do not go running off. If you go running off you’ll get a spanking” THEN you have given the kid a very clear instruction with the consequences for disobeying spelled out. If the kid bolts, then yes, you can give a spanking, because they had the opportunity to avoid it.

As a parent you really do need to train your kid to understand particular warnings as Non-Negotiable. And everyone here is declaring over and over again that if you can get that training without spanking, then more power to you. The point was not that my sister Did Or Didn’t Spank My Niece When She Bolted Towards The Oncoming Subway, it was that my sister had managed to get across to my niece that there was a certain tone of voice that was to Not Be Ignored and it worked, and there is a chance that training was only possible through spanking.

And Jodi, declaring that people who don’t have the time to raise kids the way YOU think they need to be raised is the *precise* logic used by anti-feminists for why women shouldn’t be allowed to have jobs if they’re moms (or hell, leave the house. I mean, what was my sister thinking, taking her kid to see the city anyways). Because, you know. Kids are work, and if you can’t give over every fucking second of every day going forward for the next 18 years to nurturing and coddling this little miracle than you shouldn’t have them.

As a parent you really do need to train your kid to understand particular warnings as Non-Negotiable. And everyone here is declaring over and over again that if you can get that training without spanking, then more power to you. The point was not that my sister Did Or Didn’t Spank My Niece When She Bolted Towards The Oncoming Subway, it was that my sister had managed to get across to my niece that there was a certain tone of voice that was to Not Be Ignored and it worked,
Comment #213: Mighty Ponygirl on 11/04 at 01:55 PM

Okay so far.

and there is a chance that training was only possible through spanking.

Non sequitur. 

You just keep asserting this as if it were a known truth.  Where is the proof?  Where are all the smooshed and burnt children who weren’t spanked?  I don’t remember reading any articles where an accident with a child who dashed onto the street was blamed on not having spanked the child.

Pulling a child away from a speeding automobile isn’t spanking, and it wouldn’t count as okay under the whole “rules of spanking” cold punishment routine anyway.

Interesting point. Weirdly, this is something I think Hollywood cliches get right. You see fairly often on TV or movies a situation where a man or child puts him/herself in extreme danger (i.e. running in front of a speeding car), and when the danger is past but the tension still high the wife/girlfriend/mother character first frantically hugs the man/kid, and then tearfully smacks the him/her across the face.

The gendered presentation aside, this depiction is emotionally honest. The smacking is correctly depicted as a release of her tension and emotion, not a punishment or teaching moment for the kid. If there is nonverbal education involved it’s in how upset she is, which doesn’t need the hitting to effectively communicate the gravity of the situation. 

Back in real life we want to avoid this pairing of emotion and violence, so we lean on the device of subtracting the emotion and tension from the situation, as if that rescues it. Instead we should be taking a hard look at why it is that in the ‘hitting your kid while upset’ scenario, it’s the ‘upset’ part that freaks us out the most.

Comment #191: Mighty Ponygirl-Wow, talk about being nasty and making assumptions. My point was that in between chopping veggies and when things are simmering, it’s possible to walk into the next room and check on a kid. Or, set them up with toys in the kitchen if there’s enough room. I don’t think keeping and eye on children, especially toddlers who are very accident prone is helicoptering. It’s just mindful parenting. I trust the same is done when she goes to daycare, too.  Do you have kids or have you taken care of any for any length of time? Unless we are talking about a single parent situation working ungodly hours, monitoring a kid or two to keep them out of danger is not so hard to do.

Shorter Ponygirl: Supervision of one’s own children is a luxury. Spank children so they can be left unattended near fire. It worked for me!

Comment #195: phylosopher-Just FYI, most 2 yr olds are verbal, therefore the argument that I, or anyone, should spank in the case of a child darting away, etc are moot. It really isn’t that difficult to keep an eye on your (or at least my) kid.

You just keep asserting this as if it were a known truth.  Where is the proof?  Where are all the smooshed and burnt children who weren’t spanked?  I don’t remember reading any articles where an accident with a child who dashed onto the street was blamed on not having spanked the child.

Oh FFS. People who don’t spank their kids and then their kids turn into horrible monsters or get horribly hurt when they fail to listen to instructions will NEVER think “oh if only I’d spanked my kid” because they’ve already decided that spanking is worse than death. We’ve got over 200 comments in this thread proving that mentality. They’ll sit there and wring their hands about how they had that glass of wine during their first trimester and that’s why their kid was such an incorrigible child, or how they didn’t hover quite enough, or beat themselves up because they didn’t nurse until the kid was 5. But if you’ve specifically taken a form of discipline that is not abuse off the table and your kid doesn’t respond to the other forms of discipline, you’ve failed as a parent if you don’t reconsider and train up your kid.

I’m telling you that if my parents hadn’t spanked me and trained me on the tone, *I* would have been one of those burnt squished children because as far as putting the fear of God in me, the whole Tone That Led To Spanking was what did it. Threatening to remove me, to put me in my room, to put me in a corner, to make me go apologize, that shit DIDN’T WORK. I was NOT THAT KID.

This line of discussion reminds me that I wanted to respond to Paul at 181, who argues that totally non-violent parenting is impossible. He is quite right that parents do need to intrude on their children’s physically autonomy sometimes in violent ways in order to protect the child—by yanking the child out of the street, or holding the child down to get a shot, or restraining a child who is trying to do damage in some way. 

I don’t think anyone is arguing otherwise.  But there is a clear distinction between physical restraint to achieve some obviously necessary end and cold-bloodedly inflicting pain on one’s child for purpose of discipline.  Certainly, my father sometimes followed most or all of MP’s “spanking rules”—and the message I got was, “My parents hate me and don’t think I deserve to live.”

For another example of “Christian” spanking, here is a letter from Beth Fenimore to Roy Lessin, author numerous books, including detailed instructions of how to beat your children.  There’s a kind of creepy pic at the start, but the letter is worth reading:
http://www.drmomma.org/2010/01/how-spanking-changed-my-life.html

Livi, believe it or not, kids do not have a set schedule when they decide to be disobedient little terrors. Yeah, you can usually assume that it’s going to be close to naptime, but around 2-3 years old, things can be really, really difficult and when you need to get the pasta off the boil happens to be the precise moment they decide to fuck with the dog, then you might not be able to intervene in time.

@MP And Jodi, declaring that people who don’t have the time to raise kids the way YOU think they need to be raised is the *precise* logic used by anti-feminists for why women shouldn’t be allowed to have jobs if they’re moms ... Kids are work, and if you can’t give over every fucking second of every day going forward for the next 18 years to nurturing and coddling this little miracle than you shouldn’t have them.

This is an extreme distortion of Jodi’s point. It’s in no way anti-feminist to note that raising kids is incredibly time consuming - and, more to the point, relentless - and one should go into this with eyes wide open.

sister had managed to get across to my niece that there was a certain tone of voice that was to Not Be Ignored and it worked, and there is a chance that training was only possible through spanking.

Hmm, well this strikes me as shifting the goalposts almost all the way down the field. There’s “a chance” spanking was absolutely necessary?

Sheesh, I could as easily hypothesize that there’s “a chance” that for some kids such training is only possible by withholding food or making them sleep outside in the winter. I bet top psychologists could get us some averages and associations proving that kids forced to sleep outside for misbehaving are ‘brought to heel’ relatively rapidly. 

I think phylosopher is using Verbal when s/he means rational. Kids talk a lot sooner than they can truly reason beyond simple “I want this”/“I like that”/“I don’t like this.”

no, rb, it’s not moving the goalposts. You just can’t accept that for some kids, verbal and isolation discipline does not effectively cause a child to think about the consequences of their actions in meaningful ways.

Livi: I’ve got kids, spend quite a bit of time with them, and monitoring them to keep them out of danger is not so hard, except when it is.

“But if you’ve specifically taken a form of discipline that is not abuse off the table and your kid doesn’t respond to the other forms of discipline, you’ve failed as a parent if you don’t reconsider and train up your kid.”

Implicit is the assumption that the form of discipline in question might actually work, right?  Otherwise parents of disobedient children who don’t try, say, vegetarianism, would be failures as well.  Nobody here has offered any evidence other than first person accounts that spanking does work at all, and it’s reasonable to assume that first person accounts in this case will be extremely prone to confirmation bias.

Mighty Ponygirl, I don’t know why you’re so angry. Little kids sometimes need things RIGHT NOW (like 5 minutes for time out) and it is the job of the parents to provide those things, despite work or whatever. Parents have to put their own desires on hold for awhile when the kids are small. If both parents won’t do it, then one gets stuck with it.

I raised my children while working full time. After my divorce, I raised my preteen kids alone while working full time AND going to nursing school. I know what it requires. I didn’t have more kids (which I would have liked) because the time wasn’t there.

If you don’t have time for what it takes to raise a kid, don’t have one. Sometimes I was late and sometimes I missed work/school if they were sick or there was an emergency of some kind. My kids knew that if push came to shove, they were important to me, more important than work or school, and they knew how important those were—so we could have a roof over our heads, have enough to eat, and someday have a better life.

It doesn’t take every moment of every day to raise a child. You can do plenty of things while raising a child. However, sometimes the child comes FIRST despite all your other responsibilities. It is a balancing act.

Comment #222: Mighty Ponygirl-Yeah, I know. Again, actually a parent here.

Comment #226: paul-It’s challenging, but since I have the privilege of having a partner we have managed so far. And that’s not to say we haven’t had our fair share of bumps, but nothing has convinced me spanking my kid would be helping her in any way.

Gogo, unless you plan to spend Every Minute within arms reach of your child so that you can pull them away from something, you need to be able to command them verbally. Ideally you can do that without inflicting pain, but you have to get that message across somehow.

And rb2—thanks! I put a lot of thought into parenting and tried to be flexible as I went. Both kids (now in their 20s) seem to have turned into loving and responsible adults who think things through, which was what I was aiming for.

@Laurie But there is a clear distinction between physical restraint to achieve some obviously necessary end and cold-bloodedly inflicting pain on one’s child for purpose of discipline.

Yes, I think we all agree on that.

Some of us think that the “cold-bloodedly inflicting pain on one’s child” part is OK as long as you have previously, patiently and cold-bloodedly explained that you would do this. 

Others disagree.

Well, at least we’ve found another subject that (some) progressives and conservatives can have common ground upon.  Perhaps a bi-partisan pro-spanking lobby is in order for you types? :p

So rb2, what role do you think the law should play if any?  In many parts of the U.S., it is perfectly legal to do everything up to and including viciously belting your teenager.  Would you codify MP’s “rules of spanking”?  Make it completely illegal to spank a kid over 5?  How do we ensure that parents spank in such a way as to not cause lasting psychological and neurological damage to their children?  Because, I gotta tell you, as things stand now, most parents don’t follow the “rules” as laid out by MP.  And what happened in that video is extremely common.

@MP You just can’t accept that for some kids, verbal and isolation discipline does not effectively cause a child to think about the consequences of their actions in meaningful ways.

Not exactly. First, I am pointing out that we are not limited to the options ennumerated in this learned thread. It isn’t (a) time-outs or (b) beatings.

Second, I am illustrating (I hope rather clearly) with the food-withholding example, it is easy to posit that certain techniques may have “a chance” of being literally the only strategy for obtaining “satisfactory” discipline in very specific situations or for certain very specific children. But even if we could prove such a statement true, it does not necessarily follow that such strategies are acceptable, nor that they should be recommended to parents. 

To use an extreme by accurate-in-form analogy: the ‘ticking time bomb’ scenario where “torture is the only option!!” is technically possible, but that doesn’t make torture acceptable as a matter of policy.

The only time I have ever spanked my kids was when the “natural consequences” of not listening were “death”.

I only had to do it once, each. 

YMMV.  Our kids don’t read the special parenting instruction books, and some of the little buggers are out of spec!

Physical restraint is not spanking, and isn’t abuse if done in a way so as to not inflict pain. Pain and punishment are not the goal - getting a wildly out of self-control small human contained is the goal. I noticed early on that the kids in my life who lacked self control and were constantly ignoring warnings and boundaries had parents who conflated discipline with punishment and restraint with abuse.  My now teen son, who is borderline Aspergers, has told me that he appreciated it when I would physically restrain him when he was younger and raging because it made him feel safe and under control - he sensed that he really couldn’t contain himself and now nothing bad would happen once we had him pinned in our arms.

Interesting you should say that, rb2, as that segues nicely to a point often overlooked:

When determining what is morally right, practicality should never be entered into the equation.

What is moral must always and forever be divorced from what is practical.

Why?  Because if we decide what is moral based on ‘what works,’ then effectively we are pragmatists and therefore the separate concept of morals has no meaning.

Therefore, for morals to have meaning, there must be things that must never be done, even if they are the ‘only’ way to get results.

So the fact that oldfeminist believes that her relationship with her mother was damaged by the fact that she was spanked is something that we must believe, but my assertion that as a child I would not have responded to non-corporal discipline as a means of drawing clear boundary lines is somehow trying to prove a negative?

@laurie what role do you think the law should play if any? ... Because, I gotta tell you, as things stand now, most parents don’t follow the “rules” as laid out by MP.  And what happened in that video is extremely common.

Yes. This is why I think the “Rules,” though perhaps well intentioned, are a mistake and way too idealized. IMO they have little value anyway, but even supposing they were effective, the cover they provide for outright, heinous abuse makes their existence problematic. (Some will argue that of course this isn’t true, but if there is no connection then why are we even discussing the Rules in this thread?)

As to law, I don’t know how to answer your question. Not that it isn’t a good one. It’s just that we are such a heterogenous (and in many ways, SUCH a fucked up) society, that I have a hard time seeing new law as an effective way to enforce policies in the family arena. Already with existing law we have rampant, seemingly unstoppable abuse AND senseless meddling in the lives of parents whose crimes amount to being frazzled. It would be nice to think that new laws would simultaneously make our policy more sensitive AND specific, but I have a hard time believing that.

I am also of the opinion that virtually any law will be enforced, and consequent penalties meted out, disproportionately on the poor and the usual targets of law enforcement abuses. It’s another topic, but this is why I have a very hard time with hate crimes law.

Gogo, unless you plan to spend Every Minute within arms reach of your child so that you can pull them away from something, you need to be able to command them verbally. Ideally you can do that without inflicting pain, but you have to get that message across somehow.
Comment #230: Jayn Newell on 11/04 at 02:26 PM

Unless you assume that violence will work when nothing else does, this doesn’t in any way support the idea of spanking as a proper means of training them to listen to your verbal commands.

All these “but what if nothing else works” assumes something *will* work with that child at that moment.  Why is it so unbelievable that sometimes maybe nothing will work at that moment?  That doesn’t mean the child will never learn, but maybe it is not yet ready to learn. 

Maybe the kind of learning that only sticks if you use fear and violence isn’t worth it.  Maybe it’s better to be more inconvenienced or even have your whole schedule disrupted and your dinner ruined than to run the risk of alienating your child from you out of terror and shame.  It’s not like that will go on forever, though I realize it feels like it will.

Again, I ask for empathy on this.  I think my mother, had she known the effects, would have found ways to teach me other than spanking me.  She wasn’t a cruel person, she was doing what she thought was right.  She just didn’t know better.

You don’t seem to understand what it’s like to think your parents believe you are a bad horrible person because, as a child, you can’t seem to figure out any other way to interpret their hitting you.  Why did I believe this and other children didn’t?  I don’t know.  All I know is that I’m not the only one, and it was a pretty horrible place for a long time, and of course I thought it was ALL MY FAULT.

I was spanked when I was little. The only discernible effect it had on me, short- or long-term, was that it taught me to listen to my parents and that there were consequences to my actions. Shock and amazement, operant conditioning works!

I think the inability to draw a distinction between spanking and beating here is fatuous at best. It’s silly to pretend they’re the same, on the part of both the anti-spankers and the Christian domestic discipliners. There is a monumental, measurable difference between leaving a red mark that goes away in a minute or two or no mark at all, and leaving marks that stay for hours, bruises, cuts, or welts. Saying that the two are substantially equivalent simply HELPS and encourages the abusers hiding behind the spanking label.

@Jayn—-I would posit that that “somehow” is achieved through age-appropriate language, repetition, praise, and appropriate consequences for disobedience. My life experience as a teacher of hundreds of young children has proven these methods effective. Sometimes children have processing disorders and need additional support but that is a matter of accommodating for special needs and this NEVER includes corporal punishment.

Appropriate consequences are often time consuming and/or inconvenient for the parent, I agree. Hitting a kid for emphasis or expediency doesn’t work as a substitute.

Instilling the fear of being hit as a way to deter a child from misbehaving while in unsupervised situations, I will never agree with.

I understand that it is not possible to be 6 inches away from one’s child every minute of every day. Hell, I even understand that shit happens right in front of people’s eyes every day and children are injured under close supervision. Each new experience should be causing the person in charge—-the ADULT—-to revisit the situation and decide what can be done differently next time.

Example 4: My friend’s crawling baby put his hands on the open oven door when in the kitchen while his Mom was cooking, despite having been told, “Hot, hot!” He was a baby and he touched it and burned his hands and cried. Maybe a baby learns a lesson from such things. And maybe a baby should be smacked in addition to being burned to reinforce the lesson? The next week the baby did the same thing and burned his hands again. My FRIEND had to learn the lesson that while having the baby in the kitchen while cooking was safer than leaving him alone in another room, he needed to be FURTHER CONTAINED while the oven was being opened and shut. He needed to be in his high chair, eating cheerios, banging a spoon and playing with his monkey doll while she did certain parts of meal prep. She had to change the way she supervised her child to ensure his safety, because warnings and pain did not keep him safe, and she knew letting him continue to hurt himself until he learned was not right, either.

Maybe Ponygirl’s sister will go thru the turn style first next time and negate the need to use even her stop right now voice command.

One would hope that everyone lives and learns and tries to do better the next time.

In classroom situations, if a child regularly bites, hits or harms others, we have to first look at the environment: what can we change about the materials, space, number of children or other factors like light and sound to make these situations not occur in the first place? We also have to look at the positioning of the teachers. Maybe someone always needs to be near this particular child to facilitate and lead that child toward verbalizing needs rather than reacting physically. Again, sometimes the child needs more help than we can provide and additional services are sought. Those additional services never include hitting the child.

Then again, if a child regularly bites, hits or harms other children, we also have to question what kinds of experiences the child has at home, what is being modeled by siblings and parents. Children who ARE hit often hit others more, because, guess what? That’s what has been demonstrated as a legitimate response to anger and frustration. Go figure.

“I think the inability to draw a distinction between spanking and beating here is fatuous at best. It’s silly to pretend they’re the same, on the part of both the anti-spankers and the Christian domestic discipliners. There is a monumental, measurable difference between leaving a red mark that goes away in a minute or two or no mark at all, and leaving marks that stay for hours, bruises, cuts, or welts. Saying that the two are substantially equivalent simply HELPS and encourages the abusers hiding behind the spanking label.”

When we can start ‘spanking’ adults to force them to comply via pain, I’ll buy this.

Yeah, but for some reason CPS frowned when I tear-gassed by 3 year old.

So the fact that oldfeminist believes that her relationship with her mother was damaged by the fact that she was spanked is something that we must believe, but my assertion that as a child I would not have responded to non-corporal discipline as a means of drawing clear boundary lines is somehow trying to prove a negative?
Comment #238: Mighty Ponygirl on 11/04 at 02:56 PM

My early alienation from my mother is to me a fact and I can pretty easily remember thinking and feeling that hitting me proved she hated me, feeling resentful, feeling afraid, not wanting to tell her anything if it wasn’t going to make me look obedient and good and right and justified.  This actually happened.  I lived through it.

You propose that, had you never been physically punished, you would never have learned right and wrong.  But that experiment never happened.  How do you know that six months later you wouldn’t have “gotten it”?  You do not. 

However, billions of children who didn’t “get it” right away, and didn’t get hit, somehow learn it anyway.

Given the choice of harm that oldfeminist describes and your assertion that you would not have responded to anything but corporal punishment, I know which side I’d prefer to err on. I’m sure if my kids hadn’t responded to the way I raised them, I might have tried other things, but physical punishment would have been one of the very last things to try (guilt probably would have been the last).

Are clear boundaries necessary? I always thought there was some value in having squishy boundaries; if the kids could make a good case for moving them, I was open to that. Some things are not negotiable, but many things are, and learning that is a good lesson. The kids learned pretty darn quickly what sorts of things were negotiable, and what weren’t.

Oh well, don’t worry…someday children will be born mindlessly and therefore worthlessly obedient little simpletons who would never dream of disagreeing with or acting impious towards the almighty adult in their life, and therefore no parent will ever feel even the least bit inconvenienced by their little bundle of joy.

Plus having somewhat squishy boundaries means that when you, the parent, are in the wrong, it is easier to apologize and make needed changes.

So the fact that oldfeminist believes that her relationship with her mother was damaged by the fact that she was spanked is something that we must believe, but my assertion that as a child I would not have responded to non-corporal discipline as a means of drawing clear boundary lines is somehow trying to prove a negative?

Of course not. I (speaking only for myself) accept what you are saying.

But this does not lead me to believe the many, many people who claim that “hitting my kid is the only thing that works. Otherwise he Just. Won’t. Listen!”

“Rules” etc just feel like codification of this in an socially acceptable wrapper.

My dad (who was fucking STRONG; it is incredible and awful to see what aging does to a person) would hit (rarely spanked, but fairly often punched, pushed etc) me and I ‘turned out ok’ I’d say. He did calmly say he’d ‘kick your ass,’ for various infractions, so there is that Rules-esque aspect to it I guess.

It’s difficult for me to say if there was any “value added” in my being punched. But, knowing that I pretty much did what I did anyway, and that my situation was (a) worse than a few but (b) way, WAY not as bad as that depicted in the footage above - and indeed, I would rather have it the way it than have been subjected to ‘legitimate’ Rules spankings, it raises the questions:

Was further corporal discipline necessary? Did I need that beating on my bare ass, in a calmer fashion, to make it real? Would a written set of rules and a signed contract have made shoving and punching OK, or is only over-the-knee acceptable?

Does writhing after having your breath knocked out of you constitute too MUCH, or to LITTLE, humiliation - i.e. is it more or less humiliating than a Rules-based ass-tanning?

Is the fact that I never considered myself ‘abused’ an endorsement or an indictment of any specific corporal punishment approach?

Maybe I would have been ‘better behaved’ if my dad more strictly followed The Rules. Or maybe I would have simply pissed him off less (or more). On balance it’s hard to say.

The bigger regret is being too weak and afraid to protecting my siblings from the intentional infliction of pain and suffering. Interestingly, the Rules and other systems like it don’t seem to cover that perspective very well.

TW

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdHb6I0kSiM

oldfeminist, I know there are kids whose parents are so devoted to non-corporal punishment that they will not accept that their talking- and isolation- disciplines are not working, and their kid, in turn, is a monstrous little hellion. So yeah, I think that if my parents hadn’t spanked me, I would have been one of those kids, and who knows if I would have EVER learned the lesson about boundaries. Maybe I would have been a high school bully and not gone to college because doing meth and yelling at people with jobs was more fun.

I was not spanked, but I always assumed that some kids needed spankings because they were terrible little shits. Now I have my own terrible little shit. She won’t listen, and she absolutely knows what she is not supposed to do and does it anyway. She knows she is disobeying and giggles about it. She has also never done a single thing that I thought merited a spanking. 

It should be added, however, that I’m a mediocre mother. Maybe I’d be a spanker if I were a good mom?

there are kids whose parents are so devoted to non-corporal punishment that they will not accept that their talking- and isolation- disciplines are not working, and their kid, in turn, is a monstrous little hellion

I’m sure. But your instinct that if only these people would hit that kid he’d be just wonderful to be around is where the argument goes off the rails. Further, the idea that people who find discipline very difficult would be able to effectively follow The Rules of Spanking or some other ‘simple steps to perfect obedience’ seems a little far-fetched. Seems more likely they’d be ineffective and impulsive beaters of children.

The cure for such monstrous little hellions, brass tacks, is to not hang out with their parents when said hellion is around.

Gogo, my preference is certainly to use other methods first—moving the child or changing the environment. At the same time, you’re not always going to be able to keep a child contained when something comes up.

Jodi, I’m not sure of the value of squishy boundaries for toddlers. I’ve been trying to avoid having anything that only needs to be enforced sometimes, because I don’t know that she can really understand that yet. “Never touch the blinds,” is simple. “Don’t play on the chairs when Molly is nearby,” isn’t, especially when she’s pretty oblivious of Molly to begin with.

Talking out of turn? That’s a paddlin’.
Lookin’ out the window? That’s a paddlin’.
Starin’ at my sandals. That’s a paddlin’.
Paddlin’ the school canoe? Oh… you better believe that’s a paddlin’.

rb2, yeah, and hopefully that hellion will just die in a fire before we have to worry about how their parent’s poor parenting is going to impact the good kids I know when they all are in school together. Or my community once they turn from a nasty little hellion into a destructive teenager who thinks it’s giggle-worthy to drink and drive, or light fires, or whatever.

The bottom line is that consequences are in order.  The other bottom line is that self-control is the goal.  I see kids whose parents scream at them and whack them constantly, and those same kids can’t seem to control themselves when adults aren’t forcing them into control.

Both the “hands off” parents and the “scream/whack” parents miss the point, which is to raise children who have good judgement and a good sense of the rights of others.  That’s my point at least - some of the scream/whack and hands off parents have this “but my child isn’t old enough to ... ” complex and a “my child NEEDS me” issue as well ... and have 20 year olds who can’t seem to take a crap without proper direction.

*hearts ms kate*

@Jayn—-you can’t always keep a child contained, but you can always hit her = problem solved?

Nope.

If you think that constant, stern punishment creates children who behave themselves when unsupervised, go teach Catholic school for a year or two, like my husband did.  Many of the teens he dealt with had no idea how to behave when they were not being told what to do and sternly rebuked, and would get totally wild and nuts if not locked up constantly.

the point, which is to raise children who have good judgement and a good sense of the rights of others

Correct. The bone of contention seems to be whether this is something that a nontrivial number of children need to have beaten into them.

Yawgmoth, most likely you are a good enough mom. That’s all that any of us have to be.

My parents spanked my brothers, who were definitely monstrous little hellions, and the spankings didn’t change that. I lived in such fear of those spankings (which were spankings and not beatings, and which rarely were inflicted in anger) that I not only strove to never do anything wrong (except cry when my brother beat me up—which crying earned me the one spanking I ever got) but felt I couldn’t talk to them when I had problems. I felt I had to figure every damn thing out for myself without asking for help. That’s a terrible way to grow up. I can’t see that it actually helped either of my brothers (one of whom was a bully and used/sold drugs throughout college and the other one wound up getting killed in a traffic accident at 14 while doing something he’d been told not to do).

But it was a different time, and spanking then is what most parents did. That didn’t make it right. Thoughtful parents try to correct the things that our parents did wrong and continue the things we think they did right. Spanking was never on the table for my kids. I talked to them early and often and they were taught empathy very, very early. My daughter must have been less than 2 when she stomped a cricket with her shiny new hardsoled shoes, looked at it, then bent down to pat it saying “I sorry”, so I know the learning empathy was already working then.

Or my community once they turn from a nasty little hellion into a destructive teenager who thinks it’s giggle-worthy to drink and drive, or light fires, or whatever.

Again, the way “proper” spanking would solve this is left entirely to the reader’s imagination.

It’s almost as if we haven’t been beating our kids and driving drunk since kids and cars were invented ...

@Jodi, that cricket story is the creepiest heartwarming tale I’ve heard in a while. Nearly Gaimanian.

Again I salute you.

Well gogo admitting that she’d happily let a child keep biting the other children while they tried to figure out if anything might dissuade the kid blows my mind.  Frankly, it reads like parody.  So I don’t know what to make of it.  I’m sure I wouldn’t want to send my children to a school that lets them get bit dozens of times and doesn’t think that needs to be ended immediately.

Yeah, parents abuse their kids under the guise of spanking.  They also abuse their kids under the guise of time outs, or talking tos, or any other discipline method one can imagine.  A parent who wants to be abusive will be abusive whether or not they can hit their kids. 

I guess if you’ve just never been around a child whose behaviour was at all challenging to control, you just don’t know what you’re talking about.  The anti-spanking examples of children doing minorly bad things are so silly as to discredit the arguments.  Kids biting and drawing blood, or hitting other kids in the head with rocks - those are plausible situations where the “well, let’s give them a year to see if they can figure out why this is wrong” approaches fall down.

Squishy boundaries for toddlers = not having to eat all the food on one’s plate. getting to wear the clothing one wants to wear.

Non-negotiable in the same area = eat something on your plate or an easy fix food (like peanut butter sandwich) or don’t eat. Enough clothing has to be worn for the situation.

Those boundaries evolve as the kid learns to be safe. Although, they are always going to do something silly/dangerous even at older ages; my 12-year-old once put a metal can in the microwave.

Comment #262: Jodi-That is a sweet story. Well, maybe not stomping the cricket, but saying sorry afterward. Despite what others on this thread think, I know the inklings of empathy can be taught and learned at an early age. My 2 yr old often says she’s sorry unprompted when she accidentally hurts me.

Brian, kids who are hitting others in the head with rocks need professional help, as do those who are biting others and drawing blood. I don’t think spanking is going to cut it.

Hey Brian, citation! Where did I say say allow a child to bite?

Oh, whoops, nowhere! Never once did I say allow the child to bite another child, nor have I allowed a child to bite another child in a real life situation. That is a completely falsehood, concocted by you.

From the get go I have said, remove the child, redirect, give age-appropriate verbal responses.

Your reading skills are a “parody” of literacy.

Kids biting and drawing blood, or hitting other kids in the head with rocks - those are plausible situations where the “well, let’s give them a year to see if they can figure out why this is wrong” approaches fall down.

Again, all I ask is that you provide some (dear FSM, any) evidence that “proper” spankings solve these problems, to say nothing of not creating worse ones.

I am going to go out on a limb and say there are NO easy solutions to kids hitting each other with rocks outside, i don’t know, limiting access to rocks.

Certainly “just add spanking” hasn’t worked thus far. We are a young species in many ways, but braining each other is ancient.

I guess Brian would like his kid to go to a school where the teachers “happily” hit children to teach that hitting/biting/rock throwing is not okay.

And of course, people will continue to discipline babies, toddlers, school age children and teenagers in exactly the same way throughout life, without scaffolding new and different consequences for the child as he grows, because deliberately obtuse Brian thinks this makes sense.

Yah, Brian you definitely do not get it.

I’m kind of stunned by the amount of people here who think it’s okay to assault people.  It’s not.  That’s the end of it.

“But my kid is . . . ”  No.  It’s not okay to hit people.  You can’t hit your spouse, or your enemy unless they’re trying to hurt you, you can’t hit a dog, and you can’t hit an elderly person with dementia - who is as hard or harder to deal with than any two-year-old.  It’s not okay to hit your child.

And the people here who make their kid stand there and listen to why they’re going to be hit?  You’re creepy on a level I can’t even fathom.  “You.  Just stand there and listen to my speech about how I’m going to hurt you.”  That’s the kind of deliberate infliction of fear and pain that’s near sociopathic.  “It’s not personal,” is the line of every professional thug.  Doesn’t make a difference to their victims.

people will continue to discipline babies, toddlers, school age children and teenagers in exactly the same way throughout life, without scaffolding new and different consequences for the child as he grows,

Whoa, where was that? No one here has said that spanking should be used without other types of discipline. Just that it shouldn’t be ruled out as an option either.

Gogo - It was in comment #242.  We shouldn’t play the game where you want to pretend that kids just behave well, and are easily corrected when they misbehave.  Or have any inherent interest in behaving.  I’ve been around enough kids to know better. 

Of course, if my child was persistently biting other children, adults, whoever, I don’t know what I’d do.  Depends on the kid.  But giving the kid 24 hour supervision isn’t plausible, at least for those of us who aren’t wealthy.  Other solutions might work, but they might not. But you can’t send a child to school/childcare who’s a persistent biter (if only because they stop taking them pretty quick.)  And you can’t just lock them away from everyone until (IF!) it clears up. 

There’s a constant, underlying assumption that either a) kids just want to behave, or b) parents necessarily have something kids want that they can bargain with.  And a lot of the time, that is true, but if you know enough kids, and well, you know it isn’t always the case. 

And kids really are different from adults, because parents are responsible for them.  Yes, I can’t and don’t hit my wife.  But if she’s persistently biting me, I say “Fuck you, you’re on your own.”, which I can never say to a kid.  Yeah, kids get discipline that adults don’t get, but the reverse is true too.  If I locked a biting child away from everyone else, where there’s the possibility to stopping the biting, that’d be abuse.

“So the fact that oldfeminist believes that her relationship with her mother was damaged by the fact that she was spanked is something that we must believe, but my assertion that as a child I would not have responded to non-corporal discipline as a means of drawing clear boundary lines is somehow trying to prove a negative?”

I’m not really concerned with anecdotes in either direction.  If anecdotes and personal experience were what I was going on, I would be in the “my parents hit me and it’s no big deal” camp.  And anecdotes are particularly irrelevant when there is evidence, from large, longitudinal studies, that suggests that spanking children may cause behavioral problems later in their lives.  If there were similarly reliable evidence showing that spanking may have some benefit as well, then the possibility of harm would have to be balanced against that potential benefit, and I am sure sometimes spanking would be appropriate.  But I haven’t seen any such evidence, and nobody has offered any. 

As an aside, I don’t want to give the impression that I think parents who spank their children are monsters or anything.  I was hit a few times in a manner that violated several of the “Rules of Spanking.”  It didn’t really bother me then, and it doesn’t bother me now.  My parents aren’t bad people.  The vast majority of the time they were great parents and remarkably patient with me (one of those extremely difficult children).  In fact, I think hitting me a few times was totally understandable, but that doesn’t make it acceptable.

OK, I almost skipped this. Yep, that was me too. I would never had had the nerve to film and post it though. With me it was my mom. Tree “switches”, belts, hairbrushes, wooden spoons, fly swatters (till they broke).

The anticipation in his voice, “Get over there.”  The frustration that had not been exhausted, “I never got my licking “. Oh he was still frustrated. He wanted to beat. He was going to beat her. Because her licensing for her musical collection was not adequate? Her copyrights were not in order? No, but it her fault, because she is not a “nice little girl”. She is “a thief, a liar”,  and some other things.

There is no question that there is release for the parent. This is the dirty little secret isn’t it? Parents hit their kids because they like the way it feels to hit their kids. My mom beat me like a slow mule. And then the shaming after the beating, because obviously what happened is, even to the most conservative mind, wrong. And it has to be the victim’s fault. It is because she is filth. She must deserve it. Because the physical, almost sexual release of passion that comes from a beating like this is so clearly communicated to the victim. The complete happiness he felt after this abuse, the emotional release, must have been lovely. I am sure the was laughing in the next five minutes. She knew it was coming - the buildup before the storm. Once I got beaten for not being outside playing in my swimsuit on a nice day. Because I sure as hell went outside when she suggested it.

MightyPony that you could watch this video and then defend hurting a child was horrible.  Triggering and horrible for me, personally. Triggering for other people who are explaining to you what trauma violence was for them. No I do not believe it was good for you, and it certainly did not teach you empathy. 

Parents hit their kids because they like the way it feels to hit their kids. I slapped one kid, once. I was horrified. I never lost it again like that.

I have two teens, amazing really if I bragged you would not believe their wonderfulness. But it is true. Loving, caring, smart, funny, hard-working, self-respecting, and yes do I live in the House of Lip. But sometimes they are right, and when they are wrong I give them space to climb down. They trust me. I trust them. I won’t hurt them on purpose. I never have.

here Jayn:

“The anti-spanking examples of children doing minorly bad things are so silly as to discredit the arguments.  Kids biting and drawing blood, or hitting other kids in the head with rocks - those are plausible situations where the “well, let’s give them a year to see if they can figure out why this is wrong” approaches fall down.”

When I read this comment, I see obtuse Brian implying that parents of children of all ages who do not use hitting as a discipline, passively wait for their kids to “figure out why this is wrong”, (as one MUST do with an uncomprehending baby or toddler,) while the child grows older and progressively more violent. Those parents, rather than proactively giving more detailed explanations as their child becomes more cognizant, rather than adapting significant, progressive consequences to fit the misbehavior, such as caregiving, repair of property or monetary restitution when the child is able, just flap their silly hands and say, according to Brian, who makes stuff up, “well, let’s give them a year to see if they can figure out why this is wrong.”  According to Brian and others here, those parents could instead administer those behavior-changing smacks children need, to teach that violence toward is not okay—-if only they weren’t such wimps!

I don’t care if someone says you should talk to a child the first 99 times he does something wrong and then hit him on the 100th time with a fair warning. In my opinion hitting SHOULD be ruled out as an option under all circumstances. It is never justified.

My mother rarely hit me or Kid Bro, but I vividly remember the few times she did.  I remember being nine or ten years old, lying on my face and crying out loud in terror as she raised the iron stirring spoon.  I remember covering my bottom with my hands, and Mother shouting, “Move your hands or I’ll hit them!”  Everyone I’ve told this story to has said, “Well, of course your mother would never have hit your hands with the iron spoon.”  And probably she wouldn’t.  But at ten I didn’t know that.  All I knew is that if she did, it would break my fingers.

You know what I don’t remember?  I have absolutely no memory of what she was so angry about.

Oh Brian, please show where, in comment #242, I advocate for, or say I would “happily allow” children to harm each other.

I did say if a pattern of biting or harming others is emerging, as adults in a school environment we have to look at: the way the classroom functions, its stressors, the individual children, and at our own supervision and proximity to children with potential impulse control issues. This is not playing a game and ignoring the child’s part in the situation, I have already outlined ways for adults to intervene with children after a hurtful incident in previous post #124.

But ideally, we’d like to head off the violent incident before it happens, right? As a supervising adult, knowing a child has the potential to hurt another one, I have to be extra vigilant and aware of rising tensions. I have to intervene with children who need extra help, and give them words to express themselves, help them negotiate, follow through to make sure the terms are met, and remind them of their successes so they can repeat this kind of positive interaction with peers without prompting, somewhere, sometime down the line.

It takes a lot of repetition. It also takes the teachers and the parents working together, being on the same page, using similar language to talk to the child, following through at home with discussions and consequences for things that happen at school. It can be a lot of work, and it can take a long time for some kids to get in the positive behavior groove, but it can and must be done without hitting the kid.

I have had tantrum throwing children kick, bite, scratch, hit and spit in my face in a school environment. It has never occurred to me to respond with similar violence. I have held the child so he or she could not harm me, told him or her “No!” in a strong voice and then found a safe, soft place for the child to calm down, with me nearby. After the tantrum settles, I talk to the child and go over the events that led to the breakdown, and discuss how we can handle it differently next time, and then we start again. This works with children as young as 2 years old.

There are kids for whom this will not work, kids with language delays, sensory processing disorders and other conditions. Hitting these children doesn’t make their special needs go away, and sometimes it makes them much worse. I’d feel like shit to find out I had been spanking my bratty child as a punishment for biting when all along she had a neurological disorder and could not help herself. But I guess some folks would be fine with that.

Me hitting a child who hits me is not a moral option or a professional one. I would be fired and probably prosecuted if I did. But this is not what keeps me from hitting challenging or hurtful children. The fact that it is wrong is what makes it verboten. I model this for children as a teacher so they will learn to respond to others verbally, rather than physically.

MightyPony that you could watch this video and then defend hurting a child was horrible.  Triggering and horrible for me, personally. Triggering for other people who are explaining to you what trauma violence was for them. No I do not believe it was good for you, and it certainly did not teach you empathy.

No, actually, it did, better than seem to be able to understand. Because for all of the stories of abuse that people are saying here, I am not questioning that anyone has actually suffered when their parents spanked them. I believe oldfeminist, even though I believe that there are ways to permanently injure your child without laying a finger on them. I believe you, I believe gogo and balconyscene. What you guys seem unable to understand is that someone can be spanked and NOT have it be an abusive, life-destroying act, and that parents who might not have necessarily wanted to spank their kids otherwise did find that when it came to very critical matters, a spanking was what got their child to stop doing the worst of the worst, and maybe they never had to spank their kid after that but the behavior was simply unacceptable to allow to continue when all other forms of discipline had been exhausted and found ineffective.

And frankly, I’m sick of repeating the rules, because this judge broke all of them. This judge was not spanking, he was flat-out-abusing. And I would say a good 80% of the stories people have shared here have been abusive and certainly not spanking as the means of discipline that child psychologists have outlined (and let’s face it, if it wasn’t an effective means of discipline for children who don’t respond to verbal- and isolation- punishment, they would not be enumerating these things to psych majors at the major east coast university I attended. They would say “well, we discovered a way that it’s not horribly damaging, but it’s still so ineffective it’s just not worth it to go into.”)

I get it. The eyes have rolled back in the head, and at this point I’m someone who bites the heads off puppies and punches babies for fun. But believe it or not, I do have a lot of experience with kids of all ages, and I know that nasty little truth that not all kids are the same. And no, I’ve never laid a hand on a kid even though I have had some really nasty little brats piss me the hell off in my day.

And all of the “oh, that kid should be in therapy” stuff is bullshit. Kids do horrifically cruel, brutal shit to each other and to animals all the time. It doesn’t mean they’re troubled, it means they’re fucking kids who don’t understand the difference between right and wrong is not subject to change. And if you can stop that without resorting to physical punishment that’s great. But developmental psychologists do allow that some children require the shared experience of pain in order to build empathy (as Brian pointed out).

Around 2 or 3, kids will enter a stage where they are actively and aggressively DEFYING their parents. And that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to beat your kid into submission, or become an authoritarian monster, but you have to be adaptable as a parent to realize that they might not be interested in coming to an rational understanding with you. And if their actions of defiance are limited to not finishing their broccoli or not putting away their toys, or fussing about getting into the tub, then you’re what’s called a Lucky Parent. But when the kid starts “not punching” his infant brother, or biting other kids, or wants to start throwing the dog off of increasingly high areas, and when you tell the kid “no” and try to move them away from this activity it actually becomes important for them to DEFY you, and isn’t interested in how dogs can be hurt when they go sailing over the 2nd floor balcony (yes, I have a friend who is a vet and had to take that poor dog), and you literally have to watch the little demon like a hawk 24/7 because the second your back is turned they decide to go back to Not Punching Their Infant Brother In The Face (Oops, well, I didn’t mean to),  you might need to accept that you need to Set That Rule that if you go over and start “not punching” your infant brother in the face again, you will get a spanking, and then stick to that rule.

If either of my kids had thrown a dog off a balcony, yes, that kid would have gone to therapy. That is one of the early warning signs for sociopathy.

I worked in a mental health inpatient unit for children and adolescents for 5 years. Those kids who had harmed animals generally went on to harm people, usually starting with their younger siblings.

Oh, meant to continue that harming siblings is what got them put in the mental health unit. If parents had paid attention, they could have worked with a social worker/psychologist or other specialist to ensure those behaviors didn’t happen again. We did not use corporal punishment on the unit, although we did use “holds” (we did not use any other type of restraints other than one or more staff members holding the child who was acting out).

They weren’t all teenagers, either. We had kids as young as 5.

Re: the idea that the girl was screaming louder than was necessary.

My initial thought was, “Well, of course she was!” Not for the camera’s benefit, but for her own.

I used to work as a pro sub in a commercial dungeon. I did it for two years, and sometimes I’d take exceptionally bad beatings. I haven’t watched the video, and I don’t intend to, but I’ve been hit with a belt for way, way longer than five minutes and been left with thick bruises from my calves to my butt. I did not particularly enjoy some of these beatings - but if my choice was between eviction and beating, I chose being able to pay rent every time.

One thing I, and the other subs I worked with, learned *very* quickly was to always scream and yell louder than the play merited. A client who wanted to leave bruises wanted to hit us to the absolute extremity of our endurance. And a good way to convince him that we were truly suffering was to scream and cry and yell. The louder we did it, the more he thought he was hurting us and the less likely he was to hit *really* hard.

And those beatings were consensual.

I can only imagine that a teenager, wanting the beating to stop, would *of course* put on a performance of screaming and crying and being in pain. The more her dad thought she was suffering, the less likely he’d be to hit her longer and harder than if she was only whimpering or crying a little bit. But even if she was being performative - the beating was still wrong. And the fact that she even *thought* that being performative would help her suffering means that the beating was six kinds of wrong.

So, yeah, I do think that she was probably crying and screaming louder than she had to - but the fact that she was only increases my sympathy for her. She just wanted her dad to stop hitting her, and she was doing whatever she thought would make it stop.

“and let’s face it, if it wasn’t an effective means of discipline for children who don’t respond to verbal- and isolation- punishment, they would not be enumerating these things to psych majors at the major east coast university I attended.”

I disagree.  Often practitioners and academics assume things without evidence, and then when the evidence starts to pile up against them, they resist it.  They continue to teach these things to their students.  Routine episiotomy is an example, off the top of my head.

“The eyes have rolled back in the head, and at this point I’m someone who bites the heads off puppies and punches babies for fun.”

For what it’s worth, I certainly don’t think that, and I am sure that I am not the only commenter here who disagrees with you on this that doesn’t think you’re an ogre or something.

Mighty Ponygirl:  “What you guys seem unable to understand is that someone can be spanked and NOT have it be an abusive, life-destroying act,”

I specifically said that I believe you when you say you weren’t harmed by spanking.  “MP, you believe you weren’t hurt by spanking, and I think it is quite possible this is true.”

I repeated that for you.  “I specifically said that children are not all the same.  I said I believe you when you say you weren’t harmed.”

Why don’t you hear me?  How did you miss these?

I also said I believe my mother would not have hit me had she known better.  She was not a monster or I could not have bonded with her, finally, a few years before she died.

My point, which you keep avoiding, is that you can’t tell which children will be traumatized and which won’t.  So you can’t factor that in in making your decision.  For sure you will traumatize some of them.

And there’s no proof that there are *any* children who will only learn right and wrong from physical violence, no other way.  If you have some please show it.  Saying you never would have learned right from wrong without spanking isn’t evidence because it’s about something that never happened. 

Assuming that people who don’t manage their children’s behavior well could do so *but only if they would hit them* is not a proven statement. It’s just your opinion.

The thing is, kids act out or disobey for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes they just want to push your buttons, and you—the adult—are really modelling good behavior if you can keep your calm. Sometimes they want to push your boundaries, and then you have to decide if those are firm or if maybe the kid is ready to have those be a little squishy. Sometimes they are just ignorant of what they are supposed to be doing, or they misunderstand what you want, so you have to be calm and explain. Sometimes they are angry and that anger has to go somewhere…so you make sure they have an acceptable outlet. My kids had a plastic blow up punching bag that looked like a purple bear and it got a pretty good workout when they were angry preteens.

The way I see it, adults already have all the power, and somewhere deep down, kids already know that. I just can’t see it being a good idea for the big powerful person to hit the smaller, weaker one. Parenting isn’t a might makes right situation. It’s a stronger person leading a weaker person until the weaker one comes into his/her own strengths.

Also, all this equivocation of “Well, there’s a difference between real child abuse and spanking, stop whining about spanking” reminds me a lot of the whole debacle with Richard Dawkins’ condescending pap towards Rebecca Watson.

if it wasn’t an effective means of discipline for children who don’t respond to verbal- and isolation- punishment, they would not be enumerating these things to psych majors at the major east coast university I attended

Argument from authority and false on its face. The entire literature is a graveyard of ‘proven’ theories thought for generations and later discarded as quackery and worse.

But even so, I repeat: I am fully confident that cold blooded, calm beatings with equally calm preceding lectures is a very effective strategy for obtaining the submission and domination through fear of large numbers of defenseless children. I simply question the common wisdom that it is necessary or moral, in nearly every case.

@Ismene
I wouldn’t rule out the anxiety aspect as part of the “excessive” screaming. I work as a pro domme, and while most subs really like the anticipation aspect of a scene, I think that same anticipation is terrifying under these circumstances. Also, from the beginning, he’s doing a lot of things that we recognize as dangerous, like hitting full-force, hitting anywhere (including perhaps on joints, though it’s hard to see), and letting the belt wrap around. If someone came to me and actually WANTED this kind of beating, I probably wouldn’t be able to do it. And I’m a 5’5” woman who doesn’t have nearly as much upper body strength as this guy does.

“But even so, I repeat: I am fully confident that cold blooded, calm beatings with equally calm preceding lectures is a very effective strategy for obtaining the submission and domination through fear of large numbers of defenseless children.”

Whoa.  That’s…pretty fucked up, dude.

@Liz: That, too. And your subs *want* to be there - this poor girl had literally no choice.

I will definitely take your word for it that he was being dangerous. My boyfriend watched the video, and he described it to me - that was bad enough, I don’t intend to watch it. I cringed when you mentioned the belt wrapped - that’s one of the things I hated the most, and I would refuse to see clients who made a habit of wrapping.

I gave my comment because some people seemed to read her screaming as being performative, and therefore evidence that it wasn’t ‘that bad’ or that she was just exaggerating. I wanted to provide a point of view that - yeah, maybe she was exaggerating, but she was doing it to save herself more pain, so only a callous asshole would blame her in that circumstance. The issue is not that she might have been exaggerating her pain, but that she had been put in a (highly non-consensual) situation where that kind of exaggeration was a useful strategy.

@balconyscene: Yes. Yes it is. Kind of the point.

If a ten-year old threw a dog off a balcony, then yes. Time to march the kid off for therapy. But little kids (I would say less than 6) really do not intrinsically understand that other people have feelings, and can feel pain. If they don’t feel pain at the moment, it doesn’t really register that someone else feels pain. It’s sort of there at the periphery, people keep telling them that someone might have an ow, but kids really do not understand what that means, to create a shadow identity. The only experience they can fathom is their own. One famous example is, if you put a four-year-old in front of a model of a mountain, and you put her in a seat so that on her “face” of the mountain, she can see a house and a cow, and then across from her, in a seat facing the other side of the mountain, you put a teddy bear, and the teddy bear is facing a tree and a dog, and you ask the kid what the teddy bear sees, they’re going to say quite simply that the teddy bear sees the house and the cow. They won’t even move their head to see around to the teddy bear’s side of the mountain. The fact that the teddy bear could “see” something other than what they see is not something little kids understand. And really, they shouldn’t, they are much too helpless to have empathy at that age.

OK, so here’s a question for you, if your 4-year-old kid has decided that he wants to drop the dog off the bottom stair and you say “No, don’t do that again, that hurts the doggy” and they laugh and think it’s all a joke, and then grab for the dog again when you’re not looking and drop him off the seat of a chair, and you say “I told you that hurts the doggy, if you do that again, you’re getting a spanking” and immediately they pick up the dog again and make to drop him off of something, and you stop the kid, and you get the dog out of his hands, and you give him a quick spank and then, after things have cooled down you give him a hug and just tell him that you still love him, the doggy still loves him, but the kid needs to love the doggy and not play that way, and the kid has *learned his lesson* and is no longer trying to pick up the dog and throw him off of things, and furthermore, the next time he does something dangerous or harmful you can say “don’t do that, if you do that, you’re going to get a spanking” and he *doesn’t do it*, would you really have rather put that kid in therapy?

You know I was intentionally drawing a strong metaphor earlier, but now it’s striking me how much like the torture debate this really is.

The apologetics have all the same hallmarks. In each case, the description is that of a mild discomfort (‘quick spank,’ ‘a little water on the face’) and yet in each case it’s supposedly 100% effective in getting results (‘learned his lesson,’ ‘gave up valuable intel.’) and therefore indispensable.

Who knew such painless, humane and yet overwhelmingly foolproof ways of controlling human behavior existed? I can’t believe no one discovered this earlier.

But of course we only hit because we love. We wouldn’t have to if they didn’t make us do it.

I’d really like to say I’m against the fictitious gender pronouns.  We have perfectly good ones, they have been employed for hundreds of years despite complaints.

The neuter and fictitious ones are fine for those who choose them - but I’ve seen them used far too many times as insults to people who don’t fit perceived gender norms.  It’s very frustrating.

@ 150

She does put herself where the camera will be focused on on daddy, which is partly why she won’t get on the bed (the other reason is to show how enraged her father will be when she doesn’t get on the bed).

Daddy wasn’t telling her to get on the bed, Daddy was telling her to BEND OVER the bed, where she’d still be in camera range.  Would daddy have to insist she pull down her pants so he could “spank” her bare bottom before you’d see the sexual connotations and figure out another reason why a 16 year old girl might choose a harsher beating over bending over for daddy?

Where are all the smooshed children?

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001915.htm

First Google result from

http://www.google.com/search?rls=en&q=causes+of+childhood+death+in+the+us

Apparently misadventure is the most common form of death.

Who’d have thought?

If pain isn’t useful in learning avoidance behavior, why do we have the sensation of pain?

Having read “The Nurture Assumption,” I am unconvinced spanking would have any results either way. If my kid grows up to be a mass-murdering psychopath, the evidence suggests it would have happened no matter what I did.  So since she’s cute and I’m shallow, I will continue to not spank. (She’s nice to the dog so early signs are positive)

Also the book also suggests most of her personality will come from genetics. Since I’m awesome, she should be all set.

“Daddy wasn’t telling her to get on the bed, Daddy was telling her to BEND OVER the bed, where she’d still be in camera range.  Would daddy have to insist she pull down her pants so he could “spank” her bare bottom before you’d see the sexual connotations and figure out another reason why a 16 year old girl might choose a harsher beating over bending over for daddy?”

I was more thinking that it was less sexual and more humiliation.  I’ve been hit all through my life, but this was how my second stepmother loved to beat my number 2 sister and I (sibs 3 and 4, from dad’s second marriage, were lucky that they had a mother that lived close enough to give her hell if she so much as breathed wrong at her kids).  She was a bitter angry jackass of a woman who couldn’t stand any of my father’s children that she didn’t push out of her vagina and with dad working 2-3 jobs to support us all, she had a lot of opportunity to take it out on the two of us. 

You had to lay on the bed, and at least have your pants off, and if you made noise, she hit you longer and harder, though for no.2 sister, who no matter how many times she was beaten was still rebellious (and of course, no one in the family got the hint that this shit wasn’t fucking working), she had to strip first.  Stepmonster even said to her once “I WANT you to feel this….”  I’m pretty sure she was getting nothing sexual out of it; she was just angry and wanted to put someone lower than her, and that’s totally what I’m seeing in this jackhole’s rage, the desire to destroy and break someone.

I’m glad for those who were spanked as kids and are okay adults, I mean, good for you, honestly.  On the other hand, I may have avoided running out into traffic or touching hot stoves, but I also broke off all contact with my family 10 years ago because even talking to the lucky siblings is too triggering.  Last time I heard, no. 2 sib dropped out of school and started pumping out babies just to get out of the house.  I’m not having kids at all because I can honestly say that I don’t have the patience to raise them into decent people (though I envy the hell out of my friends who are parents and have managed to keep from striking theirs).  I would probably hurt them as bad I was hurt out of sheer frustration, and because of that I don’t even own pets.

If pain isn’t useful in learning avoidance behavior, why do we have the sensation of pain?
Comment #298: Crissa on 11/05 at 01:48 AM

Pain works to pull your hand off the hot surface before you have to think about it.  Pain tells you to stop running unless a bear is chasing you. 

Pain in your hand tells you to pause or stop hitting your child or get an implement so you can continue without pain.

There’s no guarantee that externally applied delayed pain will make you “learn” what the applier of pain wants you to learn.  People often just try to avoid that externally applied delayed pain or hide the punished behavior.  See:  hangovers, aspirin and drinking a quart of water before you go to bed.

Where are all the smooshed children?

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001915.htm

First Google result from

http://www.google.com/search?rls=en&q=causes+of+childhood+death+in+the+us

Apparently misadventure is the most common form of death.

Who’d have thought?
Comment #297: Crissa on 11/05 at 01:46 AM

Uh, these have NO information on whether the children killed in accidents (mostly car accidents according to the first link) were spanked or not.

OK, so here’s a question for you, if your 4-year-old kid has decided that he wants to drop the dog off the bottom stair and you say “No, don’t do that again, that hurts the doggy” and they laugh and think it’s all a joke, and then grab for the dog again when you’re not looking and drop him off the seat of a chair, and you say “I told you that hurts the doggy, if you do that again, you’re getting a spanking” and immediately they pick up the dog again and make to drop him off of something, and you stop the kid, and you get the dog out of his hands, and you give him a quick spank and then, after things have cooled down you give him a hug and just tell him that you still love him, the doggy still loves him, but the kid needs to love the doggy and not play that way, and the kid has *learned his lesson* and is no longer trying to pick up the dog and throw him off of things, and furthermore, the next time he does something dangerous or harmful you can say “don’t do that, if you do that, you’re going to get a spanking” and he *doesn’t do it*, would you really have rather put that kid in therapy?
Comment #293: Mighty Ponygirl on 11/04 at 10:31 PM

Either put the child in therapy, which is of course a horrible thing to do to zie (HI CRISSA!), because what if people knew?  Or hit the child, which is a nice thing to do to zer?  I think I know which way I’d go if those really were the only options.

But if the child isn’t psychotic, just not empathetic enough yet, you just limit the exposure of helpless beings to those non-malicious in intent but potentially damaging actions.

Kind of like not letting kids be spanked even if the person who does the spanking doesn’t know any better and doesn’t think they’re causing trauma, even if people told that person, yes, it causes trauma.

I forgot to address the unsurprising embedded assumption in your post, MP, that therapy doesn’t work but spanking does.  Otherwise you wouldn’t have stipulated that the child post-therapy will remain disobedient to the parent’s imprecation to stop doing something dangerous or harmful.

What do you think therapy is?  Sitting with the little shit and saying “I feel so sorry for you, let’s cry together, your mommy is so mean”?

I have a nephew with multiple learning disabilities.  He has not always been gentle in expressing his frustration and anger.  Spanking him did not work.  Lots of therapy both solo and with the whole family has helped. 

Therapy in this kind of situation is much like taking a private lesson in life skills.  Every family member has to understand how to deal with this kind of challenge to effectively meet it, and we are not born with the tools. 

Especially when faced with a challenging child like this one, the “spanking only as last resort” mantra ends up being “spank this kid all the time because he is a serious problem all the time.”

In an earlier age he’d probably have either been killed because he got into fights, or left to be a wild man if he were strong enough.  Now he is learning to work, participating in Special Olympics sailing crew and cheerleading, has friends, does art and music.  He isn’t perfect, but I would rather have him the way he is than taught that might makes right and pain gets people to do what you want, because he’s an adult male with adult male physical strength.

Honestly, I find it highly likely that these oh-so-precious “never spank” policies are just cover for parents who are too soft to discipline their children, or in some cases some kind of cultural liberal identity marker. That’s the vibe I’m getting from these comments of “I can’t even vaguely understand why you would ever want to do something like that.”

“Blanket training,” for all of it’s stupidity and pointlessness works, if you want a child to sit still on a blanket (I think that’s stupid—give the kid a playpen and keep the kid stimulated, right?) But if corporal punishment never worked and was never useful, then “blanket training” would be literally impossible.

I find it highly likely that these oh-so-precious “never spank” policies are just cover for parents who are too soft to discipline their children

Yeah, cause beating a kid makes you hard as hell.

If corporal punishment never worked

As I said above, it is surely possible to obtain obedience of and domination over many children though the application of violence and terror. The conversation is not about whether beating children ever ‘works,’ it is about whether it is ever necessary. I guess hardass spankers don’t go in for too much of the readin.’

My advice: if you’re too fucking soft to discipline a child without beating her then get your own predilictions in order before you start judging others.

Tyro, if you’re getting from my comment about my previously violent nephew that I don’t understand violent children, you’re not reading very well.

This is just the easy response, oh, you’ve never dealt with a really difficult child, you don’t know what you’re talking about.  Teachers like GoGo above don’t have the “luxury” of hitting kids and, while not all of them are good at it, plenty learn to deal with children whose parents don’t care or know enough to try to discipline in any way.

Actually thinking about what you’re doing is kind of a Liberal identity marker.

Tyro—-no one says you cannot beat people into submission—hell yah, it’s way effective! Some might even say it’s fun.

The point is: hitting on any scale is potentially damaging to children. That some people claim to have “benefitted” from it, does not change the fact that many were traumatized by it. As folks have said over and over, one cannot know if it is damaging to a particular child until the damage is already done.

Further, allowing for “controlled” hitting just leaves the door open to uncontrolled hitting in the case of lost temper or even sadistic intentions. If hitting is NEVER an option for a parent, he or she will not end up hitting in an uncontrolled manner.

Distorting the argument to make it seem like people are only discussing a choice between hitting kids and using no discipline at all, on account of softness and preciousness, misses many, MANY points about pro-social discipline that have been included in this 300+ post thread. Go read em.

Tyro: I find it highly likely that these oh-so-precious “never spank” policies are just cover for parents who are too soft to discipline their children”

I’m sure there are cases where this is true.  And that’s probably a good thing! After all, when it comes to providing any sort of (well, behavioral) discipline, one of the most important things is consistency. Self-control and clarity (what am I doing, and why?) are probably pretty major too.  And the rules of spanking Mighty Ponygirl brought up require even more of this - you’d have to be able to calm down and hit your child in an extremely controlled, almost ritualistic manner, with serious consideration of the child’s capacities, behavior, etc.  Someone who - as specified - is too “soft” to “discipline their children”, but might feel required by social expectation to hit them ... well, with careful training and support it might go according to plan, but most likely will be an utter mess, and possibly a dangerous one.

Also, not entirely clear what you mean by “discipline their children”.  Are we talking too soft to hit their kids (in which case, guilty as charged; getting beat with a belt as a child must’ve tenderized me right up), or too soft to provide any sort of discipline? (Which does happen, unfortunately for everyone involved).  Either way, it’s sorta important that parents/caregivers have models of effective discipline they actually can do ...

Mighty Ponygirl: “And I’d trust the developmental psychologists more than I trust James “let’s shower with our sons to keep them from being gay and beat the shit out of him with tree branches” Dobson.”

Well, when you put it that way, sure, but that’s a relative, not an absolute thing - ie, developmental psychologists don’t have a direct line to Truth, and are pretty much inevitably going to get some things wrong along the way.  I know when I was back in school and taking a developmental psych class in the mid-‘00s, the picture I got was that, ie, Piaget was respected as a groundbreaking pioneer, but that his work had also been challenged and reconsidered and etc., with his findings and framework somewhat seen as, at least, more complicated.  In some cases newer research suggests that kids’ responses might be pretty influenced by seemingly trivial aspects of the tasks, which end up testing other things entirely - working memory, spatial ability, figuring out exactly what the crazy grownup is asking, etc.  With the Three Mountains task, for example, if it’s set up with familiar scenes or redesigned as a more socially-relevant problem,  you can end up with a pretty sizable majority of 3 year olds correctly showing another’s perspective.

“Livi @95, developmental psychology directly contradicts you. Children have to learn empathy and empathy comes after establishment of self”
One of the books sitting on my bedside table is “The Scientist In the Crib” - the little one is intermittently fascinated by it because it has a picture of a baby on the cover, and will pull it out and flip through it while handing me a board book to keep me busy Now, the authors are popularizing their work to a lay audience (in which I’m definitely included), so caveat lector and all, but one of the themes woven through the book is that there’s been a quiet revolution in child development in the last few decades, driven partly by technological changes - tape recorders! - but maybe also social ones (in ways that’ll probably be familiar to everyone here).  For example, as one of the authors (Alison Gopnik, incidentally a developmental psychologist) points out here (and sorry, best link I can quickly grab) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alison-gopnik/empathic-civilization-ama_b_473961.html
babies seem to start developing empathy rather early on:
“The 14-month-olds gave her the crackers no matter what she did. But the 18-month-olds actually went beyond immediate empathy to something more like genuine altruism. They gave her the crackers of she liked [t]he crackers and the broccoli if she preferred the broccoli, They understood that the other person might want something different from what they wanted themselves, and they acted to make her happy. Other experiments suggest the same thing. Felix Warneken and Mike Tomasello found that 18-month-olds will crawl across a set of cushions to get a pen for a an experimenter who drops it out of reach—and strains to get it back. But they won’t do that if he purposely throws the pen to the ground.

By the time they are three children have taken these basic impulses towards altruism and empathy and turned them into a deeper and more genuinely moral kind of understanding. Judith Smetana and her colleagues asked children as young as two and a half about two kinds of rules in the daycare—a rule about not dropping your clothes on the floor and a rule about not hitting other kids. Children said that breaking both kinds of rules would be bad. But they also said that the teachers could simply decide to change the first rule. They could declare that a messy room was OK and then it would be OK. In contrast, even the youngest children thought that it would NEVER be OK to harm another child, no matter what the teachers said.”

Which of course doesn’t mean that they’re not going to smack the other kid in the head 10 minutes from now.  But it’s more complicated than that.

Also, just in this month: “Babies Understand Thought Process of Others at 10 Months Old, Research Suggests”  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111101130204.htm

“considering the Rules of Spanking were actually determined by real-life developmental psychologists”

Which? Can’t find.

In classroom situations, if a child regularly bites, hits or harms others, we have to first look at the environment: what can we change about the materials, space, number of children or other factors like light and sound to make these situations not occur in the first place? We also have to look at the positioning of the teachers. Maybe someone always needs to be near this particular child to facilitate and lead that child toward verbalizing needs rather than reacting physically. Again, sometimes the child needs more help than we can provide and additional services are sought. Those additional services never include hitting the child.

Agree with never hitting the child.  However, some educators go much further than that. 

This tendency for students who are the most disruptive at best and violent at worse to take up most of a teacher’s time is one of the reasons why many parents are unhappy with the state of mainstream K-12 public schools, especially when some teachers and especially admins/school boards seem to go out of their way to defend such students’ rights to remain in a regular classroom at the rest of the class’/school’s expense. 

One client had to deal with this phenomenon recently when his granddaughter who has a learning disability kept getting harassed by an older boy who escalated the harassment to the point of throwing her down a flight of stairs.  Her family and the grandfather are in the process of suing the school district to permanently expel him from the school because of his violent history. 

Unfortunately, the school admins and the local school board has been fighting this family tooth and nail to keep him in the school despite his violent history….saying expulsion would deprive him of his “educational rights”.  Cases like this makes it understandable IMHO why many parents are skeptical of teachers/school admins/board members who seem oblivious at how overwhelming attention required of some extremely disruptive/violent students often comes at the expense of other students in the same class.

“if corporal punishment never worked”

Oh, corporal punishment can work for discipline.  While my sister was still a hellion no matter how frequently she was beaten at home, I was damn near “perfect” (quotes are deliberate).  I was an honor student with near straight As (given the response to anything less), I cooked and cleaned and watched the younger kids and never as much raised my voice or frowned or showed disrespect to my abuser.

...you’d be amazed how much discipline you can get out of someone who is broken.

I was not spanked, but I always assumed that some kids needed spankings because they were terrible little shits. Now I have my own terrible little shit. She won’t listen, and she absolutely knows what she is not supposed to do and does it anyway. She knows she is disobeying and giggles about it. She has also never done a single thing that I thought merited a spanking.

It should be added, however, that I’m a mediocre mother. Maybe I’d be a spanker if I were a good mom?

It’s not the kids who are terrible little shits; it’s the parents who are.

Balconyscene:

How often do we refer to our opponents as children?  Manchildren, etc?

Clearly, even as progressives, we still have a long way to go.

Oh, great… let me guess, you’re also one of those fainting flowers who has a conniption fit when someone uses “stupid,” aren’t you? Maybe you ought to stick to Shakesville, where that sort of language policing is welcomed.

As for “might makes right,” if you’re actually foolish enough to literally believe “violence is never the answer,” you’re pretty sheltered or deluded (oh, NO, ableism!!).

I was thinking about this video specifically regarding spanking. Once our first daughter got to age 2 or 3, my wife and I had something of a disagreement regarding spanking. She was in favor, though not strongly. I was opposed, vehemently. Her reasoning was that it could be an effective punishment and, to an extent, an attention-getter. Again, she was more or less musing about the possible benefits of it, not extolling it. My reasoning which won her over was this: First, think of spanking as hitting a person’s bottom repeatedly with a moderate amount of force to punish or coerce. Next, ask yourself which people are acceptable in the “person” part of that definition. Acceptable choices? Your children. Unacceptable choices? Wife, coworker, boss, stranger, dog. Do the same thing to any one of those and you’ll go to jail, or at least be tempting fate.

The basic gist is the only people you’re allowed to physically beat are your children, the most vulnerable people in the world. Everyone else is protected by law from being assaulted in this way.

So. We don’t spank. My kids know some daddies and mommies spank their kids and wonder why. That makes me feel pretty good.

It all boils down to, “Be willing to spank or face the judgement of Internet Childfrees (tm).” Well, my kid was singing loud songs in Wal-Mart yesterday*; someone’s surely posting about me right this minute.  I’m comfortable with being judged by folks with no kids. I used to do it and now it’s someone else’s turn. Circle of life.

*Not a spanking offense, for christ’s sake

Interesting how everyone’s talking about “the child”.  What about “the children”?

My sister doesn’t remember being spanking a couple of times when she was four, but I, three years older, remember her being spanked.  Not a nice memory, and something that has stayed with me such that I would never ever spank my child.  And bear in mind, this was instances of what the adults here would no doubt call a “swat” - nothing involving an implement, or a large amount of force.

I have already outlined ways for adults to intervene with children after a hurtful incident in previous post #124.

But ideally, we’d like to head off the violent incident before it happens, right?

The problem is that you outlined some ways adults could intervene, which might prevent the biting behaviour, or might not.  If they do, obviously that’s great.  Obviously the best thing you can do is convince the kid that they don’t want to bite the other kids.  That’s going to be the most successful approach, because that’s self re-enforcing, and doesn’t require further intervention on your part, whatnot.  But they’re aimed towards long term solutions, when something like persistent biting also requires a short term solution, and you’re assuming they’re easy to deal with.  This is misleading.

I’d feel like shit to find out I had been spanking my bratty child as a punishment for biting when all along she had a neurological disorder and could not help herself. But I guess some folks would be fine with that.

is misleading too.  As soon as you disappear the children getting bitten, then the considerations become really one-sided. But you can’t do that in real life.  Feeling like shit isn’t the issue - I’d feel like shit letting my kid roam about attacking other children too - so since I’d feel like shit either way, it’s not really a consideration.

Obviously “Wouldn’t it be better if problem behaviour could be resolved nonviolently?” is something we can all agree to.  What we can’t all agree to is to pretend that it always can.  Yeah, teachers don’t need violence to resolve behaviour, because one of the solutions they have is getting rid of the kid.  Whenever you can get rid of a problem person, you shouldn’t resort to violence.  When you cannot, the situation changes.  (And although the argument appears above repeatedly that you aren’t allowed to be violent with adults, you are allowed to be violent with adults when getting rid of them isn’t possible.  Because that is the critical threshold.)

But they’re aimed towards long term solutions, when something like persistent biting also requires a short term solution, and you’re assuming they’re easy to deal with.  This is misleading.
Comment #318: Brian on 11/06 at 12:31 PM

You’re assuming spanking will quickly and immediately solve the problem.  This is misleading, as the victims of wild kids and bullies who were spanked, whooped, whaled, beaten and so on can attest to you.

Yeah, teachers don’t need violence to resolve behaviour, because one of the solutions they have is getting rid of the kid.

Nope.  Ask exholt’s friend—this isn’t always an option, in fact in public schools you usually have to go through a boatload of procedures and paperwork and maybe even police intervention before a child can be removed from the classroom permanently. 

You can separate a child from other children until they learn.  Yes, that’s annoying and complicated.  But usually it doesn’t take years or even months.  The alternative is the possibility of emotional damage to that child and, yes, other children who witness the hitting.  And the likelihood that that child will grow up to think hitting is normal and expected.

As bad as this video is, the comments on youtube attached to it are so much worse.  “She deserved it.” “If she had complied, she wouldn’t have been beaten so much.”  Etc.  Makes me ill.

I didn’t watch the video for the same reason I’ve never seen Schindler’s List. I am already as opposed to corporal punishment and child abuse as I am to genocide—100%—and I don’t imagine watching it is going to change that.

   * * *

I agree with Kit-Kat in #120 to the extent that I see two perhaps related but separate issues here:
* What behaviors are worthy of correction
* What is an appropriate way to issue that correction

Parents who discipline their children for any sort of non-conformity (particularly if such non-conformity includes things that can’t possibly be under the child’s control) are not doing an ok thing if the discipline isn’t physical. Enforcing conformity seems to me connected to the idea that everyone is fundamentally evil, and constant vigilance—including keeping a tight rein on your actions, your thoughts, your personality—is the only way to keep that evil from escaping. And that’s going to influence the sorts of things that are deemed unacceptable. I suspect someone who grew up getting hit for genuinely harmful behavior will turn out better than someone who grew up getting time-outs for any sign of independence or individuality. But I also think that parents who are “merely” correcting harmful, clearly bad behavior are less likely to feel the need for extreme disciplanary methods than parents who feel the need to enforce conformity.

In any case, Judge Adams got both halves wrong. I suspect he viewed cerebral palsy as a sign or manifestation of extra sinfulness and/or persistant, volitional refusal to be like everyone else, and so by his lights she started out with a strike against her.

rb2, 288:

The entire literature is a graveyard of ‘proven’ theories thought for generations and later discarded as quackery and worse.

I’m reminded here of all the punitive measures devised for children who have the temerity to masturbate.

Which is a good analogy. Do the techniques stop at least some children from masturbating? Possibly, but that doesn’t make it not cruel.

Ask exholt’s friend—this isn’t always an option, in fact in public schools you usually have to go through a boatload of procedures and paperwork and maybe even police intervention before a child can be removed from the classroom permanently.

Even police intervention is no guarantee of a child’s removal or that the teachers/admins/educrats/board won’t fight tooth and nail to keep the violent kid in a public school…..safety of victim and rest of the school community be damned. 

That older boy in question has already been arrested and being processed in juvenile court.

gogo @ 242:

In classroom situations, if a child regularly bites, hits or harms others, we have to first look at the environment: what can we change about the materials, space, number of children or other factors like light and sound to make these situations not occur in the first place? We also have to look at the positioning of the teachers. Maybe someone always needs to be near this particular child to facilitate and lead that child toward verbalizing needs rather than reacting physically. Again, sometimes the child needs more help than we can provide and additional services are sought. Those additional services never include hitting the child.

gog @269:

Hey Brian, citation! Where did I say say allow a child to bite?
Oh, whoops, nowhere! Never once did I say allow the child to bite another child, nor have I allowed a child to bite another child in a real life situation. That is a completely falsehood, concocted by you.

Nowhere did you say remove the child, and you mentioned repeated biting, hitting and harming other children.  This suggests your concern is the kid doing the biting, hitting and harming not those being bitten, hit or harmed.

oldfeminist @307:

Teachers like GoGo above don’t have the “luxury” of hitting kids and, while not all of them are good at it, plenty learn to deal with children whose parents don’t care or know enough to try to discipline in any way.

No, they have the luxury of declaring that the kid needs special help they can’t provide and refusing to allow them to continue attending.

When the child in question is pre-school, which is part of MP’s stated rules.  The Jr high or high school student is outside the specific bounds you all claim to be arguing with.

helen w. h., GoGo did say you would keep the child from hitting or biting others, and you even quoted it:  “Maybe someone always needs to be near this particular child to facilitate and lead that child toward verbalizing needs rather than reacting physically.” 

An adult right there ready to stop the child seems more likely to protect other children first time every time than just hitting the child and hoping that the child learns the lesson the very first time.

Gogo was talking about a repeated biter; therefore, the child had not been kept from biting other children after the first time and an adult nearby at all times is only being considered later, when it recurs.

“Gogo was talking about a repeated biter; therefore, the child had not been kept from biting other children after the first time and an adult nearby at all times is only being considered later, when it recurs.”

That’s terrible. Perhaps repeated biters should be gagged. That’d teach them.

Nope.  Ask exholt’s friend—this isn’t always an option, in fact in public schools you usually have to go through a boatload of procedures and paperwork and maybe even police intervention before a child can be removed from the classroom permanently.

What a weird thing to say.  Start with “Nope”, then go on to explain how what I said works.  Yes, expelling students is complicated. Expulsion rates are pretty low (in my home town, for instance, the expulsion rate is ~0.02%/year, across all ages).  But expulsions happen.  Parents cannot just tell their children to fuck off and not come back.

You can separate a child from other children until they learn.  Yes, that’s annoying and complicated.  But usually it doesn’t take years or even months.

Sure, and so usually that’s the best option.  That’s still playing the same game.  Talking about what usually works, and ignoring the cases where it doesn’t.

You’re assuming spanking will quickly and immediately solve the problem.  This is misleading, as the victims of wild kids and bullies who were spanked, whooped, whaled, beaten and so on can attest to you.

I’m not assuming that, of course.  I am acknowledging that it might solve the problem, and claiming that it’s preferable to leaving the problem unsolved.

Brian: “I am acknowledging that it might solve the problem, and claiming that it’s preferable to leaving the problem unsolved.”

As has been repeatedly pointed out to you, Brian, no one can offer any evidence whatsoever that adults hitting children ever does any good: the best anyone has been able to show is that some children aren’t actually harmed, and there’s consistent evidence that some children are seriously emotionally damaged by adults hitting them who take care to cause no physical damage to the child.

In fact, it’s just occurred to me:

Consistently, the Christian right claim that lesbian and gay parents will harm their own children by bringing them up with a same-sex couple as their parents. Even now, when you can point out to those of the Christian right who care about evidence-based argument that there is literally no evidence that children reared by same-sex parents are any worse off than children reared by mixed-sex parents, and there’s some evidence that lesbian couples may well actually be better than mixed-sex couples at rearing children, they will still argue that there’s probably some kind of weird unseen invisible damage going on deep down in the background with children who were brought up by couples who didn’t fit their gold standard of children reared by their biological mother and biological father, married to each other.

There is clear evidence that parents who spank their children are likely to emotionally damage them and that parents who think it’s OK to spank their children are more likely to inflict damaging physical abuse on their children - hitting them with a belt or another implement of abuse. If there was the same clear evidence of damage from same-sex parenting as there is from spanking parenting (so to speak) the Christian right would be all over it. But they really, really want to be able to bear their children… which is understandable in a way, since abuse victims are less likely to feel able to reject their parents nutty beliefs and walk off into a better life.

“really, really want to be able to beat their children”

...some typos are worse than others.

Spanking is absolutely for the parents rather than the kids, Jesurgislac. From Postsecret a few months ago: “I’m scared by how much I enjoy physically ‘punishing’ my toddler.” I went and gave my lil’ monster a big old hug after reading that, I tell you what.

I’m surprised nobody mentioned this: if a child is sociopathic (developmentally or pathologically so) enough to want to throw the dog down the stairs, then threatening to spank her for throwing the dog down the stairs has a good chance of teaching her to be sneakier about throwing the dog down the stairs. Duh.

One of the things that my Dad said about this, and I think it’s very true, is that when the girls are young, even as the father in this video mentioned specifically, there is this idea that they’re sweet and obedient. When puberty hits, and the girls start to resemble their mothers, there is a subconscious sexual attraction of the father towards the daughters that they consciously reject by driving the daughters away, most obviously through extreme corporal punishment, but it other ways as well. I think my Dad had it right when he said they can’t deal with it consciously so it comes out in other ways.