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Men who agree with corporal punishment
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This is a long essay, for I feel like writing, and, after all, you can choose to read or not! The brainwashed fervor of some of these posts totally scares me, for they reveal so clearly the sort of blind PCist grip that the world is in, and the alarming traction that has been achieved by lunatics like Dr. Spock and the other pseudo-professions who have cast around to find a way to sell their non-knowledge. I’ll refrain from any sort of remark about what these posts say about the muddled thinking employed by so many of my fellow-humans.
So, I’ll take my point of view to several of the posts (not necessarily examples of “muddled thinking”, but all espousing views I see as hopelessly false), and then finish by making a comment, and in so doing, invite comment in return.I was rarely ever smacked and I turned out fine.
While these may well be true, neither of you are in the slightest competent to judge. These claims are different, notice, from someone’s saying (as I do) that my being beaten as a child has not damaged the love I have for my parents, either now, or at the time. And none of us three boys ever feared our parents in the slightest. These are simply true statements that I can accurately make. It is for others to assess whether or not I “turned out fine” or I am “productive”. BTW, your judgment is already in question by the stance you take against corporal punishment!Somehow I managed to be a well behaved child and grow into a reasonable and productive adult.
I intend no sarcasm or irony here, but I have friends (he is an engineer,, and his wife an industrial psychologist) of many years who would make the same claim about how well their children turned out. Indeed, they have done so! Anyway, I find their children (or at least the boys, aged 35 and 43) unusually childish, incapable of assuming responsibility, molly-coddled, slow to mature generally, morally deficient in many ways, and constantly applying to their parents for assistance. Their parents permitted them to grow like weeds, for they wanted them "free to develop". Of course, no spanking, or anything like! Anyway, when he (Dad) asked me to hire them for summer employment (one when he was 16 and the other 24), I refused outright because these children simply are intolerable to live with. Albeit intelligent, they are crude, rude, abusive with their language (and not just with their peers), pathologically argumentative, self-centred, and hopelessly tardy. I offer them not as examples of the results of non-spanking (although these strong-willed children could serve this role all too well), but of examples of how sadly amiss their parents are at assessing "how they turned out".
About countenancing corporal punishment:Anyone who beats their child isn't a parent, but a lunatic.
This sort of frenzied PCist pejorative a-la-modality is stupid. It is simply bashing at the question by slaying the messenger. I am not a lunatic, and neither were my parents - but I will admit that this is really for others to judge (NB: by argument already used above, you have no credibility in this respect because your judgments are already pretty iffy). Corporal punishment is an old and remarkable well-proven way of raising children, and an aspect of this thread is directed at the question of whether or not it still has value. To me, and many others, it is obvious that it does, and I am pretty-well sure that that belief doesn’t yet qualify one as a lunatic, or indeed, as being backward.Such backward thinking.
[I am ignoring the loaded “and humiliating them” that was tossed in free of charge, and without any proof that this happens to any serious degree. I also discard the “somebody” from consideration because it is too general when by “somebody” we mean “one’s child” that Nature has handed to us to train and help form as best we can].How on earth do people think that teaching children that slapping and physically hurting and humiliating somebody is appropriate behaviour for any reason, how can this be acceptable??
No child wants to be “whacked about”, as you put it! It is negative reinforcement, after all, and this is how it works. Slapping a child (or “whacking it about”) does hurt, and it does do some sort of “physical harm”; indeed, it is this very quality that we seek to enlist, hopefully beneficially, when we do it! By extension, the argument here is – or should be – is it justified and appropriate, in some situations, to apply this mildly violent action to your children? And I believe it is.So, there is the harm straight away. What child wants to be whacked about?
I certainly wasn’t afraid of either of my parents, and neither were my brothers. Not at all; indeed, the very idea is ridiculous to me. I never had the slightest doubt that my parents adored us. The point is that, oddly, it is not axiomatic that parents’ (and the apostrophe is correctMost modern parents don't want their children to grow up afraid of them. ) hitting their children makes their children afraid of them, whether the parents are modern or not.
If you must put words into my mouth, please choose something less foolish! What sort of human being, familiar with this world, would ever claim that the duties of a friend and a parent are the same? While there are no doubt some similarities, these duties are far more noteworthy for their differences. I really do hope this does not require explanation.And those parents like to say they are their child's best friend.
Certainly not if you won’t try. This comment is very provocative and interesting, but I believe, totally wrong if we apply it to children over the age of, say, 2 years. Earlier than this may be too young to be unequivocal about what constitutes a tantrum. That said, a child’s success at having, or desire to have, a tantrum is not based on a single incident of applying a timely hit - if I might word it so whimsically – as much as it is rooted in the general nature of its upbringing. My children quite literally never had tantrums, and neither did I nor my siblings. And if you think that it must therefore be true that we were all insipid, self-effacing, obsequious, non-demanding wee angels, I can safely assure you that this is far from the truth – although, again, this is really only for others to validate! Moreover, as I sit here now and think back to my childhood, I cannot recall any of my friends’ (again, the apostrophe!) having tantrums. I do not know whether this happened, but I truly cannot recollect ever witnessing this odd behavior among my friends (and I did have many) - even if I did indeed once see in a restaurant a tantrum entered into(?) by a child I didn’t know. But I have seen it in today's world, several times - with far fewer opportunities to see it! Today, reflecting on this - and right on topic - I see a child’s having a tantrum as a strong negative comment on the general quality of its parenting. I claim that a child reared in a generally healthy way – viz, where parents’ authority is not something that is constantly in question - does not have tantrums. To be sure humanity has enough variation to validly challenge this statement as an absolute (after all, you can find an Irishman without a sense of humor, and a German with one!), but you know what I mean.children have tantrums and you won’t (sic) stop them (sic).
Viewpoint:
First a wee story for context: At 5 years old, my son – always a distressingly precocious, intelligent and remarkably fluent speaker – (and whom I justifiably regularly beat within an inch of his life, to great good effect, in spite of this story!) was for the first time in his life in the seat beside me on the bus going into Toronto – a treat, you see. Incidentally, because we lived in a small town outside Toronto, by sheerest chance he had never seen a black man. Anyway, at a bus-stop on the way, a well-dressed black man got on the bus - and true to form – my son sung out in that clear child’s voice that the whole bus could hear “Hey, Daddy, look at that funny man!”. Under immediate stress, I clapped a hand over his mouth, looked out the window to the far fields, and said as casually as I could muster, “Where?”, while desperately trying to make sure that he got no opportunity to explain. And that’s when I killed him, Your Honor.”
And now my view:
The point is that relationship between children and parents is not one of equals, as if between friends. No sir. I do not normally change a friend’s nappies (at least, not yet), nor correct his speech, nor his homework, etc. Nor do I upbraid my friend for noting vociferously that his teacher is “not really that fat” as she stands before us all. And I do not see a child’s wishes or point-of-view as anything like the equal of its parents. Raising a child is not a democracy in action! And believe me – but, of course you know very well – that the rules governing the actions between parent and child are not those that obtain between parent and friend; indeed, they have few similarities. Parents, particularly when their children are young, and even into their mid-teens, are absolute dictators … and they should be. Of course, wise parents should weigh the wishes and the well-being of their children into the mix, and make decisions accordingly. This should guide their decisions and “edicts”, but at no time should the parents’ position as absolute decision-makers be up for discussion.
Of course, as the children grow up, the sharpness of this characterization should blur, eventually disappearing altogether - by which I mean that greater and greater credence should be given to the children’s point-of-view as they age. When children are young, corporal punishment should always be on the table, gradually receding as they age, off the table by the time they are 12, or maybe somewhat earlier. I doubt that corporal punishment of the sort we are talking of is of much benefit after this (although my private school – started by my Irish dad in Halifax in Canada – had no such qualms). Moreover, not all children “need” the same amount of corporal punishment. But in my opinion, discarding this simple and extremely effective tool from your arsenal “as a matter of principle” is the irresponsible, misguided, foolish, pusillanimous, and mawkish cop-out of “them as has drunk the Kool-Aid”. Your children deserve better than this.
Today my children are aged 35 and 45, they are both researchers at the top of their professions, and they are self-assured and confident by any measure you might choose. I totally love it when they can find time from flitting about the world to get together (and so do they), where we are more than capable of sitting up all night, like kids, on some hot topic. The notion of “a relationship of equals” or otherwise has receded into the mists of time, as you will all understand. But their backgrounds helped form them, to be sure.
I once watched a TV program, conducted by a couple of child psychologists, on handling children. Under the format of the show, several family-in-action scenarios were offered to illustrate how a healthy family should operate. One example on the table was the family’s eventual decision to move to a new location (maybe from Boston to Philadelphia, or the like). The sample family was Mum, Dad and either two or three children (I forget which) around 8’ish to 12’ish years old. The psychologists proffered the view that the correct way for the family to handle this possible relocation was to give each family member one vote. Then they should discuss the matter, after which they should vote … and then be bound by that vote! The thumping idiotsThe psychologists - actually put that forward as a sample healthy family modus operandi. Need I expound on the utter nonsense of this offering?
Do I want such inane thinking to frame the standards for raising my children? Do you, for yours? This sort of thing is all around us, to varying degrees. This is the manure that gave birth to such malignant tripe as "corporal punishment is bad", "we do not punish; we redirect", "time outs", "telling your 10-year old child that his actions are distressing to you" and so on. It is not fanciful to take this view of the matter. Just watch The Simpsons if you want to see a de facto standard for how children and parents interact. Of course, this is a cartoon, and so, should be judged accordingly. But it sets a very recognizable and definite American standard, and if you think that it is extreme, "put on the Simpsons glasses" to have a new look at any “serious” American TV program or movie that features modern child-adult interaction. You will see the Simpsons standard all over the place, even if somewhat more subtly displayed.
So, the moral of the story is to beat your children whenever you get the chance. :eek::eek:0 -
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Egad, again this is going to be a long post! Oh well, let's go....
pwpurple:
:eek: By you perhaps, but really, by who else? Indeed, how in the world did you get this nonsense out of anything I wrote? Where you simply waiting in the wings to spring this comment on any view, whatever it was, that you had no answer for?WeeWilly, your viewpoint can be summed up as "my children are better than everyone elses."
But seriously, is this hackneyed cliche actually the sum total of what you took away from my long and painstaking labor to illustrate and provide backing and substance for my point of view? I have re-read my posting , desperately looking for anything to which your comment can be seen to apply (never mind to my entire essay) and honestly, I wonder if your remark is directed at some other posting.
I am grabbing at straws, but were you perhaps using rhetoric bombast to question my veracity - or less provocatively, my memory - at my contention that, among my childhood friends, tantrums were basically unknown? This I could certainly understand, for a very well-known way to deal with facts that do not support a point-of-view is to ignore them or to attack the purveyor of those facts. Are you commenting on my characterization of my kids? Believe me, many of their colleagues have similar characteristics - in is a nature of their environment - and I do not and did not compare them with anyone else. So, with all respect, I have absolutely no idea of how to respond to you.
But let's have a look at this tantrum issue, as I suspect this rankles with you. A few years ago, while I was out working in the garden, my immediate neighbor (viz, from the house next to mine, 13 years a neighbor) came running up to me saying that her son was having a tantrum, and could I come over to help deal with him. Regardless of how it sounds, this is not a made up story, and I am doing my best to tell it exactly as it happened. She was frantic, and so, I did deal with it to the best of my ability (and no spanking had to be employed). How is not the issue, for I am focusing on the tantrum (but, although it would be off-topic, I am ready with details if anyone examines me on the issue. I am also ready to back up my other story, in my previous post, of how my daughter dealt with the problem I described there. They were not concocted examples, created for affect. They were real!).
I am afraid, pwpurple, if indeed the tantrum issue is what you are focusing on with your provocative remark, that you will need to turn up your ignoring shields to the full, but, truly, in my growing up years, I had NEVER SEEN such a thing from anyone, and the closest to it is the incident I mentioned in my essay in passing! Well, to continue ... this neighbor's child, perhaps 6 or 7 years old, was writhing around on the floor and screaming. Moreover, although that was certainly the most pronounced example I have ever seen, I have witnessed other incidents that get close to that (on airplanes, curiously, is one place I have seen this repulsive behavior on more than one occasion. They are the product of recent years, for this never used to be the case, although children flew on planes back then, too, even if less often) ... and they are all in recent, or at least, my adult, years. In my childhood (and youth), I never saw anything at all like it.
Now, here's the thing. My children are long-since grown up, and I have relatively little to do with children any more. The subject of child rearing had never arisen with my neighbor. So why was she so helpless, and why did she run to ask for help from me? First, her three boys are utterly beyond anything that their Mum or Dad can control. My wife and I have been out to dinner with the family (we are very fond of Mum and Dad), and there - as everywhere - the children dominate absolutely everything, they take what they want from the table when they want, and in whatever amount they want. They ignore any directives that either parent bleats at them, and there is little that anyone can do to reign them in. The children have "no consequences" that they understand as such. It is an extraordinary situation, and my wife and I sit quietly ignoring this elephant in the room, with chaos prevailing around us all. Need I add that the children are something that most people would walk a long way to avoid?
Anyway, I tend to help these neighbors on such mysteries of life as fixing their plumbing or electrical emergencies, their sump pump failures, and I manage their house when they travel, and so on - for they know nothing about these things - and I helped their kids (whom I can manage quite easily, probably for ordinary reasons like merely being from outside the family) to set up their fishing rods, fixing their bikes, and so on. They are Chinese Canadians and, true to form, curiously helpless at these everyday things, and they have grown comfortable asking for assistance at need - as they are very welcome to do. With this background, it was somewhat natural for her to ask for help in the instance described.
The parents are intelligent and successful by all the means that these things are judged. He is an MD and she is a chartered accountant. They have nannies to help them. They would appear to have all the raw tools to rear their children. Mum would faithfully mouth all the PC-drenched comments found in such abundance on this forum. I know this because we discussed child-rearing at Mum's instigation after the Tantrum Event. These parents are particularly lost - not to say, incompetent, in my opinion - at raising children, or at least in dealing with them, and it is unfair to condemn an entire way of going on the basis of a single example. The thing is THEY ARE NOT AN ISOLATED EXAMPLE! Sorry for shouting, but they aren't.
I see this sort of thing fairly regularly, and yet, I have relatively little exposure to children today. I mention below, in my response to Pawwed Rig that I had [some years ago] engaged with a Canadian forum on child-rearing (with a format that featured psychologists to help answer posters' questions and concerns). The forum was inundated with postings describing children who exhibited the behavior described above, and indeed, worse. When they received "modern advice" on the forum from the Illuminati ("don't punish; redirect", "time-outs", "quiet time", "tell your child how he is distressing you", "bad choices", etc), many posters would come back later to explain how ineffective this was ... and absolutely begging for further help! I read this with incredulous interest, and was absolutely aghast at the unmitigated foolishness (and so obviously uselessness) of the advice. It was the utterly blind leading the utterly blinder. How can intelligent people (in this instance, the child-rearing "experts" on the forum) so blindly ignore the overwhelming evidence of the hopelessness of their advice, even when their faces are repeatedly being rubbed in it? Some of these children, even if not all, would quite obviously have benefited from well-applied corporal punishment. They had to be reigned in, even if only for the sanity of those around them.
More generally why is the so-bloody-obvious being pointedly ignored in favor of this PC-fueled blethering? Anyone reading the postings I describe above - one might think - must surely be asking the same question! Why, then, aren't these soi disant psychologists?
I still contend that raising children is easy ... we all have known how to do it since the beginning of time. This is not to say that it is an emotional cake-walk - everyone knows it isn't - but how it is done is known. Until, that is, this latest (past couple of decades) in a-la-modality raising child-rearing to the arcane level of a PhD-level pseudo-skill that blithely discards age-old wisdom in favor of a whole raft of non-intuitive, muddled and quite spectacularly unsuccessful blethering. I believe that young parents today (say, those born late 60's and afterwards) see a situation today that they view as the norm, and so, can no longer imagine one where this norm simply does not apply.
Of course, any reasonable person knows that not all children need the same handling, and there are children who will blithely grow up jes' fine, surviving any sort of child-rearing philosophy. But this is not universally true, and we have been quite remarkably foolish to discard corporal punishment from the proven tools available to manage and train our children. It is impossible that I can be the only one who has experienced the sort of errant child behavior that I describe here. It is far too prevalent, and I probably have less exposure to children than most of you. So where are the rest of you?
On some later posting I must relate to you some of my experiences with a security firm (I owned it with my two brothers who actually ran it) - and of my conclusions at what I saw. Again, I think that much of this is suitable fodder for this forum.
Pawwed Rig:
Of course it was tongue-in-cheek, and so, probably did not rate wagging the proverbial e-finger at me with a suggestion that I smarten up and use more obsequious and respectful - not to mention mawkish - language.I realise you were being tongue in cheek For me - and most of us, I would guess - people who truly beat children (or anyone else, for that matter) are contemptible and pathologically cruel, and reading over the posts in this thread, I see little evidence that contributors to this thread are of this sort.
There are some subjects where all humor - or worse, irreverence, even if obviously and openly light-hearted - is viewed with alarm, and as something needing swift correcting back to terms that are sepulchral, black and meticulously respectful ... the written equivalent of whispering in church. This is a sure sign that the insidious evil of PCism is at work, either actively or "re-actively". Talking child-rearing is one such subject (I dealt on a least one other [Canadian] forum devoted to this, and was surprised at how strong this was). So too are discussions about race, religion, the right to bear arms or to hunt foxes (particularly reactively, among its proponents), gender rights or characteristics, physical or mental disability, and so on. The point is that, with such subjects, there is a widespread and extreme discomfort with opinions that are frank and open - particularly those that run counter to the prevalent PC-headwind, and so, those opinions will tend to be buried under a blanket of painstaking euphemism and roundaboutation ... and, more importantly, very difficult to open up to frank examination.
Cheers.0 -
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I must confess that there is some sort of saucy imp in me that cannot resist poking a stick into the hornet's nest, although there is an end in view. Actually, I tend to choose my words with care, and it was no accident that I used the word "beat", and that I refuse to kowtow to the prevailing wind that pays obsequious homage to anything that involves the politically correct. Indeed, I warned about this before. I do this in the same way that one wets a finger and holds it up to the wind. It is a test of what is prevailing. I repeat, word-for-word what I replied before to a comment before about my using the word "beat":
Also, I find it important to know, to understand and to acknowledge that when one beats/strikes/flogs/smacks/slaps (choose one and strike out all offenders) a child that it actually causes pain. And yet I firmly believe that corporal punishment has a healthy and proper place in the parental toolkit, and that it is foolish and irresponsible to discard it so wantonly. I refuse to back off this, for the very fact that it produces pain is what makes it obviously and immediately effective. People that do not acknowledge the basic truth of this are simply burying their heads in the sand, and have long ago succumbed to the PC KoolAid I referred to before.Of course it was tongue-in-cheek, and so, probably did not rate wagging the proverbial e-finger at me with a suggestion that I smarten up and use more obsequious and respectful - not to mention mawkish - language.
For me - and most of us, I would guess - people who truly beat children (or anyone else, for that matter) are contemptible and pathologically cruel, and reading over the posts in this thread, I see little evidence that contributors to this thread are of this sort.
There are some subjects where all humor - or worse, irreverence, even if obviously and openly light-hearted - is viewed with alarm, and as something needing swift correcting back to terms that are sepulchral, black and meticulously respectful ... the written equivalent of whispering in church. This is a sure sign that the insidious evil of PCism is at work, either actively or "re-actively". Talking child-rearing is one such subject (I dealt on a least one other [Canadian] forum devoted to this, and was surprised at how strong this was). So too are discussions about race, religion, the right to bear arms or to hunt foxes (particularly reactively, among its proponents), gender rights or characteristics, physical or mental disability, and so on. The point is that, with such subjects, there is a widespread and extreme discomfort with opinions that are frank and open - particularly those that run counter to the prevalent PC-headwind, and so, those opinions will tend to be buried under a blanket of painstaking euphemism and roundaboutation ... and, more importantly, very difficult to open up to frank examination.
You see, I fervently don't believe that children are silly little sugar cubes that need to be kept constantly dry, and far away from anything that is unpleasant, or which causes pain. Again, moderation is the thing, as it is with pretty-well all things. But it terrifies me to see how kids are being molly-coddled and cutified today, how the [frankly] silly and freakish PC treatment of children, so well exemplified here, has become the norm, and how perilously near we are to having reasonable and proper care of children damned near against the law and in the hands of litany-spouting zealots!
Another story:When my daughter was 3, I took her to a birthday party for the 3-year-old son of friends of mine. At that party a film was shown for the 10 or so children at the party, while we parents sat off to one side chatting. We could see the film and the children sitting there watching the film, and we parents, too, could watch the film with desultory interest as we sat chatting. Well, the film was a Disney thing about some little animal, and about how it manages in the big wide world. Typically of this sort of Disney film, the plot of the story requires early-on that the mother of the wee animal protagonist has to be "dispatched with" so that the story can get on with the lonely wee one, out fending for itself. The way that this film handled this ticklish item was to produce a bad predator that Mum has to confront, and then to have all this confrontation occur behind a bush from which Mum never returns!When this poignant incident had taken place in the film, one wee girl - daughter, as it transpired, of the woman sitting at my table - turned around and asked her mother frantically and with great horror, "What happened to its mother, Mummy?", to which her Mum bleated out the reply "- er - she went away." Immediately, my daughter, also sitting watching this movie, turned to me and said, "That's not true, is it Daddy?" Her Dad, not always the most tactful of individuals (I was lot younger then!), replied "No! She was killed by the mountain lion!". I bet needn't dwell on what I hit I made with that wee girl's mother sitting directly across the table from me! By the way my daughter, simply accepted this, and went back to watching the movie.Interestingly, I note that no-one has made any attempt to square up to my arguments, examples, and philosophy. Instead they must needs focus all on my choice of words (that I specifically offered up as a distraction), or simply mouth off a litany they long ago ceased thinking about. By the way, I am an atheist who also argues on a forum that looks at religion, and the style and feel of arguments anti-corporal punishment and pro-religion are identical. The same again happens on a gun forum on the part of advocates of gun ownership and hunting, and on a Britsh pro-fox hunting forum (if you can imagine such a disgusting thing).
It must be very apparent, even to the casual reader of my long posts, that, my irreverence aside, I take all these issues very seriously, and I doubt that much reading between the lines is required to see that I am hardly a parent that flails cruelly away at his kids. It is exceedingly likely (but certainly unprovable) that I have spent far more "quality time" (ugh! everything in me rebels against this sort of expression) with my children that did/do most of these litany-mouthing posters. I castigate no one of you, of course, because in any particular instance I might very well be wrong!
But I feel that this PC'ist tripe - for tripe it is - has to be opposed. Educating children is now almost exclusively in the hands of women, for normal men are fleeing from being teachers in droves (for fairly obvious reasons) as we pointedly hand children increasingly heavy artillery designed specifically to attack men. I few years ago I read in Toronto's Globe and Mail an article about this, where the claim was that in 15 years the number of male teachers at high school had dropped to 10% of what it had been. A couple of my friends are female teachers, and they tell me that the few male teachers at their schools are openly gay men. Be careful, I am not anti-gay (remember my comment about my refusing to be obsequious in dealing with PC issues), but I do find it significant that all other men have [apparently] found it necessary to flee this profession.
This is a forum about corporal punishment, and I want to stay on topic, but how do you like this, in terms of sending chills of fear down your spine? - A couple of weeks ago, my 13-year old grandson in Vancouver was asked in school to write a poem with the first line "Just because I am a man I don't have to be strong". This was not a punishment or object-lesson, but a simple assignment. The school has a single gay man among the teachers (that, oddly, everyone apparently wants to be taught by), and all the rest are women. My daughter tells me that she must often rush out of the room (during parent-teacher meetings at her school) at the idiocy that is discussed and put forward, to avoid arguing, for, as she points out, she must deal with these people tomorrow!
I can only imagine the feathers I must be ruffling with this unvarnished posting. But a forum like this is for exchanging ideas, and so let's do so. I have little but contempt for a poster who swoops in, delivers an inflammatory posting, and then never returns to defend his position. But I suspect that we are nearing the point of exhausting this particular controversy.
Cheerio.0 -
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