Undoubtedly, we have all been raised with different tolerance levels, different moral limitations, and various ethical standards and codes. Whereas some of us view spanking a child as barbaric, others see no problem with such disciplinary tactics at all.
Some will only slap a hand, while others will smack a bottom here or there; some might stop at one or two wacks and others at three or maybe even four.
I was out at a Comics store today when I watched as a child ran in fear from his father after asking "too many questions". The father chased this little boy, maybe about 5 or 6 years old, around a busy parking lot and when he caught him, he back-handed the boy in the face two or three times, then dragged the boy back into the store and told the child to apologize to us for making such a scene.
I thought this was crazy. While the father had been chasing the boy, the store owner, a friend of mine, called Child Protection Services to please come and look into things. CPS sent the police, who arrived after the father had already come back in. While the man was paying for his things, the police began questioning him. Eventually, they apologized to him for any inconvenience, and then informed us that the father had a right to discipline his child in any way he saw fit.
This shocked me; with all of the child protection laws in place, and so much controversy over how many times parents should be able to hit their children, I honestly thought that this father would be told to go into some sort of counseling or parenting class or something to ensure the safety of this child. And yet the police seemed to think that nothing was wrong at all with back-handing this child.
Where should the limits be?
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There are ways to draw lines for physical punishment,
but you can't tell parents what to punish and not punish and all the emotional abuse and trauma that comes with that sort of parent is hard to measure.
I guess another question is : How do we enforce them?
(Oh and I definately think back handing should be past the limit for physical punishment--but then again, how many a perfectly fine parent has snapped once or twice and hit there kid when they shouldnt have/harder than they shouldn't have, we'd have a lot more foster children)
I support spanking. I think that if a child does something wrong they should get a spanking. I was brought up that way. But just ONE spanking. Thats where I draw the line, I think that the man you saw went to far. There is no reason to back hand a child like that, especially since all he did was ask to many questions, I think the police should have done more.
public display of discpline is my limit. I can wait to i get home in teh prviacy of my own house to spank my non existant children. I think it makes the children scared when they hav to wait for the beating. i know my little cousins know that the mean face means you go to far and to stay away from punishment they are goood.
Conformity is the jailor of freedom and the enemy of growth!~JFK
I am pro-spanking, but do think that that Dad behaved excessively. Personally, I think "spanking" means whacks on the bottom, not the face. But there are many complicating factors. One is the question of whether the remedy of involving CPS is not worse than the discipline itself. Even in cases where kids are clearly abused, it is traumatic for them to be removed from their homes, or for their parent to be forced to reside elsewhere. Sometimes it's the lesser of two evils, but it's never an easy choice. In borderline cases, it's usually better to leave bad enough alone.
The other constraint is on the child welfare system itself. There is a difference between bad parenting and child abuse. The more time is spent dealing with the former, the less resources there are to tackle the latter. As bad as I think backhanding your kid repeatedly in the face in public is, I think until there are no kids who are raped, starved, burned with cigarettes, beaten with fists or punched out, etc. do we have the right to start going after discipline that is merely excessive.
Lastly, every one of us who is a parent, before we cast stones at others, ought to ask ourselves how we would look if the worst thing we ever did as parents were preserved on videotape. I think we would all be ashamed of what we saw. So we need to cut a little more slack for other people who may just be in the same boat. As Ana said, we can't tell if a good parent has simply reached the end of his/her tether--and we can't start harrassing or locking up every parent in that situation. Ethical questions aside, there simply isn't enough money in the foster system to do that!
My mother spanked me when I was little. Her system was 1 spank for each year - a 3-year-old got 3, a 10-year-old got 10, etc. She would vary the force by how bad what I'd done was. However, when I was 8, and my sisters were 6 and 3, she stopped spanking and doing time-outs, 1 minute for each year. I have learned that time-outs teach NOTHING! My 3-year-old sister thought that time-out was nap time, and never learned a thing. She's now a habitual shoplifter and a compulsive liar, because she was never taught any better.
> I have learned that time-outs teach NOTHING!
> My 3-year-old sister thought that time-out was
> nap time, and never learned a thing.
...but from what you said hear, it sounds like the time out technique was not being correctly applied to your sister. If your sister was sleeping during time out, why wasn't her parent standing there making sure that she stayed awake? Time out isn't an excuse to avoid having to be involved in a child's discipline. You still have to be there and you have to focus your attention on the disciplinary act.
percivale
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"Vi Veri Vniversum Vivus Vici." ~ V.
Thanks Percivale; I was going to say something similar but I'm sure your wording is much better
When I was growing up my "time-outs" involved writing essays. Spelling and grammar counted, I had to explain what I did, what my thought process was at the time, why I did it, what alternative actions I could have taken, and possible outcomes for each alternative course of action. I wasn't let out of time out until this was finished.
My sister, on the other hand, simply got grounded and things taken away for a specific amount of time (usually a week). We were motivated by completely different things - she was more materialistic and taking away her things usually hurt her; I was more social and keeping me at the dinner table to write these essays while my friends were playing usually hurt me.
Now that Brandon, my 6 year old nephew/Godson, is writing legibly, I have started him on the essay writing. And so far it is working at least in the sense that he is begining to use critical thinking about most of his actions before hand. He still gets into trouble when something involving emotion comes into play - like when someone hit his little sister at the park - but for other things he has a much fuller understanding than he used to - LOL, and his handwriting and sentence structure is excellent for a 6 year old
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"Dream as though you'll live forever, but live as though there's no tomorrow" --James Dean
Fanaile Essence,
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This is not only the cutest punishment I've ever heard of, it's also probably the most productive and effective. No wonder you're such a good writer! Lol Usually I got the typical time out or grounding, or the occasional smack on the butt. It didn't teach me not to do things, it only taught me not to get caught. Your parents' method is much more effective, I'm sure getting a child to think about what they did, why it was wrong, and what they could have done instead really helps analytical thinking.
Personally, I think hitting a child at all is wrong, it only teaches them to hit others and to instill fear instead of talking and working things out. I can't believe the police did nothing to that man, just goes to show that children are the least protected individuals under our present legal system. Although it doesn't surprise me much, many times the police don't do anything to men who beat their wives either, they just tell them to take a walk and cool down. If you did that kind of thing to people your own age it would be assault, but if done to a child it becomes discipline.
-JP
Our time-outs usually involved sitting or standing in a corner or near a blank bit of wall, away from toys, books, and TV. My mom was, at that point, in college (she started at 32), and was busy studying, or was talking to her friends online. I was usually cooking or cleaning, so I couldn't do anything (I had to start cleaning everything at 8, and cooking at 10), and I have no idea what my other sister was doing. Our parents are divorced, so Dad was so far out of the picture that he couldn't do anything if he wanted to.
...but it seems a bit irresponsible to say that "I have learned that time-outs teach NOTHING!" when you really didn't take the necessary steps to make sure that it worked. Effective parenting requires intense and constant involvement by the child's parents, regardless of the particular techniques you use, and NONE of them are going to work if you aren't there to make sure that the do.
percivale
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"Vi Veri Vniversum Vivus Vici." ~ V.
Wow, that sounds rough;
My mother was working full time and going to school full time when I was young. And she was divorced from my dad who was in the Army stationed in Germany. It can be rough.
Although, I made my first cake when I was 8, and I absolutely loved baking it. I very much enjoy baking and cooking to this day.
My mother was amazing when Becca and I were small though; working full time and going to school full time for as long as I'd known her (she still takes a couple courses here and there) to acquire 3 Masters' - and we always had a hot breakfast together and a big supper together. I don't know how she did it since she was alone (parents and siblings all died young) but she managed her time wonderfully.
Honestly, it does sound like poor time management more than anything else. So it is a little unfair to say that time-outs don't do anything when the circumstances around discipline were not adequately timed.
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"Dream as though you'll live forever, but live as though there's no tomorrow" --James Dean
Fanaile Essence,
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That's true, but even when the time-outs were enforced properly, all they accomplished was making our feet and legs sore. We once had to stand against a wall for two hours because someone had taken or used something of our mother's without permission. She knew who had done it, yet punished us all. I kept saying I did it to try to get us out of it, but she knew who did it and wouldn't let any of us go, apparently expecting us to snitch, though only the one who did it knew who she was. She's done that multiple times - once keeping us in the car, in the middle of August, with the air off. What's the irony in all this? The woman went to school to be a social worker. She's supposed to know how to punish kids properly.
Wow - that's absolutely amazing.
My mom had it a little rough with the two of us growing up mostly because we never tattled on each other. I had a traumatic experience with tattling and she just kind of followed suit. But it meant most of the time we were both punished until she could find proof of "who did it" type of thing. I think that's a normal thing to do.
But, the point of a time out is to not physically harm the child during discipline... If standing next to a wall wasn't working then she should have tried something else - something verbal maybe.
Anyway, the point is that time-outs can work. They must be done properly and in conjunction with some other exercise (or talking) since the point of them is to make the child think about what he or she had done.
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"Dream as though you'll live forever, but live as though there's no tomorrow" --James Dean
Fanaile Essence,
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True, but not many parents enforce time-out properly. Yours did, in a very good manner. However, parents will frequently just make the kids stay in their rooms with their TV's, video games, computers, toys, or whatever they happen to have.
But that's not the point they're trying to make. They're saying that time-outs ARE effective, so long as the parents enforce it properly. So the claim that time-outs just don't work isn't accurate... it depends on how the parent moderates those time-outs.
There's something to be said about respect as well. I've gotten to the point where I can make my sister cry and apologize again and again for doing something wrong by just looking sad that she did it. Then she gets to the point where she feels extreme guilt for something happening that wasn't even her fault.
~C
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Yes, I know. I'm just giving more examples of situations where they don't work. Parents today are too afraid that their kids won't like them, so they won't step up and be parents. It's ridiculous.
I once had to stand in the corner from breakfast to lunch, and lunch to dinner, two days in a row!
We used to have to clean our room every weekend, and we weren't allowed to eat until it was clean. Keep in mind, I was 6, Erin was 5, and Lauren was 1, and we would have everything on the floor at that point. We would also get spanked every five minutes or so because we weren't done yet. I once got an extra spanking because I decided to sneak out for a drink of water. Grr. Point is, my mom's just annoying.
I once had to carry a pile of wood from one end of the yard and back in one day (and I had to keep doing it until that wood was moved in one day). I was like...6 at the time, and one night, my dad was leaving for work, and I got scared, because it was dark out, and I stopped with only a little bit of wood left, and my stepmom decided to punish me more by giving everything in my room to my little sister.
I hate her with a passion.
~C
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I am very worried about my 6 year old, he is an only child and he shows his dominance toward other children where ever we go it is very odd but they all seem to follow him in all his masterminded plans. Somtimes he gets rough if he buts heads with them and yells/pulls at them (very rarely but he did make one mother very upset about her daughter) In the beginning be fore I ever had a child I thought I had all the answers that somehow I could do this better than the parents who yelled and quarreled with their children. How wrong could I be. I am either worried, frustrated, or overjoyed constantly. He tries to boss me around and sass me when I need him to be on his best behavior and through all the time I have spent with him It makes me look very foolish to other parents. I know some of his misbehavior comes from seeing other families, I am a single mother without anyone in the world, I left his father because of abuse towards me and later he was violently abusive to my son, my own family on drugs, and his fathers family thinks I am making the abuse up and won't allow me into their home and I will not subject my son to that. I am just lucky his father understands I'll shoot him and leaves us alone now after stalking me like a freak for three years and three am phone calls begging me to come back and threating to kill me and my imaginary boyfriend (most of this was before the abuse of my son that I should have seen coming that makes me feel horrible I really wanted him to have his natural father). I had always been against spanking I could usually talk to him and cuddle to get the message across but in the last 2 years things have gone down hill, it isn't just the dominance his daycare, school, and I have witness absolute disrepect, kicking walls, screaming, saying NO NO NO when you try to talk to him (talk about your problem child imagine the movie) It was at his 3rd daycare that she told me to start spanking him he was 4 then now he is almost 7. When she had a rough day with him I would spank him not hard but I would be stern with my voice. Now don't get me wrong he gets like that he can be an angel for days then BAM hell on wheels, I don't understand it, his teacher said the same thing I don't know what triggers this difiance but one thing for sure it is a night and day angel to the worst behavior of the class(daycare providers and his teacher have singled him out this way) Then spankings to get more severe but not out of anger, more that he is getting older. I have been researching and I find that I don't know the right answer anymore, I want him to be happy, I want to disipline him properly, I don't want him to feel unnessassary anger, I want to guide him He is everything to me. I am so worried he has gotten some of the characteristics of his father especially the defiance. I know this one is tricky be is anyone has anything constructive to say I would appreciate it
P.S. I already know I screwed up allowing him to see his father there is no need to remind me
I suggest taking him to a behavioral specialist. I was like that when I was little (I got kicked out of a daycare for hitting another child), then I was diagnosed with ADHD and put on medication, which really helped. I payed attention and was much more obedient. He may have some other learning disorder, or it may be the same thing.