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Your Prompt For the Day — Is Physical Discipline Bad for Children?
The editorial board of the Chicago Sun-Times is out with a piece today praising the fact that the Minnesota Vikings have decided to bench star running back Adrian Peterson until his child abuse case is resolved. In the course of doing so, they take an immoderate stance on the topic at hand:
We’re hoping … that the most important reason for Peterson’s benching doesn’t get lost in the shuffle: It’s never okay to hit a child — even if your parents did it to you and you turned out all right. Not only can it be harmful to kids, but it doesn’t change children’s behavior for the better. In other words, it doesn’t work. That includes a well-intended swat here and there.
Emphasis mine.
What say you, parents of Ricochet? Is physical discipline — even a mild swat — always inappropriate? If not, how do you approach the issue? And what of the Sun-Times’ empirical claim? Does it really never work?
(As an aside, I originally intended to include an illustration in this post of a parent giving a child a gentle spanking. Searching through our stock art database, however, only yielded menacing pictures of terrified children, sometimes with a parent’s hand holding a belt in the foreground. That seems fairly instructive about where elite opinion is on this).
Published in General
It is very illuminating and instructive to watch The Dog Whisperer (Cesar Milan). His main point is always that dogs need to know who’s the leader and they will engage in all sorts of anxious behavior until you step up. Cesar’s “corrections” are meant to convey the message, “I’m in charge here.” And immediately the dogs relax and behave. You can see what a relief it is to them to have an alpha. In my experience, it is exactly the same with children. The correction does not so much have to be painful as swift and decisive and consistent.
Yeah, my kid got a few spanks.
I had one friend who was openly against spanking and hitting a child for any reason, even discipline. For her, it was personal. When she was a child, she would occasionally get a swat out of the blue. She wouldn’t always know what, just that her parental unit was upset at her for some reason. Two things I gather here:
I saw a passage online in the context of this news where somebody tried to use as an innocuous example a parent “just losing it for a moment” after the kid torches a supermarket or something, which is exactly not the point. If a parent “just loses it”, it’s not punishment in the pursuit of discipline, but anger. And while a good frothy righteous anger really helps drive the point home, the parent must NOT lose control. Anger is fine. Losing control is not.
And almost as bad as not knowing is connecting the wrong things. When I was in high school, our family was under a lot of stress. (Living in a construction zone will do that.) Mom was always stressed out from her job, and would often yell and complain about seemingly everything — if we had just lazed around the house, that we hadn’t be working, and if we had tried to clean and cook and help out, that we had done it wrong. Well, I started making a point of being asleep when she got home, even if it meant going to sleep at 6:00 PM, just to make sure I could avoid the night’s yelling.
Mom and I still have problems dealing with each other, as for so long I felt that being around her meant I would get verbally punished in one way or another. I thought it was better to just avoid her entirely, even after moving out of the house.
I’m not a parent. But I have heard many a seasoned grandmother talk about how manipulative young kids can be if the parents don’t keep their guard up. Establishing expectations goes a long way to promoting good behavior.
Two words: paint stick. Usually free at the hardware store. Used correctly, it delivers a maximum amount of sting while inflicting a minimal amount of physical damage.
The problem is this, what is the alternative? The only ones I can think of are a.) no discipline (at least until the child grows up and goes to prison), or b.) lots of psychological games.
I taught special education for more than 40 years working with middle school kids who were diagnosed as emotionally disturbed. Corporal punishment was never an option, so it was never used, though there were times when it seemed like the ideal solution.
I never used physical punishment with my own son. I never felt the need. Hitting, like yelling, is a quick and easy solution. The problem is that in each case it eventually leads to escalation as the kid gets older and harder to deal with. I dealt with a lot of kids from single parent households in which the mother was the parent. She may have been able to use spanking as a punishment when the kids were young and small, but by the time they hit their early teens they were no longer willing to take the spanking and since nothing else had been tried and found functional, they pretty much ruled the roost.
I strongly believe in having a quiver full of arrows, don’t rely on one solution to every problem. I didn’t tell people not to use spanking, it wasn’t my place to do that. I did try to offer other techniques to give them alternatives. My own parents never hit my two brother and me, and we were hellions. My dad could scare the crap out of us with a look, but what was far more powerful was his love and our desire to please him. He wasn’t easy, but he was fair and consistent. We loved and respected him and wanted never to embarrass him by our behavior. He was an adult at all time, not our buddy, our father. I think that was probably the major reason he never had to raise his hands to us.
Usually a headline like “study finds…” vastly overstates the findings of the study (if not also reversing cause and effect, but that’s a topic for another threat). Scientists will find that of 10,000 potential influencing factors, one of them exhibits a 5% correlation (which is assumed to be causation) on the result. Journalists don’t have a clue what this means, so they turn it into a black-and-white statement.
My daughter in majoring in early education. She asked me one day if I ever spanked her.
I asked, “Don’t you remember?”
“No.”
And there’s your answer. If you swat a kid on the behind before they’re four, the correction will have been made and there’s no trauma because they don’t remember. And if they’re corrected properly, i.e. you never swat hard enough to leave any marks of any kind, then you’re set.
The problem is that people who don’t give that occasional swat have convinced themselves that children aged 2-3 can reason like an adult. They can’t.
If spanking were evil then kids would have physiological issues as adults from the beatings, therefor, millions of kids raised by christian parents would be filling up physiologists offices dealing with emotional scares from mommy and daddies whippings.
However, considering that is as common as tinker bell and magic faery dust, they really need to shut up.
Oh and here is a shocker, many adults are thankful that their parents disciplined them by whipping them. Why?, because they now know how important discipline is and they see how much less disciplined as adults they would be if they did not get whipped for disobedience.
Can you show this same thing about drunks who beat their kids, or just parents who in general beat the living daylight out of their kids No, most of those kids have seriously physiological issues as teenagers and adults. Their sure not thankful for the beating and drunken rages ether when they grow up.
Typical liberal crap, in which results are meaningless, just busy bodies little devils, in human clothing, trying to destroy our culture even more.
We should always defer to parenteral choice even with crappy parents that we can’t stand and don’t agree with what they are doing to their kids, expect in extreme cases that 90%+ of the population would consider child abuse.
On rare occasion I have spanked my kids, mostly when they were younger. It wasn’t terribly effective in correcting their behavior, so I moved on to better options. (The best discipline right now is taking away their iPod. More than once, my youngest has asked if I could spank her instead.)
But all kids are different and spanking seemed to help me as a kid. I was probably only spanked about once a year, but the threat of corporal punishment was enough to keep me on the straight and narrow. I knew several friends who were “whooped” with a switch, brush or paddle; never raised an eyebrow among us kids.
Spanking turned Jon into the well adjusted adult we see here today. That is, the google eyed man hiding behind his coffee cup giggling about brained drifters.
From the least “scientific” neighborhood of science…
“The Reformation: Can Social Scientists Save Themselves?”
http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/can-social-scientists-save-themselves-human-behavior-78858/
My parents used a shaved-down cutting board about the size of 200 page paperback. My dad recalled that the thinking of the time was you didn’t want to associate the parent’s hands with pain (something like hands are for hugging, etc…). He didn’t think much of the theory but went along with it most of the time.
One day while cleaning my mom found the paddle squirreled under my mattress, defaced in crayon. So maybe there’s something to it…
Spanking didn’t work on my oldest. Like Annefy’s daughter he would have been willing to be beaten within an inch of his life rather than obey. Every day was like taking a PhD in parenting till he left for the Army. On the other hand his three siblings smartened up with the slightest sign of disapproval. No one size fits all in the parenting world.
I did the same thing, although the parent in question was my Dad. The good thing was he worked rotating shifts – so I only confined myself to quarters when he worked the 7-3 shift. The good news is that when I was 22 he apologized. We have had a good relationship since.
I can count the number of times I spanked #1 son on one hand. #2 son is so respectful and eager, I never envision having to with him. #3 daughter on the other hand… She has already had her first, (age 4) and she is the daredevil of the bunch.
Every teacher I know, no matter their political bent, has, at some point, THAT KID. You know who I mean – the one for whom corporal punishment was invented.
The Red Sox got spanked this week and I gotta say it felt good.
I got to a point where my mom could not spank me hard enough to be effective. I wasn’t necessarily a bad kid, but I knew the consequences, decided they were worth it, and misbehaved anyway.
Dad, on the other hand, was a different story.
So, as I progressed beyond 8, I often got spanked twice.
My philosophy with my daughter was that spanking was the last resort, but it was never off the table. I think she was spanked 3 times in her life, the last when she was around 12. If I warned her she would be spanked if she did ‘it’ again, and she did it again, she was spanked. I explained to her before I did it why she had left me no choice but do so, she was warned in no uncertain terms what would happen if she did X, and then once X was done, I had no choice but follow through. She learned quickly that if I said she would be spanked, she better listen up.
If you take it off the table, you have nowhere to go when the inevitable day comes when the child just ignores you.
By the way, I was in Jr High in the early 70’s, where I got paddled by the principal about once a week with a paddle with 1 inch holes drilled in it that left round marks on the butt – for having hair that was too long. (Over the collar). How far we have come, from school officials without any permission from parents spanking (and leaving marks) for hair styles to a parent who is fired from his million dollar profession for spanking his own child.
@PHenry don’t forget he will have to keep up support payments as if he were still employed at that level. In child support issues only the dad bears the consequences of economic downturns.
I love how the Sun-Times editorial board pulls out the old “it never works” argument, just like waterboarding. Here is an experiment for them: Set up a system whereby if they break the rules while at work, the boss comes in and paddles them. See if their behavior changes. The key is known rules and known punishments executed without anger.
Maybe the spanking did work. He joined the Army rather than becoming a Portlandian.
The problem in those situations is not the spanking. The problem is that Dad is missing.
Side notes:
– I agree with what others have advised — spanking is for small children, not teens.
– I disagree that spanking (“hitting” as you call it) is like yelling. Yelling signals that the parent is out of control. Proper spanking, under the right circumstances, signals that the parent is in control.
– “Quick” and “easy” are usually good things to have in a solution.
Great that you brought that up!
My wife was horrified when I said that training a child was no different from training a dog. After we got a dog, we watched Cesar a lot. We both learned a lot, and regularly get comments on how well trained our dog, and our daughters are.
Even better, the girls learned how to train the dog (who was a handful) and learned to understand why we were doing what we were doing as parents.
It made things a lot easier on all of us!
Amen. Operant conditioning is operant conditioning; the only differences between species and ages are the behaviors you punish, the behaviors you reward, and the punishments/treats used.
And squirting toddlers with the water bottle is just as hilarious as squirting cats. Even the toddler’s mom in question agreed with me on that.
Is he running the NFL or society? Maybe the NFL should focus on their business.
““We can use the NFL to help create change,” Goodell announced, “not only in our league, but in society.”
When asked whether he has considered resigning, Goodell declared: “I have not. I’m focused on doing my job.” He insisted he should be allowed to remain as commissioner “because I acknowledged my mistake” and “we’re moving in a very important direction.”
“We’re going to clean up our house,” the commissioner promised. “We’re going to get this right. We’re going to make a difference.”
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-Sports/2014/09/19/Goodell-Press-Conference
Yes. That’s why it is done.
I never spanked my daughter, nor was I ever spanked. However, I don’t trust any of the social science that says that spanking is always bad; I am sure that the research is so biased as to be worthless.