I mean, yeah. But I choose to be kind. You can learn as much from a bad example as a good one.
Life is hard enough for people, you dont need to be artificially “toughened up.”
I’m not going to be my parents to my children.
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Thats how I’ve approached it too.
Truth be told- I don’t care if my son grows up to be what others might call a pussy or inadequate in some way. I’m not trying raise the next DeltaSeal/SpaceNinja.
I’m trying to raise a good kid that will grow up to become a happy, functioning, well adjusted adult.
One guy I used to be friends with was dumbfounded by that.
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One-fucking-thousand percent.
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I was spanked as a kid, occasionally with a belt, and it was honestly the only thing that worked at times.
I could climb out of a window if grounded and what, get grounded some more? Lose TV privilege? Who gives a fuck, I’ll climb out the window and watch it at a friends house.
Dad will be home in an hour and he’s mad? I better quit being a shithead.
It does work without leaving damage. I’m close with my parents today.
There is a difference between corporal punishment and abuse, however. A measured approach designed to modify poor behavior verses lashing out in a moment of anger and poor self-control for example.
And psychology is such a soft science it’s almost like you can pick the outcome you want to see and find the books that support it. All valid, even if contentious.
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How could that have been accomplished in any significant amount of history? Statistically speaking.
This is true. But, nonetheless, my point had nothing to do with what I believe, and everything to do with what the new Americans (colonists - now that it carries a load of connotation) believed. I didn’t have to believe a single word of the Bible and I still would have made the point in that fashion.
I hope we can agree that the colonists tended to use the Bible as a life guide, whether you or I do.
We seem to have a fairly nice slice of people from different cultures. @anna_5588 comes to mind. Maybe she can input the origin of corporal punishment in her culture.
I assure you that my parents didn’t come close to “traumatizing” me as the demands of competitive bodybuilding has.
If you are correct about the traumatization of today’s kids, you pretty much answered the question @Andrewgen_Receptors asked in this thread: “Millennials and Zoomers Are Soft.”
That pretty much includes everyone who has been born of a woman.
My sole involvement as a foster parent is with infants. When we fostered and later adopted my twins they were 8lbs and 10lbs. Now I would chasten them for one thing. If they lied to me. That was the sole action that caused physical discomfort to follow. I cannot help the child change course if I don’t know where they are.
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oh, corpral punishment in China is a matter of convenience (as a suspect is the case in most other places). Before the 1 child policy, the birthrate was high and parents had not time to carefully explain why things are bad or forbidden
A lot of corporal punishment in the past came down to punishing children for violating various forms of etiquette, much of which I find frankly inefficient; however, strict rules around respect were necessary for maintaining social order,
In other cases, corporal punishment was literally lifesaving. Better to learn to fear the rod and not jump into the river than to drown. This especially applied to young boys like my dad and his brothers and cousins. I think the kid decides it’s a great idea to shoot someone in the head at point blank range with a homemade airsoft gun deserves a spanking (yes this happened)
Maybe I missed someone mentioning it, but there’s actually some interesting research on “generation theory” from Strauss and Howe. Not accepted by conventional or academic sociologists or historians for the most part. But it has a predictive value that a lot of conventional/academic models do not.
David Frum and Tom Nichols have also written very intelligently on the sociology of generations. Again, not academic. But insightful nevertheless.
This is true and the remnants of how they guided life are still seen today. I believe those remnants, while possibly helpful at the time (again, debatable and almost impossible to answer), are now proving detrimental to moving society forward and in line with other countries that are outpacing us in educational outcomes, mental and physical health.
I think is because trauma often has the connotation that it must be a tremendous harm. That’s simply not the case. Technically every little scrape one gets is a “trauma” to the skin. Same applies for psychological trauma.
It’s the difference between a reactionary response and a thought out one. Now we all have reactionary responses to stuff, the goal is to have a vast majority more well thought out stuff.
Yes, but following that did they not lie simply out of fear of physical reprisal or because they understood why lying was wrong?
I am sure any advocate of spanking would argue the latter but barring MRI brain scans I don’t think either could say for sure, so I personally will err on the side of not hitting kids.
You write this and similar a good bit, in regards to your parents. You’re doing pretty well, aren’t you? Is it possible they didn’t screw up nearly as much as you think?
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They screwed up a lot. They also did more right than they screwed up.
Basically, they did a lot as parents and I am thankful for them
According to whom?
them
I’m pretty sure most parents will admit that they made many mistakes.
Doesn’t mean that they didn’t do a lot of things very right
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Theres a thing that happens sometimes, ironically enough.
Its when a kid ends up doing pretty well despite the parents best efforts.
There might even be a couple of examples in this thread.
This reminded me of a museum piece I saw at the Yin Yu Tang House exhibit at the Peabody-Essex Museum in Massachusetts. The childminder. This isn’t the one I saw at the museum but it’s the best picture I can find. IIRC the museum had the deluxe model, which you could light a fire under so your child doesn’t freeze while you are off doing other things.
It’s not punishment per-se, but rather a convenient way to store your child while you do other stuff. Today some people might call it “bad parenting”. I chalk it up to generational differences.
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Well, if they say it, it carries a bit more weight.
EVERYONE makes mistakes. “This is where XYZ screwed up” is different, at least in my mind, from, “XYZ made a mistake here.” The former sounds like whatever carried lasting bad consequences, while the latter sounds like whatever could probably have been done better but isn’t a big deal.
Maybe. But I don’t think she is one. It’s always sounded like her parents did a good job; just not one with which she agrees(at this time-if she has kids of her own one day, that may change).
When I initiated the corrective action it didn’t matter. I needed their attention that lying to me came at a cost. When they made a mistake, they needed to be explained why their action was inappropriate (as best they could understand.) They’ll figure why lying is wrong.
When I was growing up there didn’t exist a single person that would be an advocate for me against corporal punishment. The “brain remembered trauma” that I had was that I made a mistake. I connected poor behavior with corporal punishment. Absolutely no one suggested that I didn’t deserve the punishment. It was simple “cause and effect.”
Enter the harvesting of the seed of Dr. Spock. There grew many advocates against corporal punishment. Now the punished child is getting mixed messages. One: They were punished for poor behavior. And two: Their parents were poor parents for punishing you with the “rod.”
Now today, the mixed message has devolved to one message: Their parents are poor parents.
IMO, corporal punishment is very problematic, at least, in the United States. In many cases it is entirely off the table.
But for anyone to tell me that I would be better off had my parents “spared the rod” you have no idea how the world was in the 1950’s in the southern United States. I just roll my eyes.
I was chastened many times during the 1950’s, but never once was I traumatized.
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That you believe.
I think in many cases it’s more ignorance or the lazy way to change behavior.
Can be done without physicality.
This is a poor attempt at getting the last word. Maybe it could be applied to most everyone i grew up with. But I am logical, probably to a fault. If I don’t believe I was traumatized, then I wasn’t. It is not going to surface out of the depths of my mind at any time in my life. I am completed settled that all corporal punishment in my life was “cause and effect,” even if I might not have done what I was accused. There were plenty that I did and didn’t get caught. A rare Alpha Error didn’t negate the value of the process. There were a host of Beta Errors. How could I find trauma using that logic?
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That’s like saying if you don’t believe in gravity it doesn’t exist.
Not trying to have the last word. Almost everyone is carrying some form of trauma whether they realize it or not.
You’re applying logic to something (the base reptilian and mammalian brain) that doesn’t abide by the rules of it.