I cannot believe there are still people out there spanking their children...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:At the school where I teach, we can tell the kids who are regularly hit at home. They figure out that the teachers aren’t allowed to hit them and they do whatever they want, because that is the only authority they recognize. I even had one mother shrug and say, “the only thing he listens to is the belt.”

I was a teacher and the kids that were spanked were at the two extremes. They were often the best behaved and politest students and it was delightful to work with them or they were the worst behaved because they were just really difficult kids and their parents who might not have spanked their other kids were trying everything to get them to listen and to behave.

My oldest was a really easy kid and I never had to discipline him in any way. My youngest tested every boundary and when he ran into the street when he was four I did spank him. It was the only thing that worked.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:if i ever feel like i'm being a bad parent i think - at least i dont hit my kids. I dont know how you could hit a kid and sleep well at night. nuts.

I was spanked a handful of times growing up and that bothered me not one bit growing up. It was the emotional neglect and passive aggression in my household that effed me up. Don't be so smug.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Me and all my siblings were spanked. We're all okay. We grew up well-behaved too.

I was too. It was not a huge deal. I cannot believe how aghast and melodramatic this OP is. I say this as someone who doesn't spank my own kids.

Why do you not?

I try to be the very best parent I can. I don't always succeed. But I try not to yell, I limit screen time and sugar, I try to do enriching activities with my kids etc. I also recognize that I have resources that others do not have (it would be harder to be a gentle parent if I had more kids, didn't have an involved DH, worked longer hours with more stress etc.) They are also not amazingly well behaved or anything. So I'm not saying I or my kids are perfect.

I don't think anyone is saying spanking is A+ parenting or the best approach. The question is whether it is so *shocking* or ways horrible, or it's just on the spectrum of things that happens in different families.

As for myself, my parents were immigrants and it was common there and still is. It wasn't something malicious, just th norm to them. To me it's not the norm and I try to avoid.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s now the official position of the United States government that corporal punishment should not be used to manage children in our public schools - and quite obviously the intent is to signal that same position to parents. This statement by the US secretary of education is full of hyperlinks to the latest research on what it does to children.
https://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/secletter/230324.html

This next piece is nearly 10 years old, but the statistics on use of physical punishment in parenting remain about the same today. American mothers, by a wide margin, endorse and employ physical violence in managing their children’s behaviors. Americans fathers with access to their children also use physical violence in parenting.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/hitting-ki...20the%20past%20year.


The older I get the less puzzled I am by how many wounded people there are in the world and how much violence. I grew up in a violent home where both parents seemed to get off on managing typical, developmentally appropriate child behavior with regular beatings by fist, yardstick, belt, and dog leash. We lived in fear of our parents, didn’t have close emotional bonds with them and we all have the spectrum of midlife dysfunction and disorders as a result. My two siblings who had children repeated the pattern and it has been upsetting to see the results there, too.

I grew up to be a commitment phobic childless workaholic, first as a domestic violence advocate then as an attorney prosecuting abusers of all stripes. I also carried cases for many years in dependency/neglect court and the juvenile justice system. The link between violence in the home and in one’s early childhood experience and later dysfunction of all kinds is beat your head against a brick wall undeniable. Yet people continue to beat their kids and call it love.

Peace on earth begins at home, we say in the DV movement.

The only people you work with, the people you've worked with for years and years, are victims of domestic violence and abuse. So you think everyone is an abuser.

ER doctors are well known to be bad at risk assessment. Police are well known to think everyone is a criminal. You think everyone is an abuser.

Not true. Beyond my years in law enforcement I also have spent years as an educator and hospice caregiver among many families who have not been involved in the system but who employ(ed) corporal punishment in child rearing. I cannot begin to tell you the laments I have heard on people’s deathbeds.

Those of you who hit your children - they NEVER forget it. The hurt and rejection it puts into their hearts will be something they tell a caregiver about when they are dying 70 years later. It will be something that they understand drove much of the unhappiness in their lives and in their adult relationships and which troubled their own experience of parenting because raising kids makes them fully understand how badly they were treated. And for many generations it is also something that it is never okay to talk about, because we must honor our mother and father even if they hit us regularly and called it for our own good, told us we deserved it. So it’s something they finally cry about in tbr months and weeks leading to their dying and leaving this earth - and that’s the one legacy you’ve passed on that some hospice caregiver knows about you decades hence.

I have no doubt you’ll stay in denial and justify to yourself every time you hit your kid (and *you* never do it in anger, you’re perfect after all) that it’s for their own good. And all the professionals who have studied this for years are just full of crap. As if it’s not plain common sense that getting hit hurts both physically and psychologically, none of us likes it, why on earth would you inflict it on the people you claim are the most important in your life?

It’s insanity. People who physically assault their children and call it love are deluded and mentally weak.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:if i ever feel like i'm being a bad parent i think - at least i dont hit my kids. I dont know how you could hit a kid and sleep well at night. nuts.

I doubt you’ll believe me, but I was the sensitive kid that a PP referenced (not literally). I didn’t often get in trouble, but when I did, I was devastated. Sometimes this was at school, usually for something relating to being smart and bored and doing something stupid or just fooling around. Knowing that I was in trouble with my parents was devastating, even, maybe especially, when all they did was talk about it, and talk about how serious school is and it’s akin to my job, and on and on. These things could actually induce a nervous tic in me, which, fortunately, would last only a few months, at most.

Conversely, the few times I was spanked as a kid, they were never over the top about it, it wasn’t abusive, but it was the traditional, old fashioned kind of spanking. Somehow, I just got over it; I felt like the price was paid and we could all move on. I never had a problem with it afterwards.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Spanking is so trashy. The only parents I know who talk about giving their kids a “good seat to the behind” cite the Bible in their parenting and are conservative. I don’t know anyone well educated and financially comfortable who resorts to this. We have other ways of instilling values in our children that don’t involve violence.

+1 absolutely trashy and low class. Associated with shitty parents who are poor and desperate and not yet mature adults themselves.

[Anonymous]

“ they NEVER forget it. The hurt and rejection it puts into their hearts will be something they tell a caregiver about when they are dying 70 years later. It will be something that they understand drove much of the unhappiness in their lives and in their adult relationships and which troubled their own experience of parenting because raising kids makes them fully understand how badly they were treated.”

Sorry, but this is simply absurd.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I’m well-educated and very comfortable financially, and I’ve used spanking as a disciplinary option.

saying you're a well educated spanker is an oxymoron.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m well-educated and very comfortable financially, and I’ve used spanking as a disciplinary option.

saying you're a well educated spanker is an oxymoron.

That term doesn’t mean what you think it means.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:if i ever feel like i'm being a bad parent i think - at least i dont hit my kids. I dont know how you could hit a kid and sleep well at night. nuts.

I was spanked a handful of times growing up and that bothered me not one bit growing up. It was the emotional neglect and passive aggression in my household that effed me up. Don't be so smug.

how can you tell the difference?
also spanking is emotional neglect.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:At the school where I teach, we can tell the kids who are regularly hit at home. They figure out that the teachers aren’t allowed to hit them and they do whatever they want, because that is the only authority they recognize. I even had one mother shrug and say, “the only thing he listens to is the belt.”

I was a teacher and the kids that were spanked were at the two extremes. They were often the best behaved and politest students and it was delightful to work with them or they were the worst behaved because they were just really difficult kids and their parents who might not have spanked their other kids were trying everything to get them to listen and to behave.

My oldest was a really easy kid and I never had to discipline him in any way. My youngest tested every boundary and when he ran into the street when he was four I did spank him. It was the only thing that worked.

I was this first kid, and let me tell you - this does NOT translate well for mental health in adulthood. To say the least. And I was probably only spanked 3 or 4 times, and never harshly… but the threat was still there, and it affects me deeply.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m well-educated and very comfortable financially, and I’ve used spanking as a disciplinary option.

saying you're a well educated spanker is an oxymoron.

That term doesn’t mean what you think it means.

really? a self contradicting group of words is not correct here?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Spanking is so trashy. The only parents I know who talk about giving their kids a “good seat to the behind” cite the Bible in their parenting and are conservative. I don’t know anyone well educated and financially comfortable who resorts to this. We have other ways of instilling values in our children that don’t involve violence.

Most people, including UC, UMC, and everyone else, spanks their kids. You may think that everyone is trashy but that's a different post.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m well-educated and very comfortable financially, and I’ve used spanking as a disciplinary option.

saying you're a well educated spanker is an oxymoron.

+1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m well-educated and very comfortable financially, and I’ve used spanking as a disciplinary option.

saying you're a well educated spanker is an oxymoron.

That term doesn’t mean what you think it means.

really? a self contradicting group of words is not correct here?

No, it’s not.