I got spanked and even hit a time or two as a kid.
I turned out okay considering. Had kids and thought a spanking or two wasn’t bad considering what i went though so that’s the stance i took. Thankfully we had ip cams instead of video baby monitors when they were babies. $90 vs $350 at the time so that’s what we did. I set them up with my Synology to record continuously.
I watched a monster overreact to a common child reaction. [Not justifying just explaining (I was tired and thus had a short fuse as happens at times with young kids)] Thankfully two things had happened. (1) I had the IP camera recording everything that happened, (2) I wanted to see why my kid was acting up and make sure I was in the “right” to spank her. Spoiler, I was not. I saw an angry man react to a kid who didn’t want to do something.
I cried, because I was my father when I was punished unjustly as a kid. (There were times I actually was a shit head and it was warranted, but i also remember plenty of times it was not) That morning with my 2 year old it was not. Because of that day I no longer fell into the Spanking is okay for me group.
Don’t get me wrong I know there are times it can be helpful but I realized at that moment I was not a good judge of when those times were. This means I was no longer going to do it. That was me but I don’t judge other who only spank.
I got spanked and even hit a time or two as a kid.
I turned out okay considering.
Careful. This may be a story very common among boomers, gen-x and even older millennials, but it’s gonna get you reams of downvotes here from people whose terrible experience - to them - is universal.
(FWIW: army family. Lots of “explain yourself” and only rarely was the atom bomb used)
I don’t really remember any times being spanked, though I know I was. But I do remember the time my dad put my head through the drywall for reasons I don’t remember, and the savage beating my mom gave me when I told her I didn’t want to go to church anymore. Those definitely fucked me up. Especially the latter, when I got older and realized I was queer.
Yeah, my mom was very violent, my second step dad as well. I remember the “look what you made me do”. The more I got beaten, the more my behaviour got worse.
I got placed into a foster home at 14 by childrens law (kinderrechter) because I came to school with bruises and black eyes, so my parents now are not welcome in my house or anywhere near my son…although they want to reconcile.
I have never beaten my kid and he is here at almost 20, loving his parents and doing alright. I learned from my upbringing never to beat my kid.
I am still seeing a shrink, depression from all that 40 years later. Fuck you if you beat your kids. You can set them straight by other means by taking away privileges, talking to them in a quite and composed manner, and show them ways how to do better.
I don’t think the paper is disputing the harm of abusively beating the shit out of your kids.
I think kindenough is making a point about how things can change easily. Its easy to go from “I am punishing my kid” to abuse in a split second and you may not know the difference especial if you don’t/can’t reflect on what happened. A small change over time will go unnoticed. I big change can go unnoticed if you are not watching.
Nowhere in the entire post does it say anything like this.
I’m all for legitimate papers and research challenging my views, however what kind of journal is “Marriage and Family Review”? It seems to be a little confusing with the “Marriage and Family Journal” which has been around for over 100 years. The “Review” variants has only been around since the 70s.
It seems to be primarily published through Taylor and Francis which has a mixed reputation when searching online. For others out there who are familiar with this publisher, please set me straight if my doubt is misplaced.
This is one of those papers where I look forward to having the research reproduced again in more journals, to alleviate my skepticism.
I’m not sure how assaulting children is ever going to build an effective relationship between kids and their parents. Parents should represent safety and unconditional love because then the educational message will have an easier time being accepted by the kids.
Sure, positive reinforcement is great for encouraging good behaviors. What’s effective as a positive punishment for discouraging bad behaviors?
Who says you need punishment at all?
The vast majority of misbehaviour is down to poorly-developed coping skills. Which kids have, because, y’know, they’re kids.
We all do stupid shit we know we shouldn’t, even when we know it will lead to bad outcomes for us, because fuck it.
Work is stressful, fuck it entire pizza for lunch. I’m sad and lonely, fuck it I’m calling my ex. I have a shitty headache, fuck it imma chew this stupid customer out. Omg I need to know what happens, fuck it I’m binging the rest of this series at 1am on a work night. Partyyyyyyyy fuck it lets finish the entire bottle. And so on, and so forth.
Emotion management and impulse control is a learned skill, especially when you have to integrate it with all the social stuff. People have decades of experience, and they still fuck up.
What the flying fuck do you expect from a little kid? They’re hilariously incompetent at literally everything; why do you imagine that they’d be automatically perfect at probably the most difficult complex and nuanced skillset there is? They need strategies for dealing, they need experience recognising that they need to deal, and they need time to develop enough emotional resources to take the strain.
And since when did anyone get better at learning any skill when every slipup leads to some asshole deliberately inflicting pain and/or misery on them?
That’s not how you draw a dog, Emily. :thud: You made me do that.
You missed the ball, Billy. Now you don’t get fed.
No, Kate, 5 x 8 is not 42, now I’m going to throw out all your toys.
It doesn’t work like that. People need to learn from their mistakes just as much as from their successes - which means a safe environment with support and feedback, not anxiety, fear, pain and shame.
When my kid was about 6, he had the worst time with video games. He would get frustrated when he lost, frustration would make him worse at the game, he’d start losing more and more, get even more frustrated and he’d spiral into a meltdown and storm off in rage and floods of tears and be absolutely miserable for ages.
Getting angry and melting down because you lost at a video game is entirely unacceptable behaviour, but just heaping more misery on him for doing it would have been not only highly counterproductive but a complete dick move as well.
So instead of doing that, I taught him how to manage the emotion - how to recognise the feeling of frustration, how to recognise when it was building up past his ability to handle, and then to step back and take a break until he was out of the red zone before getting back to it. It took trial and error and a whole bunch of practice, but by god it worked.
Once he got the hang of managing it, not only did the meltdowns stop, but the breaks got shorter and rarer as he smoothed out the curve and got to practice increasing his tolerance without catastrophic failure blowing the whole thing up. Before long he was actively seeking out the most ridiculous rage-games like Super Meat Boy and VVVVVV just to revel in it (and beating the shit out of me at them too, little tyke).
And this principle generalises across the board. Teach them to manage the gigantic emotions and impulses that assail them from all sides. Give them a strategy for dealing with them - and when something gets past them, acknowledge the failure, make restitution if necessary, then postmortem what went wrong and how to handle it better next time. They may not like the process, but that’s worlds away from deliberately inflicting shit on them for the sake of it.
They absolutely do need the feedback, you can’t just give blanket approval to everything and expect results - you just keep it constructive. It’s that simple. Unconditional love and they need to do better than that what the fuck little dude.
And when they’re too little to reason about stuff, that’s what the Parent Voice and judicious use of Death Glare is for. You don’t need to yell, you just go full Mufasa on them as necessary. There’s a couple of cheap tricks you can use to de-escalate threenager tantrums, mostly by interrupting the self-talk loop.
And it works. My kid got all the way through the school system without ever getting in any kind of trouble; I don’t think I needed to even tell him off about anything past the age of 10 or so. We have a great relationship, I never had to be a dickhole to my kid, and I never relied on intimidation to maintain authority through his childhood, it just naturally tapered off into mutual cooperation as he got older.
I’m not surprised at the study. It’s basically impossible to control for between individual variation sufficiently without an RCT, but that will never happen with spanking. There will always be this problem of which end to label the cart and which end to label the horse.
I guess I’ll also poke the hornet’s nest while I’m here…
I don’t really have a problem with corporal punishment. Not for children, or adults, when appropriately administrated. I say this a person who has firsthand experience with a public school that utilised corporal punishment and an angry parent just taking it out on you for being a kid.
At school a paddling was just another step in the process. You’d lose recess time, you’d have to clap erasers or write lines, you’d get sent to the principal’s office and then and only then get a paddling on you return trip if you kept it up. There always had to be two witnesses and the teacher who sent you down wasn’t allowed to do it. If that still didn’t work they would call your parents to come get you and paddle you again. The last one basically never happened
It was so different from someone who was angry at you just trying to make themselves feel better that I could easily recognize it even as a small child. It always baffles me when people deny any daylight between the two, I assume it’s born out of a very fortunate ignorance. I never felt unsafe at school. It never diminished my trust in anyone there. If I got paddled at school—I knew it was coming, I knew exactly why, and I knew I could have made a sensible choice to avoid it. That was not the case at home.
The other reason is the moral one. I never see people with well behaved children claim you can forego punishments entirely and I have yet to hear a reasonable explanation for why intentional emotional harm has more virtue in it than intentional physical harm. Because that is what the alternatives are: isolation and deprivation. A time out isn’t harmless, losing recreation and exercise time isn’t harmless, they just don’t leave marks you can see.
