Parenting

Also, using violence as punishment for unintended stuff strikes me as totally immoral and useless to be honest.

As I've said, repeatedly, our brains are wired to avoid pain. An older child can have negative consequences (ie, future pain) explained. A toddler^** much like new military recruits cannot. A spanking gives them the immediate link this hurts and I need to stop/avoid it. And again, I'm not talking about punching babies or reaching immediately for a belt, I'm talking about an open hand slap, just hard enough to be felt and sting momentarily. And, again, it should not be the first choice of punishment, but something to utilize when other, better correction methods are not working. Which, with children, will happen.

The link was, what I was questioning. Doesn't it require the punishment to be immediate? Otherwise the child will be confused what the punishment was for. But to be immediate it needs to be the first method used.

The meaning of 'not working' for a small child is generally 'child is still actively doing/attempting to do that which is Not Good' (e.g. reaching for the knife or running into the road or mouthing something toxic, etc., etc.). So the spanking would be immediate to the behavior that the parent is attempting to curtail; it's just not the first corrective action that was tried.

I frankly cannot imagine a situation where this option would ever needed to be applied.

Could you guys bring more situations were you did use it? That would allow me to compare it to how other parents (like mine) solved such situations. I mentioned this conversation yesterday to my mother and two of her friends (also mothers and all of them teachers) and they were actually shocked to hear of the defense of spanking here.

Have you ever tried to remove a handful of dirt or anything similarly loose-grained from the hand of a toddler who doesn't want it removed? It's essentially impossible, unless you have immediate access to a sink (and even then, it's difficult).

Also, sometimes the goal is to curb a pattern of behavior, not a single incident. For instance, running into the road may be solved short-term by picking the child up and redirecting them, or physically standing in their way, or similar, but if it's a recurrent pattern, you want to teach the child to not run into the road—because there's always a risk that this time will be the time when you're not fast enough, or when you don't notice soon enough, and tragedy occurs. For some children, a scolding may be enough to curb the pattern, but others may not pay attention to that.

As far as specific examples, I can't give any because I don't have children and I can't recall that far back into my own childhood with any degree of clarity. My attitude towards spanking is 'never say never'—in other words, it's not a method I would ever want to use, but if all else came up empty, then it would be a last resort.

edited 10th Jul '14 6:30:43 PM by Nocturna

Sure, as an example I dealt with the other week. My two year old had a bottle of water, a regular bottle with a cap (and yes, he can open those). Often, that's not a problem, he'd been drinking out of it after he finished his milk and everything was fine. With about half the bottle left, he's standing on my bed^** I was letting him watch a movie while I was getting a uniform ready for work and starts tilting the bottle in an obvious fashion to pour it out. Naturally, I use the Parental Warning Tone, "Baby Ninja, don't do that." He looks up, grins unrepentantly, and starts turning the bottle a little more. As I reach for the bottle to take it away, he deliberately throws it down on the bed sans cap. For that, he got a spanking, and then sat in the corner as I turned off the movie and changed the bedding.

He has not picked up a regular water bottle all week, even though they have been available. At some point soon, I will encourage him to do so, and use it as a teaching opportunity to make him recognize that drinking is fine, dumping water out is not.

The spanking was a direct result of his deliberate action to ignore me; he is old enough that he knows what the Parental Warning Tone means, and normally obeys it.

I was trying to find information on this, but sadly, the most recent study on it was from the 80's, but there seems to be a greater than half chance of military parents to consider corporal punishment to be acceptable. Having seen this in my own experience, it does tend to be a visible tendency. I wonder what the numbers might be today, because as much as we're evolving, I've seen too many boys slapped upside the head by their Army or Marine dads for crying after getting injured while playing, for example, saying sexist nonsense like, "Are you a girl? Boys don't cry."

edited 10th Jul '14 6:45:15 PM by chi_mangetsu

That is not spanking though. That is abuse.

Better topic:

Children conceived by fertility treatments have a modest but real risk of being hospitalized due to severe psychiatric disorders.

This was a 20 year, complex survey so I feel the faith is pretty good. And they chose to focus more on those who had to actually be hospitalized. Should they have just included percentages that had to at least be treated or were simply diagnosed, I would be interested in hearing those numbers and how they compare.

My fist instinct is there are two basic things that could be working independently or in conjunction to cause this:

Fertility drugs aren't really good for you. And most of the time the very reason the woman is on such treatment is because her system isn't functioning properly, so you're combining chemicals and heavy medication with stock that isn't that healthy to begin with. This could be just pure biology not being that strong.

Another thing that comes to mind is the mentality and emotional health of women who choose to undergo these treatments. Parents who insist on having a child with their specific DNA have always confused me. Fertility treatments are expensive and the money they are spending on that could readily adopt many children who are already breathing air and happy. Again, if you even need fertility treatments you're in some stage of unhealthiness and that could impact your ability to parent. Fertility problems can strain relationships so even though the men aren't actually the ones having the baby that doesn't mean they are immune from all the health issues and problems their partner is dealing with on top of their own physical or emotional issues and problems. The woman could be the fertile one and the man the one complicating things. That is it's own bucket of worms.

I would like to see more research done to try and mitigate some of these external contributors but overall I think people considering fertility treatment need to be made aware of this so they can reevaluate if needing a child with your chromosomes is really that important or not. I would prefer more people to adopt instead of fertility treatments, but at least they should be made aware of the risks.

I'd go a bit further than that: hitting the head of a child? That's a no-no.

The "good, old clip 'round the ear" is sodding dangerous. <_< One miss thanks to an instinctive dodge, and you might take an eye out. Hit too hard, and you can concuss the child. Repeated hits around the head? Well, you may cause long-term brain damage. So: it's easy to call that abuse. Because it is. There's no excuse.

Spanking their backsides once or twice in a single go is unlikely to cause much damage. Especially if you don't break out props and remember to take any rings off (which really should be done). Spanking using more than five whacks? That's also a no-no in my book. There's no call for it: the point has been made.

The first step to fixing this noise is to deal with fools like this. (The comments... I know in principle ignoring the comments is advisable, and doubly so for The Blaze of all places, but ffs...)

as I've said, dangerous or destructive. Dumping a bottle of water on my bed may very well be harmless, but the same cannot be true for the playstation, the various laptops around the house, etc. In addition, he did so deliberately ignoring being told no which was the main reason he got spanked.

Maybe a bit off topic, but why exactly is the caning of adults bad? They do it in Singapore and it seems to work ok, imo way better than the US prison system a good portion of the time. Also I remember in middle school we would be offered the chance of a paddling or in school suspension, and the spanking was regarded as a overall better option by most people I knew.

So the main reason was disobedience, not preventing the child from harm.

I can see rationalization here.

If he picked up the idea that he could dump water on everything with his parents not liking it but not actually doing anything to stop it, that could actually lead to big consequences down the road.

And kids need to learn to follow rules. We kind of have to do that even when we're living on our own. They're called laws. Sometimes the laws seem really arbitrary and random, but they still need to be followed. That's one of the reasons kids need to follow their parents rules, so they can do the same with society's laws in the future.

A important is skill is noticing when you are confused. Notice when the rules don't make sense and figure out why instead of rationalization. People noticing the laws are harmful or don't make sense is how they get changed and the law should make sense.

Even in dual-career houses, mothers still get stuck with the majority of childcare

This is pretty depressing.

Re: IVF health effects.

I was kind of expecting these findings to come out actually.

The fertility industry always struck me as rather predatory and there's always unforeseen long term consequences with tampering with natural human development. Rarely beneficial.

Of course it might just a result of older less healthy women seeking fertility treatments. It might be a result of purely social-psychological factors as Gabrael was saying. It could quite reasonably just be a statistical fluke without any cause. There is too many variables to really say.