I think we touched on this before....Follow

The punishment for your kids doing something wrong must relate in some way to what they're doing wrong. For example, you can't teach a child it's wrong to hit their little brother by spanking them.

You must correlate the punishment to the crime as much as possible. If your child isn't sharing, you take what they're not sharing away. If they watch too much TV, you take that away, etc etc.

We are?Your dad sounds like a pansy. You do, too.

Edited, Mar 15th 2007 1:29pm by Jophiel

I pushed my dad down a flight of stairs once after he hit me with the coffee table. Then I ran.

Well, did you learn your lesson? Either way he shouldn't have stopped at thirty.

I want to touch on something Joph said that I think is really important.

Corporal punishement should not be the result of any single event escalating. I think that might be where some of the confusion lies (and where it often ends up as abuse). You should not start with a child who did something minor and then escalate punishement if he's being pissy and end up with a spanking. Ever. Because in that case Smash is correct (ok. All the stuff he quoted is). The punishement does not get properly associated with the behavior. All the kid learns is that if he gets his parent(s) angry enough, they'll eventually hit him. The association becomes one of "escalate to violence if you don't get your way", which is exactly what you *don't* want to do.

I was spanked as a child, but it was always based on what I'd done. Never an escalation. If I did something very minor, I got a minor punishement (removal of toys/priviledges, extra chores, etc). There was a whole separate catagory of things that got you a spanking. Typically, this involved things that required us to actually have made a choice to be "bad", not just forgot something or failed to do something correctly. So if I decided to break my sisters dolls, I could count on a spanking, but if I accidentally left the milk out on the counter and it spoiled, that wouldn't. Arguments and disagreements about other punishements (or just in general) typically resulted in greater punishments lumped on (of the non-corporal kind). I suppose if I'd argued hard enough or tried to hit one of my parents, that likely would have resulted in a spanking, but that never happened.

In any case, I'll also disagree with something someone else said. Spanking most definately *must* be punative. If it's done "in the heat of the moment", the parent can't be sure he or she is doing it for the right reason. My dad always did the spankings and he was *never* angry when he did them. When one of us had "earned" a spanking we were told that we had. We were sent up to my parents room and given about 10 minutes to think about what we'd done. My dad would come in, have a chat about what we'd done, why it was wrong, including whatever we'd come up with while thinking about it. Then he would spank us. Afterwards, he'd spend a bit more time talking about the whole event and generally being as consoling as possible.


There were a number of issues I had with my parents when growing up. But the method and use of spanking was absolutely *not* one of them.


I'll also point out what I see as a flaw in a lot of the studies being bandied around. I don't think it's accurate to include "rate and forcefulness" of spankings when correlating results. At least not if you're trying to make an argument for or against spanking as a tool in general. If you want to talk about what kind or method of spanking is used, those numbers are useful. But spanking in general should not include those values (unless you're using them to exclude the higher frequency and/or more violent ones).

The studies seem to approach this backwards. It's backwards for exactly the reasons Joph gave earlier. The studies approach seems to actually assume that if a little bit of spanking is "good", then a lot of spankig must be "more good", and so judges spanking by ranking "more spanking" as being more indicative of spankings effectivness. By doing this they throw weight into exactly the "wrong" factors involved with spanking. It would be like trying to argue that drinking alchohol should be outlawed because the more one consumed of it, the worse their problems got. It ignores the possibility that a moderate amount may do no harm, and may actually do some good.


Um. And it also kinda ignores the possibility that in households where spanking is practiced, it's reasonable to assume that the kids who get spanked more often are more likely to be the "bad kids" in the set. We can't say with any certainty that they'd have been perfect angles if only they weren't spanked. All we can say is that they got punished using the method those parents used more often then other kids, and (surprise!) also ended up being more likely to be troublemakers later in life. Um... Maybe they're just troublemakers? It's a varient of the FSM fallacy. Certainly we should not be scaling our results based on those values...


IMO, if you want to run a study that shows the effectiveness of "spanking" versus "not spanking", you need to ignore frequency and forcefulness. Simply look at the set of all households where spanking is practices and all households where it is not. Then compare the rates of "troubled kids" between the two. If anything, you want to remove the cases where parents started out not wanting to spank their kids but changed their minds because their child turned out to be a hellion and they felt they needed to. Because you can't tell if they were hellions because they were spanked, or were spanked because they were hellions.

Grey area is the parent who thinks there's a fine line between a smack on the butt-cheek after repeated warnings, and a piano-wire throat choke for spilling the beer.

I was smacked when I was repeatedly warned about my behaviour and continued to be a little Shit. But enough about my relationship with Darqflame.

On a few occasions when nothing (but nothing) would stop bad behaviour, and warnings of a smacked bum failed, I did smack the kids.

One 2 or 3 occasions I was stressed and smacked them in temper. I felt like a **** at the time. Still do really.

Certainly. But now your study isn't testing whether spanking by itself is a bad method of discipline/punishment, but simply confirming that the children of abusive parents will have problems as they get older.

That's part of the problem with trying to just determine whether spanking itself is the problem, since abusive parents will abuse their children and call it "spanking". I'm suggesting that studies attempting to determine whether spanking when used "correctly" is a viable child rearing technique should attempt to remove those instances from the study, but pretty much all the studies Smash linked did the exact opposite. They increased the weight of their studies by factoring in frequency and forcefulness. Thus, the maybe 10% of households where spanking was used and the parents were abusive in it's use end up accounting for a much higher rate of spanking *and* a higher rate of troubled kids down the line.

Any way you look at it, if you're going to try to test spanking itself, you need to *not* weight on those factors if you want a valid result.

Absolutely. My suggestion is that this typically does not escalate into a spanking though if the kid is just being pissy about his initial punishment or repeating something he already did wrong again and again. The spanking should be done because the action taken was sufficient to warrant one (and what the criteria is exactly can vary but should be kept consistent). If the situation escalates to him throwing a plate through a window, breaking both, and that's in your "you get a spanking for this" catagory *then* you spank him. The point is that he associates the spanking with performing specific actions that are unacceptable under any situations.

I mete out punishment with a length of chain.

I grew up with a single mum that was a career woman in advertising. So yes, she was kinda stressed-out most of the time, eventhough I was the perfect son, at least until the teenage years.

I only got a smack on the butt once, for crossing the road without looking when I was 6 or 7. I almost got run over. The smack wasn't painful at all, it was more "symbolic". I'm sure subconscisouly I understood that I was being smacked because I had almost got myself killed, and that it was for my own good. When I look back on it, I don't feel anything except "Meh, I guess she was right."

The irony is that when I was 20, a girl I really liked got ran over by a car and got killed on Tottenham Court Road. I was there, and it was one of the defining moments of my life.

And hers, obviously.

But I disgress.

I agree that mild corporal punishment is "ok" in extremely rare exceptions, if it is clearly explained. Punishing without explaining creates a sense of injustice. Kids are clever enough to understand why what they do is wrong, and why they are punished. But the physical action should be symbolic, as opposed to trying to create behaviour through fear of pain.

I consider you responsible for her death, because clearly you didn't swat her on the bottom enough, a mistake I would never make. May your guilt hang over you like the impending welt of a naughty child. If you choose to make amends, I recommend you cut yourself, because it's a more adult alternative, and because being a grown-up can be lonely, when there's noone to spank you.

Edited, Mar 16th 2007 8:35am by Barkingturtle