Don't make me take off my belt, son

Everything else
1

Ok, so the thread about Christmas and bratty kids got me to thinking.

When I was a kid, we got paddled. I don’t remember when it started, but I do remember dreading it every time. I remember that is was always only one swat and it was the anticipation rather than the actual paddle, which stung but didn’t hurt after about 15 seconds (except for one time, see below). At first it was a ping pong paddle but as we got bigger anbd that didn’t hurt at all, my dad custom made these paddles that were bigger and meaner and hang them in the wood storage area by the fireplace. I think back then, and certainly before my generation, kids were disiplined much more harshly than today. Hell, we had corporal punishment in elementary school. I remember the principle paddling people (not me).

Every time I got paddled, I certainly deserved it. It was only in extreme cases when I got paddled, it’s not like I was paddled every single time. Some instances I remember:

  • Beating up my brother
  • Recklessly smashing a window (it was, shall we say, only semi an accident)
  • Making gasoline and styrofoam bombs back by the burn pile
  • Buring various flammable chemicals in the garage, right next to all the other flammable chemicals.

That last one got me a bit of a harder smack which left a bruise for a few days. That was the one I remember most clearly because my Mom scolded my Dad afterward when she thought I was out of earshot. It was also the last time we were paddled.

I asked my Mom about it a few years ago, and she said that if they were to do it again, there would have been no paddling. She said it was mostly a byproduct of German tradition. I’m not sure . . . it seems like sometimes it still has a place. Not having kids yet, but planning on it someday, it’s something I’m curious about.

So what’s modern parenting theory? Is there still a place or paddling, or is it all time outs and love hugs and childhood therapy sessions now?

2

I’d never hit my kids (on purpose) it’s as simple as that.

My dad smacked me once in anger, but I was being an impossible brat and considering I once threw a knife at him, I don’t think I have anything to complain about in that regard.

I can understand a parent striking their child (with a flat hand) in an extreme heated moment like when the kid just did something incredibly mean, stupid or dangerous. But planned paddling with premade implements?
That wasn’t even o.k. in my generation.

3

See, I consider it very wrong to hit the kids in anger. Paddling is/was more of a deterrent.

4

Kids with nothing to fear will run rampant.

5

I got smacked fairly frequently as a child for any number of reasons. All it taught me was to lie to my parents better.

6

First of all, I think responses aren’t very valuable without an indication of what kids and ages you have. Theory is fine, but for those on this board who don’t actually have kids, well…

I have a 7 y/o girl, 5 y/o boy, 1.5 y/o girl.

I’m not a big fan of physical punishment, but I think it has it’s place, sometimes. IIRC, when I was a kid, I was spanked, rarely. I don’t recall time-outs and such - just groundings, which really didn’t bother me much, since I liked to hang out in my room and read.

For our kids, the primary punishment is a time-out. Our oldest girl is pretty well behaved - I probably only give her a time-out once every couple weeks. Our boy is a handful - probably one time-out every couple days. The youngest is too young for any of that stuff.

Sometimes time-outs don’t work - the kid won’t stay, will be destructive, etc. In those cases, I do spank (open hand, on the backside). This is a pretty rare occurence - maybe once every 2-4 months for my boy, and perhaps once in the last year or two for my oldest girl. It gets their attention. But it also feels kinda hypocritical, as often the cause of the punishment is their violence towards someone else. i.e. Son, stop hitting your sister, and when he doesn’t, I spank (hit) him.

Hopefully it’ll phase out. Again, we hardly need timeouts or anything for my oldest girl anymore (at age 7), but used them more often with her a couple years ago.

The best behavior modifier I’ve found is distraction. If my boy is misbehaving and not listening to instructions to stop, the best way to change the behavior is to distract him with something completely different. Doesn’t work always, of course, but a very useful tool at times…

7

Oh, I agree. It’s very wrong, but at least I understand how it can happen. Note my use of the word extreme. I’ve never done it.

I have two girls, 5 and 1½, and discipline obviously only applies to one. We manage with timeouts and restricting privileges and we’ll continue to do so or we’re failing as parents - not the kids (sorry Phil).

8

Never hit in anger, occasionally paddled.

A good litmus test is this: If you’re going to dole out physical punishment, first sit the kids down for about fifteen minutes of talking. It will hurt them far, far worse than your hand. Lean heavily on family guilt and whatnot. Then give 'em a whack.

If you can’t wait the fifteen minutes to hit them, then you have the problem, not the kid.

H.

9

Out of us four kids, none of us ever got hit, except for once. My brother got the crap beat out of him for shoplifting. We were essentially all well-adjusted kids, even going through the parentals divorce, however, apparently breaking a law was the line we were not to cross. So being raised that way, it makes me feel semi ill when I see parents physically punish their kids. Especially in public.

Erik J.

10

Is there really that much “wisdom” out there that says kids shouldn’t be paddled? Looking at Houngan’s post, do people really believe that parents paddle their kids because they get off on it?

When I was young, I remember getting paddled once from my parents (once or twice from my school whose policy of three strikes and a swat was bizarre to me even then). My offense: I was 5 and as some little girl was about to sit down in front of me I pulled the chair out from under her, causing her to fall and possibly injure herself. I believe I was grounded too, I’m not sure. But I’m damn well sure I was paddled, and I never did that again or even thought about it because of it.

Was it because the everliving tar was beaten out of me? Of course not. It was because the parents that I knew loved me did something that hurt me, and it made the (proper) impression that what I’d done was egregiously, inexcusably wrong.

If you stick to timeouts of varying lengths or groundings only, what the heck do you do when the kid really screws up and it’s imperative you impress upon them that they need to never do that again? (Presumably because someone or themselves might get hurt.)

Seems like there’s a fair bit of room between pummeling your kid every time they track a leaf onto the carpet and never, ever, ever giving them even a quick smack on the rump for suspending the dog over the spike covered pit (with real nails) while playing Indiana Jones. I just don’t get the whole “If you ever touch your kid as punishment you’re a failure as a parent.” idea.

11

I grew up getting lots of paddling. My mom was my single parent and that was her favored disciplinary measure. For a while anyway, as a young kid I did not want to be paddled, it hurt, so it was a real deterrent. Until I was about 13 or so and her paddle didnt really phase me.

Then I started getting grounded instead which IMO was not effective because she overused it, but that is a little bit of tangent. The public school system took up her slack though and I would get whacked (again with a paddle) by my coaches for various insignificant offenses. A funny thing is that coaches hit harder than moms. I was frequently truant in my last year of high school and had to serve a number of detention hours to meet some kind of attendance minimum in order to graduate. We were allowed to take pops (1 pop=1 swat with a paddle) at a rate of 3=1 hour of detention. So I chose that and for like the last 2 months of school I got like 6 a day. This was a principal doing the paddling and they hit somewhere between moms and coaches but it was no big deal by that time, I was 17 or so, and sure beat the hell out of sitting in detention. I dont imagine they do much corporal punishment in schools these days but when I graduated HS in 1991, it was very common still, at least in Texas where I grew up.

So anyway. I was a proponent of this kind of discipline when I became a father, not that you go around whacking toddlers I am just saying, I thought that someday we would be paddling any misbehaving kids. I have recently come to the conclusion that it is not very effective as a discipline and its more of an outlet for my anger than a corrective tool, so thats not good. We have an almost 5 year old daughter. She will still get a swat on the bottom for occasional shock value if she is doing something really crazy and out of hand. But for the most part I find that incentives to behave and the removal of privileges for misbehavior work much better than physical punishment to correct misbehavior.

12

I just don’t get the whole “If you ever touch your kid as punishment you’re a failure as a parent.” idea.

I think there’s a mentality that kids can be reasoned with. They’re not functional yet at that age - they respond to baser fears and stimulations.

I’m not a parent but I do remember each time I received an actual spanking (twice) and I remember specifically what they were for. I deserved them and I got what was coming to me. I learned. If I had been sent to my room for a time out instead, I probably would have done them again.

13

Because corporal punishment went on back when women and darkies couldn’t vote. Therefore, as society fixes certain obvious injustices, like universal suffrage, it is obligated to discard all the other things from that era as well due to a sense of sociological self-enlightenment. By the time we’re warping around the galaxy, no one will ever be wrong; they’ll just be misunderstood.

14

One thing to note: It’s my experience/observation, and that of other parents that I’ve talked to, that young boys in particular don’t always ‘respect’ timeouts (to a greater extent than girls). i.e. You can put them in timeout, but they’re more inclined to not stay there, and/or to continue acting out while in timeout, or to venture out of timeout to continue their misbehavior, etc.

The vast majority of spanking occasions for my wife and I are after the kid has been in timeout for some time, and is clearly not respecting it. And mostly, this has been for our boy, rather than our girl. If you lack a step beyond ‘timeout’, then you risk the child learning that the punishment is toothless and can be ignored. The spankings have dropped off substantially over time (not that they were very common before) once the child learned that if they continued gross misbehavior in timeout, that something worse would happen.

Can a child be raised without spankings or anything like that? Of course. But I don’t think that “never spank” is particularly more virtuous than “rarely spank”. The key is the long term effect on the kid’s behavior and well-being. The risk of spanking is the possibility that the kid learns that violence is ok. The risk of not spanking is that the kid learns that they don’t have to obey the rules (punishment is toothless). There’s a fine line that must be navigated by the parents.

15

Yeah three boys here: 10, 8 & 7 y/o. I think it’s been a year or so since any of them have gotten a swat but when they have it’s never been done in anger. I don’t really get angry when they act up and do wrong things. I remember when I was a kid and I know how clueless I was - I don’t expect any different from my kids so no anger.

Mine are all different too. My youngest is pretty compliant and hasn’t really had much in the way of swats. My oldest tends to be more bull-headed and he’s probably gotten the most: maybe 10-12 swats from about ages 3-6.

Overall timeout and taking away privileges seems to work best but there have been those times when I thought a swat was necessary.

16

I have an 8 year old boy, and a 6 year old girl. I’m divorced, ex has the kids, so I see them on the weekends.

They’re pretty well behaved for me. I’ve spanked the girl once, and I’ve grabbed the boy on the shoulder or wrist forcefully enough to hurt him (meaning, cause him pain) a few times. Timeouts are usually sufficient.

My ex, however, does nothing but complain about the boy. She can’t control him, and he has no respect for her. She says he does some horrible things – swearing and violently beating up on his sister, and his younger half-brother (ex is a whore, but that’s another topic). When I was a child, my parents hit me using paddles, belts, whatever, and I’ve told her to do the same to my son when he acts like that.

But here’s the kicker. She’s afraid to. Because they’ll call DSS on her. The teachers will. She SWEARS that if the boy goes to school with a single mark on him, DSS is called.

In fact my son is going to counseling to help with his issues. He told the counselor that one time his mother smacked him on his face, and it left a mark (no doubt she smacked him and he ran into the bathroom to see a mild red-mark). The counselor threatened to call DSS on her.

How does this help? This is wrong. The child is not being abused, but he’s abusive. And the system is preventing the parents from disciplining him.

My ex’s youngest (different father, who’s left) is 2 or 3, and he’s a little helion. He’s needs a BEATING. I see this kid for 5 minutes every week when I pick up my kids and it’s all I can do to not belt him. He screams and hits my ex as hard as he can, all 100 pounds of her, and all she can do it tell him to stop it. I’m glad he’s not my kid, because he’s going to be a burden to society.

Hopefully my kids won’t be.

17

When I was a kid, I would get my ass handed to me quite often. I am sure I deserved some of it. Being an only child meant you did things because you were bored, and then you took all of the punishment since there was no one to share the blame. I remember being 7 or 8 years old, and my mother saying “take off your belt and give it to me”. That was just a trap. Logic says don’t do it, but saying “no” means you are gonna get hit even more. It’s definitely a lose-lose situation.

What I did learn out of that was that I would use every other thing I could on my kids before physical punishment. I believe that punishment has to be tailored to the kid. Some kids respond better to time outs than others, and so on, and you have to experiment to find what works on your kids. I have a 7 year old boy, and I have fortunately never had to lay a hand to him. He occasionally does wrong in what Bill Cosby called “brain damage”, and simple groundings have worked for us. When he was younger, we would give him timeout, but he didn’t respond to well to that initially. We took it up a notched by doing things like putting on a movie he liked, or playing a game he loved while he stood in the corner not being able to see or take part. That made all the difference in the world on our son.

18

You never hit a child in anger and generally corporal punishment should be a last resort. You explain to the little snot-goblins twice, if that doesn’t work you spank them with an open hand on the ass.

As a child gets to about 10 their reasoning power becomes a little better (If you’ve done your job right.) and hopefully explanations of cause and effect should be good enough.

My sister-in-klaw never really disciplined her son and now he has no concept of right and wrong. According to her a 2 year old is embarrassed enough by being told he is naughty. If he ever does anything wrong around other people and they shout at him he runs to mommy and she tells him what a good boy he is. His latest game is killing his sisters’ pets. (Strangely enough she is a well adjusted child who was disciplined properly.)

19

It’s a matter of guilt or stubbornness. As a kid, guilt worked far, far, far better on me than any threat of violence. It was the threat of doing the Wrong Thing.

To me, using physical discipline hardens children to both become inured to violence and (most importantly) to expect and anticipate both punishment and bad behavior. Just look at Olaf’s story; it “did me good” but he was still screwing around till the day he graduated.

To me physical punishment equates to swatting a stubborn mule or other trying to turn some brute animal. Maybe there are people whom just won’t behave unless there’s a mule driver behind them with a ready whip; hopefully by the time they get to that age, raised properly beforehand, your children won’t be ungovernable mules as well.

20

Loss of privileges is the step beyond.
I’m sure it can be done and knows plenty of examples. My governement agrees with me, since corporal punishment of any kind is against the law here (yes even paddling your own kids behind closed doors), though no cases have been brought since the law for the kind of disciplining we’re talking about in this thread.

Your argument can be applied to paddling as well - there’s plenty of examples of tough kids ignoring real physical abuse, why shouldn’t your kid learn to take a paddling and ignore it? Then they need to learn that something worse exists beyond that?!