They don’t get off on it, at least none but a very small sick minority, but anyone can strike in anger. That’s all I’m saying; take the time to make sure you are paddling the kid for his sake, not yours.
H.
Having children is a huge life change, and is not for everyone. But I think the money end of it is overrated. Yes, kids are very expensive. But in the greater scheme of things, it seems odd to avoid having kids so you can buy a PS3 on launch rather than a year or two later, or buy a new $25,000 car every 3 years rather than a used $20,000 car every 5 years. The toys (and lifestyle) we buy are pretty small potatoes in the grand scheme of things.
I’m using the money I save to get me to retirement faster, but I understand what you’re saying and for most people that point is valid. I’ve read that taking a kid from birth to leaving your house costs about $250,000 per child. That’s a lot.
The most comical are the people who have kids and also do the crazy buying stuff you mention above at the same time. Genius.
And, in fairness, you didn’t address the free time issue. I watch people with kids and they always look exhausted and continually complain about not being able to ever go out or do anything. At least until the kid is old enough to stay home alone…
I think the worst punishments I got were from my grandmother, who paddled me and actually switched me once. My parents occasionally spanked me, and when I got older they grounded me (except for one notable incident when my dad threw a shoe at me for flipping him off.)
The worst punishment that I suffered though was getting yelled at by my dad. For me, that was worse punishment than anything else, as he has a very loud voice. Even as an adult, someone yelling at me will almost automatically bring me to tears.
As for having kids myself, I don’t know. I had a stepson for a while, and he was a very difficult child, always acting up partially due to his meth-head mother. Trying to handle him and other stressors in the marriage are what caused the divorce, unfortunately. When I’m stressed out, I have a really short fuse and can get frustrated easily, and I ended up yelling at him a lot. I started hating what I felt I’d become (a screaming harridan,) so I got divorced.
Maybe it was because I was too young or something, but I have this fear that I’ll end up doing the same thing if I had kids of my own.
We had children because we are selfish. Because we want a child.
When you have a child, even as a father, something biological gets triggered, and you change. The day after my son was born, I was a different person from the person I was the day before. From the very core of my being, I became someone else.
The “trouble” of raising kids is oversold, and the reward is undersold. The feeling I get when my son laughs at me, when he gives me a big hug for no reason, when he snuggles up and goes to sleep on my shoulder – there are no feelings in the world that come even remotely close to how awesome those feelings are. And I get a shot of this drug just about every day. The value of these experiences cannot be expressed in terms of money.
And if you don’t have one, you’ll never know what it feels like, because you won’t have gone through that primal transformation of personality that occurs when you have a child that is the gateway to this kind of feeling.
It’s like a drug, man.
Wanna see happy? I showed my 2-year-old how to use the camera on my Macbook. Right-click this link, save as, and watch happy. Set to appropriately silly music.
If there’s something more fun than that, I don’t know what it is.
Is that how you got over your bipolarity too?
Just kiddin.
I think you’ve ramped the hyperbole up to 11 on that statement, but being a father certainly is a life changer.
I’ve always thought the best response for this was to explain to the child that if he wants to go into foster care, that can be arranged, and to prepare for the enjoyment of being ass raped by pedophiles who want to take in 12 year olds.
My family is also one of those interesting splits. My father had multiple kids, but I was the youngest, and the next oldest was about a decade older (so there was a big gap there, obviously). My father gave me spankings when I was very young, but young enough to the point where I almost do not remember them.
My older brothers, however, were definitely recipients of the “German childraising” school of thought. They received honest beatings for screwing up, which I am happy to say I never received. Something obviously changed in that 10 year period; in part I also just think it was the difference between the 60s (with a parent who really wished it was still the 50s) and the 70s.
And if you don’t have one, you’ll never know what it feels like, because you won’t have gone through that primal transformation of personality that occurs when you have a child that is the gateway to this kind of feeling.
The trouble is that the demo is 18 years long and you can’t quit early.
There’s an age when I think a small swat can be preferable to no swat.
A 4 year old (for example) may have no idea why running into the street after a ball is dangerous, or why grabbing at the stove is a bad idea. I’d much rather swat them once on the butt, enough to sting for a minute and startle them then try to explain “If the stove is on, you could get burned and that would hurt” and hope it sticks.
As kids get older (and they become more able to understand things), I think physical punishment becomes less “useful”. That said, there’s clearly a difference between using physical punishments and child abuse and society in general has gone WAY off the deep end in overreacting on that kind of stuff. The fact that we live in a world where parents even wonder “What will they say at school?” if their kid trips and falls/gets a bruise is proof enough of that.
Also, for the brilliant argument for quasi-fascist military governance.
Phil, Denmark’s not the only country that prohibits any kind of physical punishment, it’s illegal in Sweden too and has been for three decades. If you admit to striking your children for disciplinary reasons here the general reaction would be to see you a moral failure. The social stigma is profound to say the least which, ironically, is far more of a deterrant for parents to strike their children than the actual legal punishment would ever be.
I would strongly disagree with you that the law is terrible. The point of the law is that children are to be regarded as individuals with the same protection as other members of society. The government interacts with individuals, not the family unit.
I can understand a blow in anger, though I can never condone it, but considering how much absolute power parents already have over their kids lives I cannot see why anyone can think physical punishment is a necessary part of the arsenal.
Five year olds are not citizens in the sense that 18 year olds are. They can’t make ‘adult’ decisions for themselves. They must be cared for and raised. That’s what parents are for (not the state). And for the state to presume that it knows more than multiple millenia of child-rearing tradtion, across many cultures, is quite foolish in my opinion.
I think it depends on the size of the country, the uniformity of it’s culture, and other factors. For instance, there’s a long tradition among some cultures for female circumcision, for example. Would it be over nannying for a country to ban that? It’s all a manner of degree.
Multiple milennia of tradition also held that women could be subjected to physical discipline by the head of the household. We did away with that notion just a couple generations ago.
To paraphrase Hobbes, the life of man for most of our existance on this planet has been poor, nasty, brutish, and short. We are trying to break with the past for a reason.
No, children can’t make adult decisions. And yes, they must be cared for and raised. But what makes you think that you cannot do this if you are unable to use violence against them?
There are so many differences between the occasional spanking for an errant 5 year old, versus female circumcision or wife-beating, that it’s almost laughable that those are the best comparisons cited.
Obviously, there is a huge difference in scale (relatively mnor, temporary physical pain designed to teach a small child social norms and/or avoid serious injury, versus permanent mutilation or hard core violence against an adult).
But also, consider this: All children eventually grow into adults. Most adults who were mildly spanked as children, looking back on it as adults see it as a relatively good thing (taught them discipline when simpler measures failed). For evidence of this, see the many comments in this thread to that effect.
But with your two examples, I doubt most of the victims, interviewed after the fact, would agree that the action was merited. (Actually, perhaps I shouldn’t make the comment about female circumcision, as I know little about it. Most males circumcised as babies don’t regret it as adults. That said, I know female circumcision is very different, but I don’t know enough about it to speak with confidence…)
I don’t spank my kids. Or hit them in anyway. I never have and I plan on keeping to that policy, no matter much my son pushes us to the edge sometimes. :)
I have a 1 year old daughter, a 3 year old son and a 8 year old daughter. My oldest is horribly well behaved and hardly never needs to be punished. My youngest is a booger (don’t do that Abby, she’ll look back at you, grin and go for it), but she’s to early to understand any kind of punishment so she doesn’t get in any trouble other than being told no.
My son on the other hand… He’s fucking asshole (ever watch Louie on HBO?). Really, he’s a sweet, adorable, smart little guy who is extremely stubborn and likes to push and do things just because he knows they bother us.
To punish him, he loses privileges, his toys, goes to bed early and has to spend a lot of time in his bed. About the time the terrible twos rolled around, he wasn’t listening for jack. He would hit and try to bite and so on and get into anything he could. So he spent a lot of time in time out in his bed. Sometimes (though rarely) whole days. He would get out of his bed, we’d pick him back up and put him back in his bed. He’d throw things, we’d take them away, he’d try to break things in his room, we’d take them away (at one point, he nothing bet a dresser left in his room). We had the shelves lined with toys that were taken away for breaking one rule or another, or just not listening. If he tried to hit us with things or throw them at us, instead of just throwing them around, we threw them away (that stopped that part if it pretty quick, of course).
My wife and I really considered spanking at one point, but shied away from it because neither of us believe in it. So we just stayed consistent, tried not to let our anger show (that’s a big one…if it isn’t affecting you, at least in appearance, they much less likely to do it again), always keep escalating it until he listened and responded correctly (“quit it!” isn’t an answer :P ), and overall waited him out.
Now, as he’s almost four, he hardly ever has to spend time in his bed and other than some sharing issues with his little sister, he’s doing much better. He came around. He has almost all of his toys all the time and though we still don’t turn our backs on the sneaky bugger, he doesn’t get into stuff as much. And punishment has progressed from time outs to working. Either cleaning his room, or the play space, or something… this is even more effective, of course. :)
We both came into the relationship not wanting to hit our kids. I was the oldest of 3 and took my spankings from time to time (though rarely) and saw my brothers and step brother take them more often. And I saw, even when I was really young, how hypocritical it was. I made my decision to never hit my kids when I was 10. My wife came from a very abusive father physically and otherwise and spent a lot of time being angry at everything and when she came around the other side somewhat, she started to work through it and decided if she ever had kids, she’d never hit them. So we were both on the same page on that and talked about it a lot before we decided to have kids.
Basically, I don’t agree with even spanking your kids, though I told my wife that I might consider it if they ever did anything really dangerous (played with the stove, lit things on fire, etc), but we haven’t had that and I don’t think I’ll do it then either. I just can’t wrap my brain around hitting my children to explain to them to behave.
My kids will, and do, behave because it’s their misery if they don’t. I can make them miserable, and get them to understand how it’s completely unacceptable without hitting them.
That being said… I try not to condemn other peoples methods of parenting. I don’t agree with it or condone it, but I can’t say I’m absolutely right either. Though if it gets into levels of abuse, I’ll say something. And as a last resort, I’d call a HRS type agency, but they are almost never a solution. Especially here in Florida.
Phil, my point was that there was no difference between disciplining children and disciplining the spouse for all those milennia of tradition you cited. Today we consider all types of violence against spouses as abuse. A hundred years ago a man could slap his wife and have this mild form of violence considered proper while breaking her arm would be seen as excessive or even sanctionable. Same as the difference between a “mild spanking” and “fist to face” in child-rearing terms today.
Consider that most adults who see spanking as a good thing were brought up with the notion that spanking imparted discipline and was good for them. And to further complicate matters, it was done by their parents who by definition would only want the very best for their children. It takes a leap to get out of the feedback loop there.
A hundred or so years ago, some parts of society treated several classes of 18+ year old individuals of full mental competency as inferior, and/or incapable of making their own decisions (blacks/slaves, women, jews, etc…)
It is admirable that society has progressed and we no longer do so. But five year olds are quite different from those other classes, and I doubt very much that the day will come anytime soon when they are treated as having full mental competency and the ability to make their own decisions.
Also, I suspect that wife beating has never (or even wife cuffing), has never had as much support (in Western nations anyways), as child spanking.
I think that the point was that not all age old wisdoms are true or acceptable, not that they are comparable in other ways.
As Kalle said spanking has been illegal in Sweden for thirty years, and it socially unacceptable. Sweden has yet to devolve into a post apocalyptic wasteland, but perhaps the dire reprecussions of not hitting children is just around the corner. My limited interactions with Amnerican teens some fifteen years ago in no way indicated that they woulkd turn out better than unspanked Swedish ones, they were more deferent to the teachers though, if that is a good thing I do not know.
I don’t think an unspanked child is necessarily going to turn out worse than a spanked one (this issue being only one small one among many that affect how a child is raised). But I am surprised and dismayed that a nation would feel the need/right to intervene in parenting at so basic a level. I thought Scandanavian nations were supposed to be more socially progressive, and hence have LESS government nannyism?
One consequence I might expect to see if a government went too far in asserting that IT controls the basic relationship of the parents and the child, is that, over the long term, folks would be less inclined to have children. i.e. If it’s gonna be the government’s kid in the end, and the government calling many of the shots, why should I go through the trouble?
In fact, we see here that the birth rate in Sweden has fallen from 14 to 11 per thousand, from 1990 to 2005. It is falling in the U.S., too, but from a higher base and at a slower rate (from 16 to 14 over the same time span). These stats are admittedly imprecise (point me to better ones if you find them), and also, from 1970 on to 2005, the US falls one pip further (from 17 to 14 - Sweden was already at 14 in 1970), though again, that’s a smaller percentage of the starting value…
And I don’t mean to imply that this is some kind of “if I can’t spank my kids, I won’t have any thing”, but rather, a reflection on whether a society views its children as first and foremost, wards of their family, or wards of the state. This issue is only one among many that would go into that.
Sweden invented these things called “condoms” in the 70s but the US government isn’t allowing us to import them for fear they’ll erode our society.
Don’t I know it. All we can find here in the USA are those funny looking balloons that are kind of oily on the outside. They come in a funny wrapper, too…