I disagree with the very notion that spanking a child is violence against them. In the same way that I disagree with the notion that if I accidentally burn myself on a hot stove, the stove is somehow perpetuating violence against me.
You realize saying that the, “I don’t mean to imply” part, doesn’t actually change that you just spent three paragraphs saying that, not implying it.
It’s a very interesting conclusion you’ve drawn and takes into account nothing but what you want as factors. Congrats on jumping to conclusions based upon silliness.
You accidently burning yourself is the same thing as someone hitting you on purpose? Lousy analogy.
I mean that such a law, in and of itself, wouldn’t lead to the conclusion (no children), but rather, that it would contribute to an overall attitude of government rearing of the children being primary rather than parents. And that, in turn, would be a disincentive to having children.
Perhaps I left a small gap in the logic, but I assumed the reader would be able to cross that gap on his/her own. Next time, I will proceed in smaller increments of logic.
I disagree with alot of your posts dude, but this is total nonsense. If this were a thread on assault and prison, would you agree that a slap on the face is the same as breaking someone’s arm in a barroom brawl? Would you agree that swatting a dog on the nose with a newspaper is the same as kicking him around because you had a bad day at work? You cannot possibly mean to equate all forms of violence as the same.
Lets try this gain. Your conclusion goes like this, the government gets too invovled in the spanking rule, hence the raising of children, which contributes to a perceived overall attitude of the government raising children. And with that conclusion based on no actual facts other than a loosley coupled birth rate and no other actual knowledge of Sweden, you’ve jumped to “And that, in turn, would be a disincentive to having children.”
Your conclusion has nothing to do with logic at all. It shouldn’t reference the term logic it’s so far from it.
Perhaps I left a small gap in the logic, but I assumed the reader would be able to cross that gap on his/her own. Next time, I will proceed in smaller increments of logic.
lol
You are right, they can get very sneaky. Therefore we implemented a rule that if we discovered that the kid had played one of us off the other, the punishment automatically escalated beyond simple timeouts. Its actually not a new rule as ethical problems (lying) have always been escalated. The kids have only made that mistake a couple of times. I’ll let you know if it keeps working as they get older/sneakier.
Me accidentally burning myself is an action which has a consequence.
A child doing something so egregiously wrong is also an action which has a consequence.
The entire purpose of spanking in my worldview is as a substitutive consequence, primarily for actions that are so potentially damaging they should never be tried again. Boundary exploration is part of a child growing up. It’s one of the reasons that you tell them no and they do something anyway. There are some actions where this is inherently unacceptable because of the potential. There are multiple ways to go about dealing with this:
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Try to reason with them (which is effectively what a time-out is; you expect them to make the logical relation ‘I shouldn’t do that because if I do I’ll get punished’)
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Protect them from ever having the opportunity of doing it. (Good luck protecting your kid from anything even remotely dangerous for 18 years. Even better luck dealing with the consequences of having raised them in such a cocoon when they hit 18 and are out on their own and can do whatever they want legally.)
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Substitute a suitably shocking and base reaction for the real (potential) danger so that it leaves a more primal impression.
The idea that spanking is designed to harm a child is ludicrous. It’s not violence. It’s shock. It’s designed to build a primal “Oooh… look… shiny… oh, wait, that SUCKED last time” response that short circuits the need to actually think about the consequence. The same way that setting your hand on a hot stove does. Except in a far more controlled manner.
He’s not.
He’s saying that Phil citing millenia of experience is a bad argument because there’s a lot of other things we’ve had long experience with, that we stopped doing because we realized it was wrong.
We’ve had slaves for ages but realized (very slowly in some places) that it was a bad thing and ended the practice. Saying this isn’t saying that smacking your kid is as bad as keeping a few house slaves - it’s merely saying that not everything we used to believe fully in, is right.
I think Sweden is a very progressive nation in this regard and I’m happy we followed them. As modern a nation as the US is there’s a few places - especially those regarding punishment and morality - where I find you really old fashioned or should I say ass backwards as a collective.
It seems reasonably obvious that he can and does. Which I suppose may be a rather nasty byproduct of the societal setup he’s touting.
Or I could be a neanderthal for thinking that if I got really pissed off and, say, called my wife a filthy whore in front of her parents, I’d deserve to be slapped.
I’m not real fond of this disproportional world that the Swedes on the board are painting, where there aren’t different severities of actions (and hence shouldn’t be different severities of consequences). Or is the common wisdom that saying “That really hurt my feelings, I’m not speaking to you for the next 10 minutes” is actually somehow a lot less severe than “That really hurt my feelings, I’m not speaking to you for the next 30 minutes”?
mouse
I don’t get belive in spanking, so I come at this from a different point of view. I definitely agree that spanking is a faster way, but I don’t agree just because it’s a bigger shock, it’s a better way. That’s my opinion.
What’s not opinion is that spanking is hitting another person to convince them to act the way you want. What’s not also not opinion is that kids that are hit as kids are some large times number more likely to hit their kids when they have them. It continues the cycle of violence.
And on a purely logical note, what do you when you’re spanking them so they don’t hit someone else? It seems very hypocritical to me, to say the least.
shrugs
I won’t keep pushing this because it seems a philosophical disagreement that we may not come to a conclusion on the same here, it just doesn’t make sense to me.
If someone slapped me on the face I could file charges for assault (forgive me if I don’t know the specific US legal terms), we’d go to court, and assuming I could prove that the event had taken place the guy who slapped me would get fined. Illegal and actionable violence against a person. A bar room brawl would give a harsher punishment for the degree of violence involved, but the core principle is that one’s person should be inviolate.
Would you agree that swatting a dog on the nose with a newspaper is the same as kicking him around because you had a bad day at work? You cannot possibly mean to equate all forms of violence as the same.
First, dogs are not people. Second, different degrees of violence exist, but there is no point when violence is not violence.
Let me put it like this. If you, today, got spanked, would that be violence against you?
Yep, lying is a big no no and will get you in twice as much trouble as just doing something and telling the truth about it. At least for my kids :).
Sorry Hanzii, but: “Phil, my point was that there was no difference between disciplining children and disciplining the spouse for all those milennia of tradition you cited”, followed by examples of a slap vs. a broken arm, reads to me as Kalle saying that Kalle’s point is that there is no difference. Perhaps I misread, if so my bad. My very first post in this thread was meant to be a little bit of a goof, but in it I said that corporal punishment is equated with other old-fashioned values (like women not voting) and therefore many try to lump all of them together nowadays.
I’m curious what he thinks about another poster who said that he purposefully puts on a child’s favorite movie and then plays it while the child is in the corner or otherwise unable to watch. Would this be considered a form of mental cruelty or even mild torture? (I mean this in all honesty, not as a LOLBUSH troll).
For the record, I agree with other posters that spanking per se isn’t always required to properly rear a child. But I’m not too keen on a government body legislating it. Legislation protected bad institutions in the past like slavery as well, so that’s hardly a comfort for me.
In general, given the choice between traditional practices, developed over millenia in much the same fashion across many different cultures around the world, and a new untested hypothesis, I would err on the side of the former.
It is true that some traditional practices are bad, and that we as a society have reversed some of these. But these are the exceptions, rather than the rule (i.e. you don’t take notice of the many, many cultural traditions that we DO continue to practice, only the ones we change or at least argue about).
Comparing widely practiced customs such as spanking a child, to extreme practices that are generally NOT approved of by society (even back in the day) like wife-beating, or are only practiced in a small number of cultures (female circumcision) is a tremendous stretch.
How many here who got the occasional spanking as a child feel emotionally scarred by it? Raise your hands, folks…
This is likely true.
I guess I see a real difference between “hitting” someone and “spanking” them. I would never, ever, ever hit a child. (Hell, or another human being period.) Hitting to me involves a connotation of “I’m trying to damage you.”
I would spank, though, because spanking to me has a connotation of “I’m trying not to damage you, but to leave an impression.”
I think whether or not the child gets the difference between hitting or spanking has more to do with the rest of the environment they’re raised in than the act of hitting or spanking.
For an example of other punishment, I give you the following:
I know a couple of parents who clearly love their children. There’s no denying that, no question. They’re not mean or abusive, they’re not passively aggressive, none of that. They have one child who had some discipline issues for a while, and they punished him thusly:
When he would do things that were egregiously bad, they would make him stick out his tongue and then put a drop of hot sauce on it.
I can’t imagine someone claiming that was violence, yet it causes pain. What it was was a strong deterrant, because sometimes restriction of priveleges just isn’t a strong enough deterrant. (All you can do with restriction of priveleges to amplify things is make them last longer; at some point there’s a threshold where the causality link is lost, especially with younger children who don’t do abstract reasoning well.)
To me, spanking is something that does no damage but leaves a sting and, more importantly, a sense that the transgression was severe enough to deserve punishment well outside the norm. I don’t like the idea of spanking for any little thing; I think that is abusive and probably unlikely to help in the long run. But I’m still trying to get where the stridently non-spanking types go when they need to enact a punishment that leaves zero doubt that the transgression was so bad that it will not be tolerated again. If you limit yourself to no dessert, time-outs, etc… what do you do when your 4 year old darts out into the middle of the street?
I agree they are both a form of violence, but your last post seemed to imply equating vastly different degrees of violence. If a child was making a scene in a store, could the parent grab the child’s arm and sternly direct walk them out of the store and leave? Would this violation of personal space be acceptable?
Yeah I knew the analogy was flawed by using an animal, but on the other hand the nose-whack isn’t illegal but animal abuse is. Even here in the US.
Because I am now an emancipated “adult” member of society: yes. I would even include the scenario above, grabbing my arm and walking me out of the store, as being unacceptable now.
When did anyone say that?
For my part I just don’t see any evidence that societies that stigmatize and outlaw spanking are faring any worse for it. So I just think that the common sense appeal that some of you are trying for here appears shaky at best.
The only time I have recieved physical punishment left me nervous around overweight men, but I don’t think it had much other impact on me.
What is it we always say in these threads? Anecdote is not the plural of… no… well, it’s something like that.
Also a person who’s emotionally scarred isn’t the person most likely to diagnose it properly.
And what are these many many timehonored customs we as society still uphold because they just work? I’d say that most customs apart from the purely symbolic changes as society evolves.
Edit: People are posting fast. Gotta use the [quote]
There’s a pretty trite answer I could give, but the real one is that of course it would, but I’m also not a child.
The very idea that children function on the level of an adult so should therefore be treated as an adult is absurd to me. Should we start locking kids up for assault when they hit their sister? I mean, if spanking is violence regardless of context, surely hitting is assault regardless of context as well, yes?
(As a side note, if someone walked up to me and spanked me in the way that I was spanked as a child right now, I’d have a tough time getting anyone to allow me to file any type of criminal charges for said “violence”. There’d be no marks, no bruises, and in fact no viable proof that it had ever happened. Moreover, in context, the only people who could reasonably be expected to spank me would be those in a superior position of some type. I’d fear sexual harrassment suits would be a far likelier outcome of common boss->employee spankings than assault charges. Again, your simplistic black/white breakdown strikes me as patently absurd. There is, as it turns out, no contextually similar definition for spanking once you outgrow childhood.)