It never ceases to amaze me how many authority figures think violence “fixes” a behaviour, rather than simply causing the issue to be hidden and breaking down trust and then later having it resurface many times worse.
To give a specific example, once was when I was about five, I had just learned about electromagnets, and was actively trying to shove bare wire into an outlet. Yes, the spanking did make me a little afraid of poking around outlets again. No, it did not make me resentful, and more dedicated to wirepokery than before; my parents were consistently trustworthy, so I took their fear reaction as something I should genuinely respect. And that very small amount of added fear in my life quite possibly saved it. If I got spanked for every little thing, I could easily see that shifting to resentment. But appropriately, rarely applied, I can say with certainty it worked for me.
No, you can't. Maybe it did, but you don't know how you'd acted if they'd just talked to you instead. It's easy to think we can untangle how a given event shaped us, but we really are horribly bad at it.
It ignores that people who never were spanked regularly can tell similar stories about just having been talked to (that's how I learned not to stuff wires in outlets). You can't tell if they are right about how it affected their behaviour either. In either situation we're guessing based on how it made us feel.
I don't think the very occasional spank is likely to be massively damaging, but I also don't think its necessary - I grew up around the time it was outlawed in Norway in the 80's. It was publicised enough that the one time my mother slapped me when I was a child, I threatened to call the police because I'd heard about it on the radio.
People insisted the change in the law would be a disaster and that children needed to be spanked, and it'd be all doom and gloom.
It was largely a non-event, apart from some pastor that made a big point of protesting and telling everyone how he still spanked his children.
Children still learn not to put wires in electrical outlets whether their parents spank them or not (as I'm writing this, I've had flashes of recollection of scary scenarios that feel like they may have been things I was told about as a child, but I really has no way of knowing if that's a real memory or "fabricated"). There was no massive rise in badly behaved children, or sudden surge of people electrocuting themselves. Of course, nor did it make us all magically better adjusted.
I have an entire childhood of other experiences I could relate to you that tells me that I do, in fact, know how I would have reacted in I had just been talked to. And I am genuinely grateful for the (very few) times I was swatted, because there are things in this world that fear is the appropriate response to.
You appear to have spent your childhood in a safe country. I did not. If what I am saying sounds foreign to your mindset, consider yourself lucky, and I mean that with genuine sincerity.
>It ignores that people who never were spanked regularly can tell similar stories about just having been talked to (that's how I learned not to stuff wires in outlets).
You understand the innate survivorship bias in this example, right? Of course you can talk to the people who never poked wires in to an outlet- they're still here to talk.
We also know that hitting your pets does not work either, yet for some reason we seem to believe that hitting children is effective.
My point is that negative reinforcement has its place, not that it is desirable in and of itself. My parents very seldom used it, but it wasn't completely off the table, and I am confident that I benefited from that approach. That is a fundamentally different situation than one where spankings or other physical punishment are so common as to have children lose trust in their parents. I always trusted my parents.
>We also know that hitting your pets does not work either, yet for some reason we seem to believe that hitting children is effective.
Speaking of pets and pain: the hotwire that I used around the horse corral kept both my dogs and the horses safe, with only an absolute minimum of actual pain. No animal needed more than one or two incidences of contact to learn to not mess with the fence, and there was no more effective solution available. Note that this isn't hitting or striking an animal out of anger- it is a very specifically directed form of negative reinforcement to prevent otherwise dangerous behaviors from spreading. It works very well, and does not cause the affected animals any long-term trauma. The just learn to respect the wire barrier. Just like they know that it will hurt if they touch it, they also know that it won't chase or bother them if they leave it alone, and that's usually how it goes, no stress beyond the first few contacts.
Sorry, but with all due respect: You do not. You know that with the accumulated past experience you had, you acted a certain way in a different situation. You do not, for example, know if the reason you acted differently when just talked to was that you'd gotten accustomed to more serious reactions for something serious and therefore interpreted the talking to as less important and dismissed it. You make the point yourself that it was rare, and is something you tie to really important lessons, so it would make sense if you dismiss being talked to as implying something isn't that dangerous.
Of course, again, we can't know.
> You understand the innate survivorship bias in this example, right?
Yes, I do. But you do not seem to have understood that the point of giving that example was that your example is also down to survivorship bias, and to illustrate why that makes anecdotes like this (both of our anecdotes) worthless as a means of determining how well either alternative works.
My point was not to prove that "my" alternative is better, but to illustrate why personal experience is a poor basis for drawing conclusions about this (and again: yes, that applies to my experience too).
To which I respond: if things were truly that un-understandable, we would have been unable as a species to have additive culture that improves over time, because what we think about how people and the world work vs. the actuality of things would be too divorced from one another.
And yet we can positively point to growth of knowledge across all human endeavors, in societies around the globe. I therefore fundamentally disagree with your proposition.
Which is ok. It's fine to agree to disagree. We could both be wrong, after all. :)
On the contrary, we have very much every reason to believe things probably happened somewhat like but still different in ways to how we remember them; I have memories of events from that age that I know for a fact can't be real. Why? Because in some of them I remember myself in the third person.
The idea that we can reliably assess how a certain action affected us is a nice fantasy, but that's also all it is. Sometimes we get it right. The problem is we can't be sure when.
I've never spanked him, I wouldn't be confident of him understanding a danger I had explained to him though.
Were your responding to 'make it physically impossible for the child to access a hot oven.'?
If yes, then you're wrong: its (99%) always possible. Just buy and install a kid's barrier and park the 2yo in his room during the cooking. Or use a cold door oven. No need for a 'big enclosure padded out with cotton wool'.
> Many dangers in the real world, you can maybe stop the kid touching an oven, but you won't be always there to stop him/her from dangerous situations.
100% agree, unfortunately. My point was that, agreeing with the parent (no pun intended), at 2yo, you don't loose sight on your child if it's environment is not 100% safe, end of the discussion.
Kids that age are in some respect smarter than we often think, but in other respects they're totally helpless.
So he's understood that the oven is hot, but not that it being hot means he will hurt himself if touching it and that as a consequence he shouldn't. That's reasonable for him. He needs to make several other connections to determine it's bad: Many other things are hot, but not hot enough to be dangerous. He needs to also realise that too hot equals pain, and this means realising that touching the plate equals pain, not just hot. That's a step or two two long from starting premise to consequence for a 2 year old.
You'll see the same with kids that refuse to dress up when going out when it is cold out. It's hot inside. They've been told it's cold outside. But they also need to realise that this means they will be cold if they go out without dressing up even if it's hot inside.
Sometimes what works with very young children is to help them connect those dots. With my son I'd open the door, step out, so he can feel he's cold, and then tell him we needed to put warm clothes on to stay warm. Or you can be explicit in explanation: "we need to put clothes on so we stay warm when we go out" instead of "we need to put clothes on because it's cold outside".
For things that can be painful, try expressing that: that the oven will hurt. That it is hot, that's a separate thing (for now).
With a two year old you're not getting away from trying to prevent access, but my son certainly responded to just having the causal chains from "do things adults consider dangerous" to "will hurt" shorter.
Another strategy that keeps giving even now that he's 9, is to give constrained choices, and make him decide or decide what he thinks the right answer is: "Do you think the hot oven will hurt a lot or lots and lots?" (or when facing a 9yo that wants to decide everything: "do you want healthy dinner A or [marginally more popular] healthy dinner B?" as opposed to "what do you want for dinner?"). Choosing a specific framing is a scarily effective way of guiding them to where you want them to be (and it works scarily well on adults too; we're not nearly as much smarter than a toddler as we'd like to think).
I certainly can't say if the above works for you, but it's worth a try.
On the one hand it isn't far from smacking, on the other, it isn't a punishment as such.
I think it was the correct choice. My curiosity was sated, no punishment was involved, and she made the (for me, anyway) right choice of letting me experience the direct consequences of my actions when she knew they wouldn't be too bad.
I'm not saying with any confidence that spanking is necessary in these circumstances, only that it may be justifiable given the risks involved. You need some sort of strong negative stimulus. It's not nice, but neither is being hit by a car.
Hell, my parents also told me when I was ~4 not to stick anything in the electrical outlets. No spankings were involved. I listened because why wouldn't I?
(Well, at least until senior year in college, when I was like "What happens if I strip an Ethernet cord and stick it in an electrical outlet?" I'd missed the exploding-wires demonstration in my physics course, y'see. Did not get electrocuted, though I did get a spectacular pyrotechnics show.)
Tamper-resistant receptacles, however, do seem to provide a real increase in safety. FWIW.
https://www.esfi.org/resource/how-protected-are-children-fro...
(These did not exist when I was a child, but had they been available, I'm sure my parents would have used them.)
>I listened because why wouldn't I?
So did I, about a vast majority of things, until I didn't, because I thought electromagnets were cooler than verbal warnings were deterring. I think you will be hard-pressed to find a child anywhere in the world that doesn't push boundaries.
Ultimately that comes down to the plug design. Schuko sockets (used in most of Europe) are typically indented into the outlet enclosure. This enables IKEA[1] (and others) to make covers that basically can't be removed without tools.
First, you could have died before the spanking. Punishment after the fact never rights a done wrong.
Second, at the age of 4, if your parents had just sat down with you and told you that you can die from electric shock, don't you think that would have made a lasting impression either?
My mother gave me a spanking to impress upon me that playing with household electricity at my level of understanding was not a joke, period.
4 or 5 year olds, even precocious ones, do not have the cognitive machinery to be able to assess this kind of risk, and if they are unusually curious (which I was), well... Sorry, mom, about all the gray hairs I probably gave you over the years. (She seemed to have loved me well enough regardless. :D)
My parents sat me down and calmly explained everything they could. Which, as I mentioned before, worked great, until the appeal of something else overwhelmed verbal warnings, which was also not uncommon. Sometimes it was electricity, sometimes it was fire. I can think of another time maybe a year or so later when I discovered a box of strike-anywhere matches, and proceeded to light them one after another to wow at the sparkles, and watch the changes in the match as it burned. My mother took a different approach this time, and as 'punishment', gave me an entire box of matches, of which I was supposed to light them one at a time, let them burn down, then drop them in a bucket of water and repeat until the box was empty.
I suppose she was trying to allow me to explore my fascination with fire in a safe way so that I would get bored with it. Honestly, I can see some merit in that line of thought. ...but instead of getting bored, once I was done, I went and asked for another box. (it turns out fire is fascinating.)
I did get good at learning just how long I could hold a match before I risked burning myself, and how to strike them properly. So that was a plus. I also learned that the embers of the spent match can be kicked back up in to flame again for a surprisingly long time, too. So I'd say it was a good lesson, no spanking involved. But electricity is not nearly as forgiving, and I genuinely do think a swat in that kind of situation can be a useful thing.
And after that, I had a complete phobia of everything that seemed even slightly off. I became incredibly picky, because that one spot on the slice of cheese could be mould or because the ham smelled not how my 8 year old brain thought it should smell like.
No spanking involved, but the psychological damage was much greater I think.
Hell, isn't a lot of childhood precisely about learning the boundaries by pushing against them to check what the actual limits are?
This is the typical-mind fallacy. Not every kid is reasonable or easily biddable.
For me it was "appropriately, rarely applied", and it was still awful and the negative consequences are still with me. Yes, it's harmless in some cases; so is falling out of an aeroplane.
Wait, so was the thing that underlined the message the physical punishment or your parent’s fear reaction? You seem to be equating them, but it's quite common for parents to demonstrate fear without physical punishment, and to administer physical punishment without showing fear. They are essentially orthogonal concerns.
.. and there would be no crime and police would have only one encounter with each person.
Clearly this isn’t true, so it suggests there was an alternative to violence that could have been applied in your youth.
If violence is unnecessary and there’s always an alternative why are all states fundamentally enforced and maintained by violence?
Most people just don't want to steal, assault, murder, etc. because of their own morality, not because of the law.
I strongly disagree. Many (but not all!) people would be more likely to steal – given an opportunity – if they were absolutely sure they wouldn't face any negative consequences. Similarly, a lot more people would punch someone in the face if they insulted them or cut in line, when they would be absolutely sure that the other person wouldn't punch back.
That doesn't mean that most people are inherently evil, just that they're non-perfect, flawed human beings. Social pressure and the justice system keeps them in line, not their morality.
> > I don't think there would be a very big increase.
> That only means there wouldn't be a massive increase [...]
Agreed.
This indicates it’s not a solution.
> If violence worked as a strategy, then it would work better the more of it was applied.
This does not follow at all. This whole argument is total bullshit. It may end up being the right answer for parenting (don't use violence against your kids) but the reasoning is astonishing. Every single one of the statements is false and only the conclusion is true. What a masterpiece!
(I’m reminded how difficult it is to make full arguments over text.
Rather than flog a dead horse, I’ll just accept that I’m not able to make my point clearly enough.)
I am generally opposed to violence, but...that really doesn't make sense. It's not generally true that, if <foo> fixes something, 10*<foo> fixes it 10 times better.
I think if that is the answer you want, you will be able to find enough examples (slavery, et c) to support that conclusion. But many countries had slavery; only a few could build planes to outrun SAMs, land on the moon, index the entire internet, or create the modern smartphone/tablet.
Creativity is much more important than violence. Violence can only be used to perpetuate the status quo; you cannot beat someone into invention or value creation
All modern military technology and the technology that spawned from it such as the Saturn V or the hydrogen bomb were invented because of the desire to inflict violence on an enemy. Creativity is a tool; violence, hatred and competition is a driving force.
That is not to discount empathy and altruism as driving forces but to ignore hatred and violence as things that have human shaped progress (and improved society technologically) is to ignore reality.
Tribes form society
Society forms the state
State destroys the tribes
State destroys the families
State controls all.
I think it's safe to assume that most humans currently alive were spanked as children and most parents alive today spank their children. If that assumption is true, than it's not amazing... it's just the norm.
There is also a large portion of parents who have rejected corporal punishment and opted for 'peaceful parenting' techniques from a moralistic perspective based on the non-aggression principle.
Even if you don't agree on moral grounds there have been loads of research papers written on this topic. The papers I have read have helped me make my mind up as I was once in the "spare the rod, spoil the child" camp.
For example, spanking by parents can significantly damage a child’s mental abilities and results in a lower IQ later in life (study by researchers at the University of New Hampshire).
Additionally researchers have found that harsh physical punishment was associated with increased odds of mood disorders, anxiety disorders, alcohol and drug abuse/dependence, and several personality disorders after adjusting for sociodemographic variables and family dysfunction, and that if harsh physical punishment did not occur, the prevalence of certain mental disorders might have been reduced by ~2% to 7%.
There are tons more studies on this.
So, if you consider your role as a parent to include giving your child the best chance at life you need to seriously evaluate the body of evidence against using corporal punishment.
FTFY. That's 66 million people. Add Europe and USA and you have about a billion people who consider spanking a no-no. Since spanking is culturally accepted in most of the developing world, I'd say spanking is the norm rather than the exception on planet earth.
> There is also a large portion of parents who have rejected corporal punishment and opted for 'peaceful parenting' techniques from a moralistic perspective based on the non-aggression principle.
Myself included.
> Even if you don't agree on moral grounds
You may be responding to the wrong comment, since I didn't state a position in that comment.
> So, if you consider your role as a parent to include giving your child the best chance at life you need to seriously evaluate the body of evidence against using corporal punishment.
Again, you've probably responded to the wrong person. I've not supported corporal punishment anywhere in this discussion.
Something to consider - is hitting the child caring for them or venting frustration?
A very important consideration. A parent who smacks out of frustration or malice will do harm. Yet a neglectful parent who never smacks a child will do more harm than an engaged parent who does.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families...
It's a rhetorical exaggeration.
The hand licking incident brought it home to me in a big way that, yea, verily, it's better to stand there dumbly and just watch it burn while trying to think of something better to do, even though that is extraordinarily stressful and can feel like the worst possible solution. When there is a crisis, it often feels like you should do Something! Anything!
Maybe. But sometimes you should do Anything -- except that. Anything but that. So it reinforced my resolve to stand my ground when adults around me were haranguing me to do things I knew would not work and would, in fact, be counterproductive.
The response that lots of people don’t see a problem with it is hard to interpret charitably in that context.
I've not yet argued a position here; only pointed out that spanking is the norm on planet earth.
For what it's worth, I was spanked (IMO responsibly, not abusively) as a child but I do not spank my own child.
Parenting is hard. People try their best. I'm grateful to my parents for raising me the best way they knew how.