mountain view lawmakers are attempting to outlaw spanking. personally, i don't like spanking. i would not spank my child. i was spanked and it did nothing but make me very very angry. i grew up to be a very angry adult. why so pissed? don't know. was it because i was spanked? don't know. i also tend to harbor self-hate. i've worked on this problem for years and am pretty close to not wanting to pull my hair out when i'm really embarrassed or humiliated. just like rain man. but seriously, my sisters are the same way and they were also spanked.
one thing's for certain, when i was 15 and observed my little sister getting spanked at age 12, i knew it was wrong and i saw my dad as crooked for decades. i think he's too old to be crooked now, but he definitely was that night and other nights. poor little sister got spanked at age 12 because she was so small! she had only reached 4'9" by age 12, whereas i was 5'8" at that age. my 5'8" father definitely did not attempt to spank me past the height of 4"9" which, for me, meant 3rd grade. i get pissed all over again thinking about what that did to my sister. said sister just gave birth. guess what? i asked her if she'll spank her son and she resoundingly replied, No Way, there will be no spanking in This House.
overall, i would like there to be less laws in the world, so i wouldn't vote for spanking to be outlawed. i do, however, think it's a mistake. and a cop-out. and lazy. we'll see. i'm sure there will be moments, if i have a kid, that will make me want to spank him.
i hope i don't.
note: i've just gone to my usual image search engine to retrieve a picture for this post. i can only find old black and white images and the kids have their pants on. in my family, we were spanked without pants on. just to make sure of absolute humiliation.
2 comments:
Quite a long time ago, I did, very rarely, spank my kids. But when my boy, R, was 3, I gave him a couple of swats once, and when it was done, he calmly turned around and looked at me and said: Mommie, it's not nice to hit people.
I replied: You know what, you're right.
And I never did it again.
Spanking, in my opinion, teaches nothing but a sense of powerlessness for the child, a sense of imaginary inflated powerfulness for the "adult," and a deep sense of humiliation for the kid. Wrong in every instance. AND, what are you going to do when the kid is bigger than you? Still going to spank? Or will you suddenly try a NEW form of discipine that is NOT going to work, because discipline needs to be consisent from day one? Kids need to learn right from wrong, and they need to be compelled to do "right" out of self respect, not because they're going to get hit when they get home.
Hi there. I feel like writing long-time reader, first time caller!
Being a parent myself, I am not wholly opposed to spanking. On the other hand, I've also been a foster parent, and I know that parents can take spanking right over the edge into full-fledged abuse. Foster-parents are legally prohibitted from using spanking in any more (also can't send kids to bed without supper). There's no way to regulate foster-parent spanking, and sure as shooting one of them will beat some kid black and blue.
For my house we have a litany of positive and negative reinforcements, starting at rewards, working through loss of priveledges, into time-outs, through some manual labor (digging in the garden does wonders) and, finally, if my wife and I both agree, spanking.
There are rules here too: never more than three, always on a clothed bottom, and three is only for the most extreme.
To date, we've never done more than two, and always prefer to use the other forms of behavior to the physical.
But I think this law is a waste of time and effort. How will they inforce? Give 4 year olds a number to call, have SWAT teams bust into a house and question the children? It smacks (if you'll pardon the pun) of politicking for its own sake.
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