Everyone has something they can’t stop themselves from nerding out over - but often it’s hard to find people to talk to about it. So go ahead, share your interests, and tell us about them!
Everyone has something they can’t stop themselves from nerding out over - but often it’s hard to find people to talk to about it. So go ahead, share your interests, and tell us about them!
Smacking children and how it literally has no benefit to the child whatsoever, and makes you a bad parent if you still do it.
I used to be a strong supporter of smacking kids, I even signed a government petition to revoke the NZ anti-smacking bill, but after studying it at uni and then keeping abreast of the research afterwards, it has only negative effects, and yet bad parents still defend it.
Hard to talk about because people get weirdly defensive even when there’s NO evidence that smacking kids is either beneficial or effective.
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There’s more than two choices here for you and your father that don’t boil down to logic puzzles or child abuse.
It sounds like his heart was in the right place, but without understanding your mental capabilities.
At that ages, punishments need to be clearly established and actionable. The child is behaving badly, the parent demonstrates "if you keep doing that, you’ll lose out on (Xbox, free time, family game night etc etc), then following through. If that fails, then removing the child to isolate for a while. Once they’ve calmed down, then following through with the aforementioned punishment.
Your father’s punishments would probably start working around 9-10 years old according to research.
Finally, the “I got hit and I turned out okay” is terrible logic. That justifies any behaviour that someone can survive through. Just glance at the research to see why smacking is a wholly negative ordeal with no upsides for the child.
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What is the appropriate way to parent children? All my friends who try the “gentle parenting” approach have horrible children. They don’t listen and their only gear is shrieking banshee. Most children I’ve witnessed don’t listen to logic or reason so how do you discipline? I don’t have nor do I ever want children, I’m just curious. I also dislike children so my perspective may be slightly jaded.
I’ll start with the wholly negative effects of hitting children, specifically the section on Effects on Behaviour and Development. Time and time again, scientific studies prove there is literally no benefit to hitting children, with only poor outcomes.
My understanding is the most effective means of punishment involve first establishing an environment of rich support and love for the child. Then when there’s poor behaviour, short time outs.
You remember that episode of The Simpsons when Bart steals the game cartridge, and what upsets him most is Marge’s total loss of attention?
A secondary strong punishment is removal of positives, like revoking video game access etc.
It’s hard to critique whatever parents you mention without knowing specifics, but it often comes down to:
Finally, sometimes children and just little shits with bad temperament. It’s vital to understand that countless studies show physical abuse does not result in corrective behaviour, with only negative developmental outcomes.
That was a great response! Thanks for being so thorough. I’d love to see this in action and see what kind of thriving adults it produces. I’m not knocking my friends because I’m not a parent so maybe they are doing great but their kids just have crazy personalities. I try not to judge them as parents since I don’t know what it’s like.
Honestly I get where you’re coming from with the gentle parenting approach, and I think some people use it as an excuse to not engage with crappy behaviour. But I think kids whining and behaving a bit crappy is normal, and they’re often expressing complex feelings that they haven’t learned to understand and manage, and that they don’t know how to explain. Maybe kids that learn to suppress that behaviour at a young age, through fear of punishment, or being shunned and isolated (eg ‘go to your room’) may go on to be adults who supress their feelings and don’t express and advocate for their needs and. I guess we’ll see won’t we, as this generation of kids gets older. And some other parenting style will be the ‘correct’ one by the time they have kids. My niece is going through a really annoying whiney and whingey phase and it makes her very exhausting to be around at the moment, so I do sympathise with where you’re coming from!