US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1764

On August 17 2019 22:16 plated.rawr wrote:

I'd argue that exactly because a parent-child relationship is long-term, 'quick-fix'-"solutions" like physically reprimanding your child has no place there - there is plenty of time and approaches to work through the situation that doesn't involve corporal punishment.

On August 17 2019 16:12 RenSC2 wrote:
@Muliphein do you have kids? Have you ever worked with kids?

I don't have kids of my own, but I have worked with hundreds. Most kids listen to adults and can be reasoned with. Then you get the exceptions. The ones that have 0 respect for authority, do not negotiate, and are a straight up danger to their peers. It is very clear that they've never been spanked and also walk all over their parents. They're the type of kids that when a parent puts them in a "timeout", they say, "Fuck you mom/dad" and do whatever they want anyways.

The best kids I know seem to have a slight fear of authority. They love being treated with respect and respond very well to it, but you can also tell that they have a fear of a slightly raised voice. They're not beaten shells, but it's pretty clear that at some point they learned a little fear of authority and from my perspective, came out a lot better for it. I don't know that they've ever been spanked, but they learned that fear somehow.

On August 17 2019 22:21 Liquid`Drone wrote:
When people talk about spanking their children being wrong, they're not talking about a single emotional reaction where you slap your 2-3 year old who tried to run into traffic, or even 5 seconds after it ran into traffic and a car luckily swerved away from it. Like, it is not an ideal response. But it's an understandable one, and a singular incident like this is not going to hinder your child's development.

But if a parent is spanking their child more than once per year, they're doing something wrong. There's no pedagogical justification for this. It's bad parenting, period. Not that you're inevitably going to develop into a broken human being from being spanked twice per year, but we still know that this yields negative results. We know that children who are spanked are less receptive towards other behavioral correcting approaches. And we know that when you teach a child something, you don't just teach what you are trying to teach, you're also teaching your behavior.

That is, if a child steals candy from a store and you spank the child for doing that, you do teach the child not to steal candy from the store. This is the intended lesson, and that is fine. You're also teaching the child that it's okay to hit people who engage in behavior that you disapprove of. This is the unintended lesson, and it is not fine. And it's why the argument from people who say 'I was spanked, and I turned out fine, so spanking children is fine' resonates so poorly with me: My perspective is that people who say this didn't turn out fine, as evident by them advocating hitting children. That this is appropriate is a part of the lesson learned that we need to stop more children from learning.

On August 17 2019 22:30 Jockmcplop wrote:


Yes that's true and generally I would agree that physical discipline is bad, but i think there occasions that warrant it. It seems like you're working under the assumption that every single instance of a parent smacking a child is going to cause damage and fail to achieve its goal, and I hard disagree with you on that.

I also don't think the intention is a quick fix in place of something more effective, but a last resort when dangerous or terrible behaviour is repeated over and over again despite the parent trying everything else.

It depends so much on the child. Some kids need discipline, most don't. I think having hard and fast rules about this stuff is absolutely ridiculous given the variation in attitude/response from different kids.

I'd much rather have a smack round the head once a year than have a parent who screams and yells at me 24/7 (this happens alot, in fact in the UK i see it almost every day) but never hits. There's a massive difference between abuse and discipline, and the line is actually very clear. I think as a society we have forgotten about the benefits of discipline and this is actually more mentally damaging than the physical application of that discipline.

On August 17 2019 22:44 Liquid`Drone wrote:


Screaming and yelling at a kid 24/7 should probably constitute psychological abuse, and it seems likely that it's part of a horrifyingly negative spiral where the parent screams at the kid for being so loud meaning that it's both trying to teach the kid not to be loud and to be loud at the same time. Kids do not only adopt what you say, also what you do.

On August 18 2019 00:57 JimmiC wrote:
You keep moving the child back and resetting the time. You have to be firm and consistent and realize it might take a long long time. Keep reasoning and try to wait out the timeout. Tell them you love them and they need to calm down. Make sure to model the calm behavior you want them to exhibit no matter their reaction.

On August 18 2019 01:15 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I'm not even sure I qualify as a timeout advocate, I think it's better than spanking but.. I think the main things are; be consequential, be infinitely patient (this is probably where most people fall short imo), and associate negative behavior with the absence of positive rewards. (E.g 'I was looking forward to doing this with you, but if you're gonna act like this, then I no longer want to do it. Then if behavior changes (you said 'if', meaning it's conditional) you still go do whatever it was, and if the behavior doesn't change, you skip doing that activity that time.

Kids are different and can't claim that I understand how it feels for parents with exceptionally unruly and energetic kids. Some are much harder to raise regardless of how well they have been raised, and speaking in generalities is tough; every teacher or parent will at some point abandon their principles out of convenience. At the same time if you are a teacher, it's impossible not to see that traits you find in parents tend to replicate themselves in children.

At the same time, I mean, the be infinitely patient is more of an option if you live in a less stressful society. In Norway we have kindergartens available from ages 10 months until 6 years and we don't have quite as many people working two jobs, I suspect we have fewer single parents too. In that case, there's more time left over to do a good job parenting. And it is one thing you really can't rush. I'm not passing moral judgment on people who make honest parental mistakes / are influenced to act out in ways they don't want to due to stressful and hectic life style, but I am challenging the notion that spanking is ever the preferred way, pedagogically speaking, of dealing with difficult children.

On August 17 2019 22:21 Liquid`Drone wrote:
When people talk about spanking their children being wrong, they're not talking about a single emotional reaction where you slap your 2-3 year old who tried to run into traffic, or even 5 seconds after it ran into traffic and a car luckily swerved away from it. Like, it is not an ideal response. But it's an understandable one, and a singular incident like this is not going to hinder your child's development.

But if a parent is spanking their child more than once per year, they're doing something wrong. There's no pedagogical justification for this. It's bad parenting, period. Not that you're inevitably going to develop into a broken human being from being spanked twice per year, but we still know that this yields negative results. We know that children who are spanked are less receptive towards other behavioral correcting approaches. And we know that when you teach a child something, you don't just teach what you are trying to teach, you're also teaching your behavior.

That is, if a child steals candy from a store and you spank the child for doing that, you do teach the child not to steal candy from the store. This is the intended lesson, and that is fine. You're also teaching the child that it's okay to hit people who engage in behavior that you disapprove of. This is the unintended lesson, and it is not fine. And it's why the argument from people who say 'I was spanked, and I turned out fine, so spanking children is fine' resonates so poorly with me: My perspective is that people who say this didn't turn out fine, as evident by them advocating hitting children. That this is appropriate is a part of the lesson learned that we need to stop more children from learning.

On August 17 2019 22:30 Jockmcplop wrote:


Yes that's true and generally I would agree that physical discipline is bad, but i think there occasions that warrant it. It seems like you're working under the assumption that every single instance of a parent smacking a child is going to cause damage and fail to achieve its goal, and I hard disagree with you on that.

I also don't think the intention is a quick fix in place of something more effective, but a last resort when dangerous or terrible behaviour is repeated over and over again despite the parent trying everything else.

It depends so much on the child. Some kids need discipline, most don't. I think having hard and fast rules about this stuff is absolutely ridiculous given the variation in attitude/response from different kids.

I'd much rather have a smack round the head once a year than have a parent who screams and yells at me 24/7 (this happens alot, in fact in the UK i see it almost every day) but never hits. There's a massive difference between abuse and discipline, and the line is actually very clear. I think as a society we have forgotten about the benefits of discipline and this is actually more mentally damaging than the physical application of that discipline.

On August 18 2019 01:28 Vivax wrote:


For the most part you argue correctly according to knowledge about model learning, conditioning etc. . This might be a trickier question though and hasn't been answered in the textbook the last time I read it: Do children get more influence through model learning from their peers, or from their parents?

With the best parenting in the world, you could put a kid into a school of bullies, and he'd slowly start becoming a bully, spank him all you want or talk to him all you want. It's just what he'd have to do to be able to deal with his everyday life. That's my take on it at least and also an answer to above.
For research it would be interesting to also know the effects of the opposite (which is basically what Barnevarnet can do, take you from "bully" parents and put you into a more civil environment). You'd end up being able to feed the data into a twofactorial ANOVA if I'm not mistaken.

What I think is consensus I can agree with is that violence as punishment by parents when the childrens peers are less or equally violent, will make it more likely that the child becomes more violent than his peers.

Now if someone asked me what my conclusion from the discussion was, I'd say that it's too contextual for anyone to be able to accurately set a wrong and right valid across all situations, and why there are services for this kind of thing in countries that care.

Attachment and early caregiving relationships

The quality of early care of the infant has long been seen as central to infant development and later socio-emotional functioning. Freud described the infant's relationship with the mother (primary caregiver) as the first love relationship and prototype for later relationships. Similarly, Bowlby (7 Bowlby J. Attachment and loss: attachment. 1969; New York: Basic Books. [Google Scholar]) elaborated the notion of the primary caregiver as a ‘secure base’ – a secure position from which the infant explores the world – and described this relationship as influencing the development of ‘inner working models’, or representations, of the self, other, and relationships. The inner working model in turn influences perception, cognition, and affect about relationships, and forms the basis for ongoing patterns of relating or attachment.

Results

Emotional temperament in infancy predicts children’s overall behavioral scores (β = 1.16, p<0.001), emotional difficulties (β = 0.30, p<0.001), conduct problems (β = 0.51, p<0.001) and symptoms of hyperactivity/inattention (β = 0.31, p = 0.01) at 5.5 years. Infants’ active temperament predicts later conduct problems (β = 0.30, p = 0.02), while shyness predicts later emotional problems (β = 0.22, p = 0.04). The association between the child’s temperament in infancy and later behavior did not vary with children’s own or family characteristics.
Conclusion

An emotional temperament in infancy is associated with higher levels of emotional and behavioral difficulties at the age of 5.5 years. Children who show high emotionality early on may require early prevention and intervention efforts to divert possible adverse developmental pathways.

On August 18 2019 02:02 plated.rawr wrote:
Obviously, psychological violence is a terrible thing as well, but that's not what I was offering as an alternative. I'd like to believe there's ways to raise a child that doesn't involve brutalizing the child's spirit.

On August 17 2019 12:01 Muliphein wrote:I'd also like to point out that reward and punishment ie positive and negative reinforcement, as a teaching method for both humans and animals have lost their scientific support about 30 years ago. We know kids, or dogs or any other animal, do not actually learn through being punished or being rewarded.