parenting

Why Ending “Corporal Punishment” Won’t Fix It

Jeff/neighsayer4 Comments

I had this idea of doing a YouTube sort of video, but for various reasons, I’m giving it up.

I spent some time writing it though, so here’s the rough script, just ’cause I can’t bear to write and not publish . . .

YouTube – Abuse with an Excuse

 

Me talking – scene? In the yard, birds and flowers?

PART ONE – INTRODUCTION:

 

Hey Folks, thanks for the click, of course.

This will be a talk about a sort of technical, psychological aspect of how we raise our children, and it’s not going to be exciting for most internet users.

If it were an 18th, Century manuscript, I guess it would be titled ‘A Critique of the Prohibition of Corporal Punishment’ –  maybe it will be, too, old-timey as it sounds, that is what it’s supposed to be.

I want to show that outlawing “corporal punishment” is not working and is not ever going to work to end spanking and violent child discipline and I plan to demonstrate that it is due to faulty assessment, that there is far more to this problem than what is happening in the very narrow definition of “corporal punishment.”

More, I hope to show that any policy built around the idea of stopping “corporal punishment” is in fact misguided, built upon a bad idea.

My belief, to avoid any surprises, is that punishment generally is a leading cause of our social problems and not a cure for them at all.

I think the world will become a better place with every act of punishment that we don’t engage in – but that is not the subject of today’s talk.

Today will be just one small part of that larger conversation.

So, Folks, if that interests you, if you’re a policy maker in the government or some Social Services agency, or a person engaged in the attempt to understand their own childhood and themselves, welcome!

Maybe you’re a teacher in an Early Childhood Education program, teaching our future daycare staffers and teachers, or simply a person who wants to delve deeply into parenting before, during, or after the experience of it, and if so, or for whatever reason this catches your eye, welcome!

I may bore you to tears or I may make you angry – parenting is very personal – the only thing I will promise is that unless you know me online or in real life already, you have probably never heard the views in here before.

If you make it through to the end, I’ll I commend your attention span, and welcome your input.

Again, on behalf of all humanity, because we all start out as children, I thank you for your interest.

OK then. I think we’re probably alone now.

Ha.

Scene change?

Hi there, welcome to Abuse with an Excuse, the movement with a poor name and an even poorer chance of success, because, well, because we can’t have nice things, can we?

Scene change? – sad things, kids, people? A headline reading ‘Canadian Majority Government falls to No Confidence vote, nation gives Same Guys Super Majority?’

After all, if we could change only one thing to make the world a vastly better place, surely that would be too easy! Plus we wouldn’t deserve it, would we, sinners that we are?

Scene change? – images of Christian self-abasement, Whitey from ‘the DaVinci Code?

 

It sure seems like that sometimes, but I guess in truth, I’ll have to say no and no.

Of course we deserve nice things.

Plus, it’s a fact is that making this one change in the world will be anything but easy.

But that’s only because it’s unthinkable.

Scene change? – Galileo in the Tower of Pisa?

 

If we can get past that, it might not be so hard – so that’s the goal.

That’s my challenge to the world. Can we think the unthinkable? Can we get outside of the box?

We’ll be going after one of the PC Brigade’s favourites, I’ll warn you now. No shame in walking away.

Scene change? – Protest scenes, placards – Simpsons? South Park . . .

 

Ha.

Don’t get too excited, I know we’d all like to think we get outside of the box sometimes – but we probably won’t like the outside of this one.

Most don’t.

We probably think that what’s outside of this particular box is something along the lines of a sharknado – no wait – Biebernado.

Scene change? – Can I do that? Sharknado scene, and the same with JB?

 

Ha.

Don’t worry; I’ll get back to that.

Ha.

Scene change? – Graphic of a box, and us flying into it, inside some image of people, humanity, then a “spanking scene,” then one of a parent administering a task-based penalty

PART TWO – INSIDE THE BOX:

Today’s box has two things in it, besides all of mankind: the first is “corporal punishment.”

The second, well, I’m looking for a better name, but generically perhaps we can call it simply “non-corporal punishment” for now.

The terms are problematic, and we’ll see why soon.

You get the idea, though, two sorts of punishment, corporal as opposed to otherwise, which means ‘pain, discomfort or endurance-based punishments’ as opposed to punishments that are intended to be non-violent?

Common examples of the latter kind are referred to as restrictions on ‘screen time’ for our modern, wealthy kids, the removal of a desired thing, a toy, the ‘timeout,’ ‘grounding’ (curfew), increased chores, etc.

Scene change? –graphic, outside of the box, someone closes box and labels it?

I’m sure I haven’t lost anyone; we all know that stuff, right?

That stuff, though, that is inside the box – and we are stepping out of it.

It is my hope that when we turn back to look at it, that we will see only the box, labelled “punishment.”

Scene change? – back to me talking – where?

So far so good? Super.

When we’re finished here, I’ll help you pack that box out to the curb. Hold on, we’d better back up.

PART THREE – “CORPORAL PUNISHMENT” – THE MYTH:

This is about childrearing, parenting.

Scene change? – somehow show a bunch of folks approving of the task-based scene and disapproving of the “spanking.”

There are a great many people living in the box for whom the contents are distinct, very different things, and this conversation is intended for the ones who identify as anti-corporal punishment, people who do not hold with hitting children and “spanking.”

Scene change? – somehow show a bunch of folks approving of the “spanking” scene

All those who are pro-corporal punishment, you’re not going to care about what I have to say here.

Stay if you’re curious, but really, this conversation is for most of the folks you are in opposition to already.

Scene change? – somehow show the ‘pro’ folks disapproving of ‘anti’ folks  and vice versa

I don’t think you are necessarily any more harmful than the non-corporal punishment people on the whole, and I don’t think you’re not worth talking to – I just think this is internal, anti-spanking movement stuff.

Scene change? – meeting of the People’s Front for Judea? Palin guaranteeing Idle’s Right to have babies and Cleese’s response?

The errors I’m pointing to here are ours, not yours.

You’re next on my list to attack, don’t worry, I’m not forgetting you.

If you’re still being like that after I straighten these namby-pamby types out, we’ll talk.

Scene change? – me talking?

Ha.

Where was I? Oh yes.

Don’t get me wrong –I’m anti-corporal punishment. Pain for pain’s sake? Kind of a no-brainer to my way of thinking.

In fact, I’m anti-punishment.

“Anti-punishment.” Let’s let that sit there for a second.

Scene change? – deer in headlights shot? Leela – “Yes. Wait – what?”

Has everybody heard that particular combination of syllables before?

Is it something we hear in the box?

Anti-punishment. Surely it’s been said, I just can’t be sure when or by whom.

The thing is, I want to be anti-corporal punishment, so I’m anti-punishment, period.

That’s how it works, sorry to tell you, but all punishment is physical, and it’s all based in violence.

It’s not all “corporal,” I’m not saying that, because “corporal” means the pain is the penalty.

What I am saying is all punishments require physical means to make them happen, enforcement.

Imagine forcing somebody to take a punishment over the phone, if you had no physical presence.

Scene change? – cartoon, Slyvester getting clobbered through the phone . . .

 

Me talking again

It’s possible, don’t get me wrong, some caregivers have that sort of power, but they got it through plain old-fashioned physical superiority, either in the past, the kid’s experience – or because of a present or future threat.

Or both, obviously.

(A word about pronouns. Sometimes when I’m talking about hypothetical kids, I’ll say, he or she, him or her, but if I lose track and I’m always talking about boys, it’s only an example, I don’t mean to leave the girls out.

I’m a man, and if the hypothetical has a correlation for me, I may say ‘he’ just through identifying with it.

I’m not intentionally just using male terms as global identifiers.

Mostly, I’m always writing this exact sort of stuff, and to type ‘he or she’ twenty times a day is tiresome to do, and tiring to read as well.)

When we can control our kids with a word, when we can impose a punishment and simply watch while the kid hands over the toy or walks himself to the naughty chair, whatever he has to do to pay for his crime, that kid knows something that we maybe don’t.

He knows that it isn’t optional, that if he says no to this penalty and opts for what comes next, that things only get worse for him.

Children that appear to take their punishments willingly know from experience what happens when they get their backs up and refuse.

This is what I’m saying about “non-corporal” punishment: it is always only the child’s first, best option.

It does in no way replace the rough kind of punishing, the physical kind is always there, because “non-corporal” punishment cannot exist without it.

Hmmm . . . wait a second . . .

Trauma doesn’t have to be consistent to be damaging, I mean your life doesn’t have to be all trauma to damage you.

Even one-timers can destroy people, worst case scenario.

That means that a child whose life includes mostly non-physical penalties is still vulnerable to trauma and damage if the discipline only turns violent occasionally – and it always does, at least occasionally.

So.

The physical kind of punishing is always there, because “non-corporal” punishment cannot exist without it, that statement needs a little support, to say the least, right?

Well, this isn’t hard science, but I have a few things.

One,

is everyone aware that much of the older child-rearing advice was proudly corporal?

Do we know that they advised smacking babies specifically because they lack language skills and therefore cannot be reasoned with?

Scene change? – baby shots, maybe an old birth scene with the ritual First Spank?

Actually, fair enough almost, they do lack speech and can’t be reasoned with, but I’m not actually feeling the need to weigh in here on corporal punishment of babies as such – I’m anti-ALL punishment, I’ll remind you.

But what the previous generations’ childrearing literature means is what I’m telling you about kids and non-physical punishments: we often learn our physical lessons before we even get our legs.

When a toddler or a child has learned to stand still and take his medicine, it’s likely because he has been trained by force, because, third time, you can’t talk babies into anything.

This I offer as proof that if we control our babies, if a great many of life’s conflicts with our babies are settled in our favour, there is only one way we can have accomplished it.

Two,

 

Scene change? – shots of Darwin, Goodall, a frowning, hairy Jemaine Clements . . .

 

when it really isn’t actual force – and I may have to know you well to believe you if you say so – maybe there’s a human nature aspect to it, that perhaps humans have retained some instincts. Maybe kids just know to toe the line when the parent is only showing warning signs.

That is something like genetic proof, if we have that instinct, because it means those of us without it flourished less, and that heeding the warnings is a survival trait– and it reminds us that a first non-violent attempt to control a child isn’t something we just invented.

If there are two varieties of punishment, they have always existed together, side by side.

Scene change? – Walmart scenes with kids? Corporal punishment in public?

 

Scene change? – back to me talking

Evidence that they can be separated is still pending; I’m not holding my breath, because the vast majority of households in Canada and America self-report still “spanking.”

That tells us this “no corporal punishment” narrative isn’t changing anything.

Three,

we have a long, long childhood and most of us never make it all the way through without calling the parents’ bluff at least once.

Somebody tell me that we never learned this when we pushed our grownups to the limit– our caregivers weren’t bluffing, were they, because what is punishment if the parent won’t back it up?

And in what way, while I’m asking questions and being rhetorical, in what way has this generation changed that fundamental fact about punishing? That you can’t bluff?

Rhetorical, of course, we haven’t. That’s the secret.

You know you have to follow through, right?

That statement right there, there’s another sort of proof.

If you have to follow through, then your non-physical punishment was always going to be physical if it had to be to work.

(That is a whole other discussion, what we mean when we say something “works.”

Perhaps that will be the next entry.)

Scene change? – scenes to show the following two scenarios . . .

Four,

and I’m sorry, it’s the same as number one, really, just another angle – how physical do you have to be sometimes to follow through?

Grounding and curfew aren’t corporal punishments – but the fight that will ensue when your teenager says ‘fuck you’ and heads for the front door is sure to trespass into the physical, isn’t it?

Same with a toddler who doesn’t want his timeout; timeouts certainly aren’t corporal punishments, but bringing him to where timeouts happen and keeping him there is something that happens in the physical world, isn’t it?

Where else?

Scene change? – me talking

So, that’s three or four points, arguments to show that “corporal” punishments aren’t the only rough kind, because all punishments have force, violence, and disregard as their basic, necessary ingredients.

I repeat: what is any punishment if we don’t follow through?

Punishing means following through.

Unfortunately, following through means just what it sounds like it means.

PART FOUR – OUTSIDE THE BOX:

“Corporal” is not the point, if the other kind is also nasty, is what I’m saying.

What I’m saying is corporal punishment VS non-corporal punishment is not really it, it’s not a meaningful distinction.

The distinction should be physical or not, violent or not, if that’s what we’re trying to say, ‘don’t hit.’

Does it really matter if we hit them because we planned to, because that’s the sort of penalty we like and really not matter if we hit them to make them stay in timeout, stay in house arrest, or complete their extra chores?

Scene change? – a scene to show this? The old one of Dad marching a kid to the neighbor’s with the broken window, ball gear . . .

If we hit them to force them to do the restorative part, pay for the broken thing, apologize to someone?

Scene change? – – a cartoon for the following?

This entire conversation, could be put another way, I could say that we don’t endorse “corporal punishment” for original crimes, the thing the child did to warrant punishing, but we do indeed recommend it if the little bugger won’t take the first offering.

Scene change? – me talking

Ha. Sort of.

I’m not asking this directly, ‘is hitting in those situations bad;’ I’m asking is it qualitatively different than simply skipping the restriction or the chore and just hitting them straight off?

What difference do we think it makes if we fail at what we hoped for and wind up using force and violence anyway?

None of course – well, not enough, I should say.

If a thing is rough, it’s rough.

We don’t get to pick and choose which violence is good, because it serves our purposes and which is bad, because it doesn’t; a bad thing is a bad thing, so let’s double check, ask again.

Is hitting children bad?

Apologies – it’s just a rhetorical reminder.

If that’s the distinction – whether we hit them right away or not, whether we hoped we wouldn’t have to or not – then I’m really sorry, but all of our punishments are on the wrong side of the line and the wrong side of history.

This violence isn’t from corporal punishment, from hurting kids as a penalty, this violence is from stubbornly following through and getting physical in an attempt to punish “non-physically.”

Ironic violence I suppose, but it counts!

Scene change? – Monty Python fish slap? Back to me talking

Corporal punishment is physical by definition and non-corporal punishment still depends on our willingness to back it up with force, so there really isn’t a sort of punishment that doesn’t.

That means everything that is wrong with “corporal punishment” – which we say as though it means “violent punishment,” as if there were another kind – is really what’s wrong with punishment, all of it.

There is no “other kind,” this is what I’m trying to show, because again, as we know, what is discipline if we don’t back it up, don’t follow through?

Oh, Hell, this is the way I write, isn’t it? Nobody talks like this.

Actually, nobody writes like this either, let’s all just be thankful for that and move on.

Ahem.

Just say it, right?

We can’t “not hit” young children and still have control. I’m not condoning “corporal punishment;” that was intended to demonize control.

Control is the problem, and deciding “not to hit” alone won’t help.

When our control of our kids is non-negotiable, they will make us hit them, which is the trap, the rookie mistake we all make.

Do we think our parents were never starry-eyed youngsters who were never going to do that to their kids?

OK, maybe not all of them, but certainly some were!

The trap got them and us along with it, and it’s going to get us again because of this . . . misunderstanding, this misconception that hitting is merely a choice, when we’re not really changing any of the other choices that our parents made.

The trap has us if we think that.

Again, if our control of our kids is non-negotiable, they will make us hit them.

Didn’t many of us do exactly that in our youth?

Call the bluff, make them hit us?

Scene change? – Matt Damon, Good Will Hunting, “Nope. Bottle.” Williams, “Why?” Damon: “”Cause fuck him, that’s why!” Back to me, talking

I know my brother did, regularly.

(My ‘back story’ is that I watched my three older siblings and the fighting that went on in the house, and watched my hyperactive brother attract all the attention, more bad than good – so I was good, scared straight.

Actually, though, I did act out and earned a spanking and a grounding once, I guess, an all-day skip out of grade four or five and shoplifting spree, and it was from that sort of need too, for sure, testing for limits.

It was my one and only formal punishment as I recall, in childhood, before the teen dropout/rebellion.

The teen thing was too late for spankings and by then there really wasn’t anyone around with the will or the attention to administrate the groundings.

It’s at about that age that for good or ill, our parenting is often already done and over.)

Thing is, until we have kids, we may not know that we are quite so committed to being in charge, many of these attitudes are, uh, unexamined.

Scene change? – family voting scene from ‘Signs?’

Back to me, talking

For many of us, the idea of some democracy in the family is a new and dangerous idea, no-one suggests it; and if no-one questions parents’ rights, then no-one has to answer for them.

You know what?

It was sort of possible taking the first three quarters of this thing at least a little ways down the road towards fun – irony is fun for adults, right? –but at some point things are serious, or we wouldn’t be here, would we?

Punishment, over-punishment and abuse are very real.

I’ll try, but I’m afraid I can’t see many jokes from here to the conclusion . . . I’ll just try to make our time on the Dark Side as brief as possible and just remind us all that the truth can be painful, but it will set you free.

I think getting outside of this particular box hurts – so to try to take the sting out of it, let’s just watch my hummingbird feeders while we push on, OK?

Humour can only take us so far.

I think maybe some peace and quiet might serve us better.

Scene change? – Hummingbird video . . .

PART FIVE – DAMAGE GETTING PAST:

We’ve all watched parenting or caregiving from the day we were born, and it’s like the air, always there, we’ve never known life without it, and we can’t imagine having to ask ourselves what it is, or how it should be approached, right?

Scene change? – early scene from ‘Look Who’s Talking?’

Hummingbird video . . .

Of course, I‘m sorry if it’s obvious, but humans have built some deep fields of knowledge on the subject of air, despite that the air has always been there, that we’ve watched it from the day we were born . . . pick anything and look closely, and there’s a world of study in it.

For me it’s this question, one better than ‘corporal punishment or not’ this one – ‘punishment or not?’

For me, this opens up a new understanding of the world, such as the bit I’m trying to share with you today, which is “corporal punishment” is too specific, that too much violence, too much damage to children and damage to family relationships is still getting past.

Which it is.

Consider the growing prison industry and the proliferation of psychiatric drugs for kids and teens.

These poor fixes show that something isn’t working, that the hurt and the damage are still happening, despite our idea that we have stopped supporting violent punishing practices, because really we haven’t; not yet.

As children, we’ve all felt unfairly punished and known that those times had the opposite of our parents’ intended effect, that they made us sad, angry, less wanting to be responsible, upstanding citizens, if that was they wanted.

Remember?

As parents, haven’t we all had some heartbreak or remorse, feeling terrible after having done the ‘tough, responsible thing,’ perhaps sensing that the effect wouldn’t be what we wanted?

Both of these multi-generational hurts happen because of this trap, because we imagine that simply choosing not to hit is going to be the answer to it, while really, that wasn’t the trap itself but only the bait.

It happens, our hearts broken at both ends of the transaction.

As kids and again as parents, we fall prey to this misconception that we can have it all our way with the kids, total control without hurting them in the process, because we think only “corporal punishment” is the bad kind, we think only “corporal punishment” will hurt and damage them.

When really, there is no other variety than the bad one.

Really, it’s all bad – if by “bad” you’ll allow that I mean forceful, callous, often violent . . .

“Corporal punishment” is the central element of a myth that allows the violence to continue that none of us wants or we wouldn’t buy into it in the first place.

Irony always in this conversation.

CONCLUSIONS:

I hope I’ve been able to get us to see this myth, this “corporal punishment” with fresh eyes and some logic, and to see how that idea misses the point and subverts our efforts to lessen the violence and callousness inherent in our childrearing.

It’s a test for truth, that when we buy into a narrative and the promised change isn’t forthcoming, that the truth is lacking.

Let’s stop wasting each other’s’ time with this one, OK?

Let’s look at it a little closer, and we’ll see: the emperor has no clothes, the myth has no truth.

Banning “corporal punishment” will not stop the violence in our childrearing, and hoping so, just as so many of our parents did, won’t change it either.

We need to kill this well-intended zombie lie, and you know how to kill a zombie.

You have to go for the head, the brain.

Now, finally, again, don’t get me wrong, end corporal punishment now, sure – but it’s not the real problem.

The real thing, of which corporal punishment is only its lure, is punishment, all punishment.

I mean, we’ll phase it out; it won’t be all at once, I know what that’s like.

We don’t punish at our house, so when we get a punished kid to look after who’s in that never-ending grudge match with the adults, and he starts looking for a fight?

We can’t deal, we dial 911.

We just can’t play that game anymore.

So I get how if we simply punished and pissed everybody off forever and then suddenly removed all constraints – I get it, not bright, kind of terrifying.

Looking at you, Bieber.

There it is! Sorry, I had that one loaded up, I kind of had to.

Scene change? – scene of JB behaving badly

Hummingbird video . . .

Ha.

Slow change is OK – but “corporal punishment’s” end is NO change, because every sort of punishment requires the ‘follow through.’

In that sense, all we’ve done is taken a stand and condemned the mirage, but no actual, real thing is going to be examined or criticized.

Worst case scenario, we’ll act like we’ve found the problem, and we’ll grow old and die wondering what went wrong – the current state of affairs – the worst case means we just never figure it out.

(sigh)

Of course, the only possible real cause to point to is punishment itself, again, if we think hitting kids is bad and we shouldn’t do it.

It might change the world if we can see that, if we can see that it’s the very core of it, the essence of punishing we’re really at issue with and not something . . . peripheral.

If it’s violence, hurt and disregard we’re trying to stop, then we’ll have to start to see that’s all punishment that is, let’s say problematic.

That’s the first step, obviously.

The thing is, we don’t even try to solve a problem if we’ve confused it with a solution. That’s part of this problem.

Scene change? – A few seconds of peace and quiet, then back to me talking

Thank you for reaching the end!

I’ll have the text of this available at abusewithanexcuse.com, my WordPress blog and elsewhere, along with two hundred mostly shorter blogs from the last few years, and I’m happy to discuss any and all of it.

Forget Forgiveness

Jeff/neighsayer2 Comments

for bd, AI, TTMO, pamela . . . i’m forgetting people, I know – oh, for thewalrusofsheol, wraith and noahbody . . . anyone who needs a break from platitudes . . .

with love from the dark side of parenting

Forget Forgiveness

Wait, wait, hear me out a bit. Believe me, I know the generally accepted narrative: you can’t hold anger in your heart, you have to let it go, all of that. I even accept that our worst tormentors probably never had a chance not to be the way they were, but still. Forgiveness is overrated.

First of all, for it to be what it should be, for the thing to live up to the advertising, forgiveness would have to be optional. As things stand today, in the view of this cultural Christian, that really isn’t the case. We all know that forgiveness is the endgame, and that it’s only a matter of time before we find ourselves somehow omniscient enough to forgive – almost without exception, even in some of the most horrible cases of abuse. The pressure to forgive starts the day our victimization comes to light.

That pressure leads many folks to a premature declaration of forgiveness, at a time when probably neither the abuser nor the victim have really learned their lessons. That sort of forgiveness is easily rescinded as soon as the abuser does what they do, and for that, rightly so – but the pressure simply restarts and it can become another dysfunctional cycle in our lives. Worse to my mind, is simply that in this Original Sin based Christian society, victims may suffer endlessly but abusers can too often sit and wait to be forgiven, that it’s automatic, that they are entitled to forgiveness from any decent Christian victim. That’s the Christian ideal, right, ‘Father, forgive them?’ Well, you know what?

The legend we have for the moral behaviour and teachings ascribed to that fellow, Jesus, are a rather impossible paradigm. We need to see that as a sort of bait and switch game, which is probably no more fair or positive for us than comparing our bodies to the impossible Hollywood beauties carved out of surgery and starvation. So with that in mind, and believing that there are more things to be in the world than saints or Hell-deserving sinners, I say f@#$ ‘em, our torturers. Let someone else forgive them, some moral savant or someone with less of a personal stake in it, someone who can afford to forgive them, because mostly, we can’t.

In this Christian culture, we know about Original Sin, we know we are all sinners and subject to the Christian message, that we will all sin, and we need Jesus’ forgiveness to avoid eternal pain and suffering. The human being cannot help but to reason and analyse, and when something goes wrong the human being wants to know why. We may need this information again, and so we find the agency responsible, we assign blame. In this particular culture, where we are prone to blame ourselves already, sinners that we are –

          if we forgive the obvious culprit, who will be left, who takes responsibility? For us, the default is us.

That is what I mean, that we can’t usually afford to forgive our attackers, because blame deflected from them too often comes back to us. That is some serious unfairness that the victimizer is freed from the accusation and victim suffers both, the abuse and the guilt. Forgiveness for the abuser is far too often a continuation of the violence against ourselves.

Second, real forgiveness is a process of maturing, a process of acquiring a longer perspective, and in most cases it takes time, real time, like the time between generations, like the time between the spring and autumn phases of our lives. Of course there’s part of the social pressure to forgive in that: we want to look like we’ve matured, and in a healthy way. It would be more ironic if it weren’t the normal situation: we are expected to go far too swiftly from so hurt as to cause a rift to a state where we have healed, matured and are now in the power position, bestowing forgiveness. That is not the sort of thing that the majority of sightings of it are ever going to be the real deal. That transformation is never easy and not often quick. Truth to tell? Several decades and the demise of our abusers probably go a long way towards bringing that achievement – and it is one – into the realm of possibility. Some of us don’t even want to heal as long as our parents are alive to see it; we need to be the open wound, the accusation; we can’t imagine goals for ourselves until they’re gone.

So my idea is this: we need to keep ourselves of two minds about it. Forgive in theory, know as you go about your life that ‘there, but for the grace of God, go I,’ and think that all of us could be that bad and hope that we can all be forgiven, sure – but let’s keep that in perspective, let’s keep that cerebral – cold, even. Let’s don’t invest our own feelings in it, give that idea our head maybe, but not our hearts. Our hearts need to be protected.

What I’m saying is, let’s stop treating abuse and forgiveness as personal, one-off situations, matters of the heart – after all the Big Data is coming in: we are not alone in our troubles. Not with 7,000,000,000 plus people running around – and start using our heads. Let’s consider that the prevalence of abuse and all manner of unpleasantness short of it and the near universal need for forgiveness likely indicates a social problem, and put our collective heads to it instead.

I just mentioned this rant to a wise woman I know and she told me a story about forgiveness. She was upset about a failed marriage, and she was always on a self-discovery journey anyways. She spent some serious time – three or four years – doing a lot of inner work, stuff involving her father, etc., and at a point, it became clear all the ways in which she had married her father – hardly all the fault of the man chosen for the part. She wasn’t looking for a way to forgive her husband, I think she was mostly still mad about it – but her own work towards self-knowledge took her to where she had to forgive herself, and forgiving him was just, uh, collateral repair.

That, I think, is how it works, and I know that’s what we’re advocating when we recommend forgiveness, but a few things need to be said.

One, that was a very intense, directed bunch of work that lady did, we don’t all do it, and even so, years.

Two, that was an adult situation. I’ll check, but if my wise friend has forgiven everyone, her own parents, etc., I think I can safely say it took her a bigger chunk of her journey than that focused three or four years of father-work. This person is on the lifelong plan. And that’s the sort of approach that produces real forgiveness, always as a by-product. For our caregivers, our parents, our abusers, the situation is very different, most obviously because we don’t choose our parents (at least those of us who aren’t reincarnationists don’t think so).

Whether we believe that all our damage from our earliest days can be healed or not, surely we can agree that the chance that it can’t be must be considered in any calculations we’re making. A full understanding of what even happens during our earliest days, while some people have remembered and dealt with some things, would remain impossible to guarantee considering that limited understanding we had during the experience. I think, given the inevitable unknowns, that true forgiveness could only result from our achieving a state where we could forgive literally anything.

I’m not saying it’s impossible, it happens all the time. I’m just saying it takes time, and if its schedule is even in the same ballpark as the abuser’s idea of a proper schedule, then it’s probably not the real thing. (Forgiveness is something taught to us as children by the very people – parents, preachers, teachers, in short, adults – that we might end up having to forgive. That is a conflict of interest at the very least, and an outright, cynical scam in the worst cases.) There is tremendous social pressure to forgive, to look healed and mature, to show the forbearance and mercy of a good Christian martyr – and unfortunately, the form of forgiveness usually satisfies the social pressure even if the substance is lacking and the true healing delayed. I worry that if forgiveness can become an entitlement, then there is no mechanism to change our behaviour, that if we must forgive our cruelest caregivers then perhaps we can make lax choices and do our own kids wrong, knowing that we’ll be forgiven in the end.

These are my concerns about forgiveness as a given. That if we forgive too soon that we’re blaming ourselves instead. That if we find a way to forgive our tormentors, that we may be less aversive to making the same sort of mistakes with our own kids. That forgiveness is only a treatment for a problem and not a solution, that we need to spend more energy on stopping the abuse and harm in the real world rather than accidentally trying to minimize or legitimize it by declaring all sins to be not only forgivable, but that they all must be.

Finally, let’s compare our usual attitude about forgiveness for a moment with our attitude about punishment as a parenting tool: that a cultural Christian or possibly a person from any bible culture is expected to aspire to forgiveness as a moral obligation, and along with the same culture’s injunction to ‘honour thy parents’ means that erring parents are to be forgiven if at all possible and to be pretend-forgiven if not. Contrast that with the parenting situation where the dealing out of penalties for misbehaving children must never be shirked. Discipline must be consistent for it to work. That has the potential to give us a glimpse of the measure of the gulf between our experiences of child- and parenthood:

Parents, abusers, even if they get no penalty other than their child or victim’s ill feelings, can wait for their socially entitled forgiveness while the child can be secure that his or her penalties will be swift, rarely waived, and even more rarely apologized for.

The social pressure to forgive is always there, irrespective of detail. I’ll just let you imagine how society’s will gets expressed when someone stands with the children and tells parents that the apologies and forgiveness are all traveling in exactly the wrong direction.

Jeff

July 6, 2015

All Punishments are Physical

Jeff/neighsayer1 Comment

All Punishments are Physical

Punishments are not voluntary. Punishments are unpleasantnesses that are forced upon a person by an authorized person, in order to convince him to change his behaviour; if an action is not all of these things, it’s not a punishment.
– If it’s not unpleasant for the recipient, it’s not a punishment. It’s either neutral, or it’s a reward.
– If the punisher isn’t a proper, legal authority, it’s somewhere between unauthorized punishment and abuse.
– If it’s not intended to change the recipient’s behaviour, it doesn’t count as punishment, only as retribution.
– That leaves me with force:
People tell me, a lot, that they don’t have to force punishments on their kids, that the kid seems willing enough to take their timeouts, their groundings, the restrictions on their favourite activities – all in everyone’s list of non-physical punishments – in stride. That seems, uh, counterintuitive to me. I mean, I can see that there are many instances of a person taking his punishment with no apparent force. There are certainly cases of prisoners walking to the electric chair under their own power – but to assume that this display means the condemned man has a choice in the matter is assuming too much. He’s going to the chair, and he has plenty of able-bodied men there to help him if his natural instinct to run gets the better of him. The stoic Dead Man’s Walk is only about decorum, appearances. He gets to look like a tough guy, willing to pay the price, and we get to watch a scene somewhat less horrifying than if we had to carry him in there kicking and screaming. I believe that any instance of a person willingly taking his penalty is a similar thing: the person knows there is no choice, and they know that if they fight the designated penalty, it only gets worse for them.
The punished person knows it, the condemned know it, our children know it . . . it would seem to be only the parents that don’t. Modern, deluded parents.
In some ways, the old-fashioned ways of parenting and punishing are preferable, I mean, at least an unapologetic parent who deals out spankings and slaps is honest about it, at least he knows he’s being physical, and more importantly, his kids know it. In a certain sense, his kids have a better chance at understanding what happened to them, they can have some clarity. But the kids whose parents “don’t believe in physical punishing methods,” the kids who suffered their timeouts, their groundings, having their favourite things confiscated and their ‘screen times’ curtailed, the kids who were subject to these sorts of deprivations but have to go through life trying to support the idea that their parents didn’t abuse them, didn’t physically punish them . . . there isn’t likely to be any clarity for these kids. They can’t know that their rights were infringed upon, because their parents don’t realize it either. There will be no resolution for many of these kids.
But I ask you: are these penalties optional? If the kid doesn’t feel like taking the timeout, or living without his new toy, what then? Are we not holding him in the timeout chair, or holding the door closed, which are physical things? Is playing ‘keepaway’ with his new toy not physical? Do we suggest that the toddler take a timeout, and then wait for him to agree and do it himself? Do we ask him to put his new toy down and stay away from it for a specified period and wait for him to do it? Or, as I say at the start of this, and per the dictionary definition, is punishment forced, which means physically – unless someone can do these things with the power of only their mind?
Now I’m not saying that there is some way to have things all our way as parents without punishing, there definitely isn’t. I’m just saying that if you, as a parent, made it to all your appointments on time, if you are never late for work, if you can have expensive things around your house and keep them intact, you have probably been punishing, and that’s not something you can do without getting physical about it. Everybody does it, there’s no shame in admitting it. It’s the system, and there is almost no other way, again, no shame in it.
It’s just that I think there may be more glory in finding another way, if at all possible. And prerequisite to that would be, we need a baseline, an honest one that says, whether we call it ‘corporal punishment’ or not, punishment is a forced thing. If we say we’re not forcing the timeouts, the groundings, etc., that only protects ourselves from the perception of it, it doesn’t change the reality, the reality being the damages associated with corporal punishment, because all punishments require physical means. Remember, if you like it, if you volunteer for it, it’s not a punishment. Punishments are unpleasant. They’re supposed to be, right? So of course we have to force them, that is obvious, that is, it is when we’re talking about them like they’re a good thing. Somehow, though, when we’re in a discussion of what is bad about punishing, that obvious truth becomes, uh, invisible. What I seem to hear is something that boils down to “of course, you have to – but I don’t do that!”
Yes, you do that. No shame in it, it’s the system, the only one, pretty much, so you do that, just admit it. You have to, and you do. Simple. Was that so difficult? Maybe it was, and would you like to know why?
It’s because of all these parenting books, the parenting gurus, all the parenting literature that has been published since Dr. Spock, maybe since B.F. Skinner, it’s all lies, that’s why. None of it says “let the kids win,” it all presupposes that the parents must win every time, and most of it is selling you a system that lets you win every time, with the added bonus that you can do it without getting physical. These are lies, horrible lies. How many of us thought that if we did what some parenting guru says, we wouldn’t have to spank, and been let down when our kid doesn’t feel like it? How many of us learned the hard way that there really is only one way to win an argument with a one, two, or three year-old? And then how many of us stopped listening to these liars? So now we do what we have to do and we just shut up about it, maybe we even think we’re alone, like we’re the only ones who failed at raising our kids by non-physical means, so we can’t even be open about it.
Be open about it. You are not alone.
Most parenting books are crap. They give you positive-sounding ideas, like ‘don’t hit them right away. Try this first, try that, distraction, rewards,’ but they go silent about what to do when it all fails. At the most cynical level, maybe some of these teachers know what we’ll end up doing, but they can’t say it any more. When nothing “works,” when nothing convinces your toddler, you’re on your own – but remember, you’re the parent, you decide what gets done. Kids need ‘structure.’ You know what to do.
And we do, and so we do the hard thing, we bring the unpleasantness, because, as we all know, it’s the only game in town. Just admit it, at least to yourself, your kids, and to me. I’m looking behind the curtain. I’m not going to believe you when you tell me you didn’t or you don’t, not 99% of you anyways. Because really, how could you not?

A conflicted Society – Psychology VS Punishment

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A conflicted Society – Psychology VS Punishment

A swat is good for a kid, teaches ‘em right from wrong. This has been accepted wisdom for many, many folks for a very long period of time: punishments teach.
Abuse damages people – this has probably been accepted by fewer people, and also for fewer centuries.
Can we think both these things? That is to say, is there a place in our minds for both of these . . . functions? Is there room in our society for these opposing apparent effects we see as resulting from what are perhaps closely related causes?
Psychology and the naming of the ravages of abuse have the potential to change the world in unimaginable ways. The symptoms and unrealized potentials that so often follow in the lives of the abused are a scourge the vastness of which cannot be overstated. The only measures of it that approach the truth are our wonder and appreciation of those who somehow manage to overcome, as well as our appreciation of those who refuse to repeat their abuse upon the next generation and to imagine a world without abuse is to imagine nothing less than heaven on Earth. Unrealized it may be, but only the fields of knowledge in and around psychology and sociology have the potential to bring this dream into the realms of possibility. Unrealized, to repeat. I admit that.
The reasons for the unfulfilled potential of the study of human interactions are many, and not all within the scope of what I’m trying to say here. Conversely, the unfulfilled promise of the other idea – that is sort of my specialty. The other idea, of course, being that children need discipline – read “punishments” – to become responsible, well-behaved, law-abiding adults.
The social – I hesitate to say ‘sciences,’ so the social ‘fields of inquiry’ – haven’t really been tested yet, in terms of their potential to cure some of society’s ills. Despite so much good information coming out in the last few generations about the damages of corporal punishment, spankings and other corporal punishments remain the rule rather than the exception. Despite the consciousness on the part of the psychological and psychiatric communities of the harm caused by punishments, over-punishments and abuse, these professions seem to spend their time selling fixes for the harmed people after the fact rather than focussing on prevention (I mean, to be fair, that is more properly the province of social workers and educators, plus it’s so vastly worse than just pointless and thankless – it’s no wonder no-one gets paid to do it). It seems the patients possibly believe in psychology, and are willing to use what psychology offers – but it appears their parents and caregivers do not. Therapy is looked upon as a very personal thing. When a person’s damage is so bad that it robs them of their quality of life, then they may look at the source of their pain; when we are tacitly accused of being the source of the younger generation’s pain we are less likely to participate in that examination.
Punishing, the belief in punishing, sets the scene for abuse in many ways. I know it’s a normal part of the narrative around parenting and abuse to say that proper ‘discipline’ and abuse are opposites, to say that the parent seeks to mold and direct their kids while the abuser seeks only to harm and humiliate. However to believe this, one must ignore all the gradients between those poles.
One must refuse to see that near the worst end of this bridge, that there is some remnant of the parent, and that near the best end, that there is some small component of the abuser. This would be a truth even if the two things were opposites – but psychology has shown us that as much as they are, they also are not. The truth is that, even as within the popular narrative’s apparent opposition all punishing has a component of abuse, the darker, psychological story of unconscious mechanisms show the abuse component to always be present in fairly constant measure. I’ll make a sharp left turn here.
I’m guessing that paragraph separated the believers of psychology from the believers of punishment (‘discipline,’ if you prefer)? Did anyone just make a choice, or learn that they had already made a choice somewhere in the past? Because that is the point I’m heading for here. No-one seems to take psychology or childhood trauma seriously, not until we run out of choices, or until our choices take a deadly turn, not until we’ve lost everything first. This is my point, the answer to the questions posed at the start of this little rant. If there is room in our minds for both of these concepts, then our minds are split, our selves are severed in two. We need to understand that a choice is necessary. Of course there is only one choice to make.
A modern person who has no concern for abuse, no concern for the consequences of the pain we create, that person is a monster, a villain. That person has been destroyed, he’s either a rare, birth-defected organic monster or has suffered some kind of ultimate abuse himself (or some combination, the possessor of an activated ‘warrior gene’ perhaps). That person has not made a conscious choice, and that isn’t a choice that it is possible to make consciously.
In the middle ground is where humanity lives, nearly all of us. Unaware of the choice, or unaware that one must be made, we treat the lessons of psychology like art, an amusing intellectual exercise, humouring the work and the visionaries who have shown us the way as though they were children and their life’s works were finger paintings.
“Sure,” We say. “Betrayal of love. Childhood emotional and mental trauma, being trained to look at hurt and deprivations as being good for us, demonstrating Might is Right, modeling bullying and the use of force – that’s bad, I mean, I guess . . . but what are you gonna do?” (Shades of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ . . . )
“Like, sure, psychology. But seriously . . .”
This, while in our real lives, we punish, wielding pain, withdrawal of love, and selective deprivations of all kinds ostensibly to produce ‘better’ people – because we think the lessons of psychology and the understanding of abuse, unlike hard science’s laws like gravity, only apply to some few of us, to extreme cases, to other people, to other parents, to other parents’ children.
There is a choice, one conscious choice to be made, because not to make it leaves us in the middle ground. That choice is to buy into the basic premise of psychology and the understanding of abuse, which, at its simplest is: hurt hurts. To deny the social forms of philosophy this way, to believe in punishing is to say hurt heals. That’s the simple logic of it, peeled down to the essence. But beyond that, because we don’t really believe in the sciences of human behaviour and so this logical truth can’t reach us, this:
Punishing, being what we have believed for millennia, has us still living in a world of abuse, war, hatred, bigotry, and a crumbling environment. If you think it hasn’t caused it, I ask you this: has it fixed it? Do we think it’s going to fix things any time soon, is that our fantasy? Will anyone say that if we treat our children, our criminals and our enemies with more harshness and less forgiveness that that is the way to peace, tolerance and a better future? Five, six, maybe ten millennia of ‘discipline,’ and this is our world. It’s not all bad, but it’s got a lot of bad still. Is this supposed to be the generation where our ideas of bringing pain and with-holding love will finally solve our problems?
No? So that isn’t a choice, then? What about the status quo?
Would no change in the level of pain and deprivations we use to make things better be a viable choice? Should we be just exactly this harsh and retributive then, and if we do, can we expect improvement in our problems? Should we make sure not to decrease the amount of unpleasantness we visit upon each other?
No again? Of course we want to lessen abuse and pain in the world, but we think we can get there while supporting a concept like punishment, a concept that means hurt heals, a blatant reversal of what is obvious and true.
Or is it yes?
Yes, we really do think the knowledge of abuse and its damages isn’t real, or somehow not important? We really do believe that a great deal of hurt is bad, but some hurt is good, so we need to make sure everyone gets hurt in some perfect measure, we really do think that if we don’t hurt each other, if we don’t hurt our children in some way that they won’t learn and the world will become a worse place?
The knowledge of abuse and its harms are the future of the pursuit of human happiness, and the belief that using pain and the loss of love to make better people of our children is the dark, unconscious past, that is what I’m saying. Let’s get on the right side of history with this. We’ll need to take psychology and human science out of the universities and into our homes, into real life. Most importantly, into our families, our parenting. This is it.
Hurt hurts, or hurt heals.
If hurt heals, then what is abuse?
If hurt hurts, then what is punishment?
Anyone who thinks the world is getting worse (it’s not) because of our gradual increase in humanity (a slow but constant upswing), is suffering from Good Old Days Syndrome; they are not making an accurate assessment of our long violent history. As bad as things look now, they used to be worse, and it is humanistic ideas, the fulfillment of which could well be our modern understanding of abuse and its effects, that are making the difference. The modern lives with no humanism, gang life, lives of never-ending war and strife, they are the lives with the most violence and crime, not lives lived in liberalism and molly-coddling.
That’s the choice before us. Humanism, psychology, these are the real deal, let’s let them change us. Let them save our children, our world. We’ve tried the other idea, over and over, hoping for different results, and we know what that is. But of course, mental illness is one of the documented symptoms.

Familiarity Breeds Blindness – When We Can’t See the Concepts for the Words

Jeff/neighsayer1 Comment

It’s a sad thing when words lose their power, when we have lived with them for so long that we’re no longer impressed by the things they signify. I think it was when I was reading “Midnight’s Children,” (set in India) when I was shocked, first by the expression ‘sister-sleeper’ and then in “White Tiger” when it was the stronger ‘sisterfucker’ and I realized that our version, ‘motherfucker’ had lost its punch, that I was no longer feeling the image it evokes. I started saying and writing what I think of as the Indian version in order to take advantage of its freshness and power. (Interestingly, my Canadian Microsoft Word is also accustomed to the mother version, but is flagging the sister version for a spell check.)

Show a man a photoshopped picture of himself in coitus with his own mother and he’ll react – but the word for him in that image just means somewhere between ‘dude’ and ‘swine’ these days, at least for some of us. ‘Sisterfucker’ isn’t a more disturbing concept, it was just unfamiliar to me, so my mind looked at it a little closer, and the image was a nasty surprise. I must have quit paying attention to what ‘motherfucker’ means. Now, in case anybody’s concerned that I’m switching gears, don’t worry. Here it comes.

I re-posted one of my older child-rearing, anti-punishment blogs on another site and it started a few conversations with a few people, a man or two and some ladies, some mothers. The conversation came around to my controversial stance that ‘corporal punishment’ is a misleading phrase, that in fact (‘fact’ to me at least), without a willingness to get physical there can be no punishments. Hold on –

early on while writing my blogs and my book on the subject, I looked up ‘punishment’ to get a somewhat official definition. The dictionary ones were pretty straightforward, but the Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy went on for many pages. What I came up with, in the shortest form, is that punishment is the imposition of an aversive in order to lessen an unwanted behaviour. ‘Aversive’ means an unwanted stimulus, a term I usually change to ‘unpleasantness,’ and ‘imposition’ means to put something on someone without any condition as to whether they want it or not. So a punishment is something you don’t want and is put on you without your consent, in order to change an unwanted behaviour of yours.

That, just in case ‘punishment’ is a word that we don’t examine anymore, just in case we’ve forgotten the meaning or never really heard it in the first place –

So I spent a few comments trying to convince some people that all punishments depend on force, that their children weren’t likely to have been taking their non-corporal timeouts and such from a place of willing agreement, that their kids probably had learned, either the hard way or by inference, that the non-corporal punishment wasn’t going to be optional, that if they didn’t take it, it would wind up being forced upon them, that the punishment would escalate.

I’m trying not to generalize about gender here, but interestingly, among these very few people in the discussion, the most vocal man made no bones about it. Damned straight, was his attitude, a good smack will put them right. Kids don’t understand talking; that is what they understand.

The ladies, though, they didn’t believe in hitting or corporal punishment, and while they did believe in punishment, they insisted they didn’t back it up with force. Trying to make my point, I asked repeatedly if their punishments were optional, if there was any way the punishment wasn’t going to happen, or if it was going to happen by hook or by crook. One of the ladies assured me that it wasn’t optional, that if the child simply walked away from his or her timeout, that she would simply bring the child back to it, as many times as it took. I didn’t argue that ‘bringing the child back’ was a physical act, and I didn’t ask how forcefully it might have to be done if the child was stubborn about it, although these are certainly important parts of the puzzle for me. I just asked again, if it’s not optional, then the parent is going to make it happen by whatever means necessary, right?

One answer struck me as pretty schizoid, but maybe it’s just this language thing, maybe the words in the response had been said so often that the meaning had been lost: in an answer that said ‘punishments are not all backed up physically’ someone said something like ‘of course you have to follow through.’ Now that last phrase is familiar indeed, ubiquitous even – we all know it. But unexamined it must be, because otherwise how can someone say ‘of course you have to follow through’ and feel it is somehow a contradiction to ‘I am willing to do whatever it takes to make this happen?’ So that’s what’s happening, I think, when I try to make this point, it’s the same as my opening example, like we hear the deadly, incest accusation of ‘motherfucker’ all day long, and it’s all in fun, harmless, like a friendly ‘cabron’ between pals, but when I say that all punishments are backed up with force . . .

well it’s like I said ‘sisterfucker’ loudly during a moment of quiet at a church barbeque. Shock and horror. The deer-in-headlights blank stares of the good peoples’ moral indignation.

So I’m the bad guy. All right, I’ll play that role, I’ll crash your barbeque – what time again? Oh right, I remember. It’s always happening.

It All Starts When We Punish our Kids, Part #7

Jeff/neighsayer2 Comments

It all starts when we punish our kids.

What all starts? Well . . .

Addiction.

Addiction is a strange thing.

I used to say, getting high, getting drunk – that I can understand, but gambling? Spending all your money to feel the high from heroin, or from weed, you’re getting something, at least some relief from all those pesky feelings, and with alcohol . . . well, I think with drink what you get is different. I think what alcohol gives you is a chance to vent, a chance to give voice to your worst feelings with no worry that you might remember doing it.

But gambling? That seemed like only half an addiction to me. You lose all your money and . . . nothing. Talk about cutting out the middleman. That is some pure, un-cut self harm right there.

And that is the clue to what’s really going on with addiction.

The addict tends to think that the very thing that is ruining him is the thing that’s saving him – that’s another clue. The addict sees good in the harm, perhaps it’s possible to say that the addict can’t tell good from bad, but probably more accurate to say that for him, the harm looks like good, or feels like good.
Harm from which good is said to come, or good that is derived from harm?

That is what punishment is supposed to be, that is the theory of punishing, good from harm, harm to create good. And this is where the addict learned it. Where we all learned it, at home, from our caregivers.
When a parent punishes, either hits, spanks, grounds or puts us in time-out, confiscates a desired object or simply withdraws his love in order to hurt us and induce us to avoid that hurt by doing what he wants, this is what is shown: good from harm. Worse, the parent explains it, spells it out: this harm is good for you. For many of us, for so many of us, this lesson is applied for nearly every possible hard lesson we get.
It’s no wonder so many of us think harm is good, at least that harm brings good.

Is it?

Familiarity Breeds Contempt – Corporal Punishment and the Catholic Church

Jeff/neighsayer7 Comments

Just when I thought we had an enlightened Pope, the obvious truth comes out to smack me in the face – well not in the face, I guess. This obvious truth smacked in some other part of my body, some part where being struck isn’t going to cost me my dignity, I guess.
This Pope has come out on the side of many marginalized groups, gays, Muslims (marginalized in the West), even women, I think. He even said righteous atheists could go to heaven! But this –

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31163219

“He made the remarks during his weekly general audience at the Vatican, which was devoted to the role of fathers in the family.
The Pope outlined the traits of a good father, as someone who forgives but is able to “correct with firmness” while not discouraging the child.
Some child welfare campaigners have questioned his comments.
The Pope said: “One time, I heard a father in a meeting with married couples say ‘I sometimes have to smack my children a bit, but never in the face so as to not humiliate them.’
“How beautiful,” he added. “He knows the sense of dignity. He has to punish them but does it justly and moves on.””

– this was rather disappointing. It says in the article that the Catholic Church argued that it “in no way supported corporal punishment,” but one has to wonder if this most shockingly liberal Pope could say this then what would more conservative back-benchers think about it. The article also mentions that the Church had come under criticism last year by a UN committee that was monitoring the progress of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.
So, I’m a little afraid that we’re all getting a peek behind the curtain at this Great and Liberal Pope. If he can be supportive of corporal punishment for everybody on Earth – after all, we all start as children – then perhaps that gives the lie to his support of smaller groups, perhaps that support might start to look merely political.
The premise I find amusing: that as long as we’re not struck in the face, we retain our dignity while receiving our corporal punishment. I’m sure we all remember how dignified we felt when our pants were pulled down for it.

Personally, I feel this as a slap in the face, and sort of well, personal. The guy supports every possible cause they throw in front of him except mine. Murphy’s Law, got me again.

#antiparenting

Jeff/neighsayer3 Comments

#antiparenting

It’s not personal, Folks, but I think I have to separate myself, I think I have to stop hoping that people might ever find me by searching for “parenting.” You’ll find a lot of people, and a lot of blogs, books, advice, bloggers with thousands, even hundreds of thousands of followers, but from a random sampling of the content, it’s all “parenting,” and in the overwhelming number of cases it’s all synonymous with “control.” I hope I’m not hurting feelings here, but be forewarned: if that’s what you’re talking about I’m not going to follow you. More yet, if I’ve been following you, that’s likely to end soon. Again, not personal, but if I had a brand, you’d be hurting it. I can’t be associated with you.

I’m pretty old, the other side of fifty, and so I’m not the most savvy fellow on the interwebs; much of social networking is counterintuitive to me, and I may have lost my way. I thought I would be followed more if I followed more people, and who knows? Maybe it worked a little. Maybe half of my thirty-some twitter followers and half of my hundred or so WordPress followers are the reciprocal kind, and if those numbers were larger by a few orders of magnitude, I suppose I would accept the arrangement. But really – who compromises for those sorts of numbers? For those numbers I’m going to allow myself to be confused with the likes of Barbara Coloroso?

Not personal, Ms. Coloroso. You’re normal, and as such, you’re a fine specimen of your type – but I am in the business of telling people what they don’t want to hear. I’d love a bestseller, of course I would, but this is not my day job. No-one needs me to make any money at this. Folks, when I tell you you’re all bad parents and you’re destroying the world with your efforts for control, this message comes only from the goodness of my heart. These insults are free for anybody. You’re welcome.

“Parenting” has a lot of positive connotations. We protect our kids, we feed and house them, do all we can when they’re sick and we hope for best for them, of course we do. I have no objection to the things we wish for our children. If that was the entire list of what we do – well, that actually should be the whole list, that’s the point. It is the other side of parenting, the side we don’t like to see, the dark side that I’m taking issue with: punishment has no place in that positive list of parenting activities. It certainly deserves no credit in any positive outcomes our children may have. I tell you here, when a firm hand doing the hard thing appears to save a child from serious trouble, we can be certain it was also what led them to trouble in the first place.

I have to say here, that much of the modern parenting advice never says “hit your kids,” or even “hit your kids if nothing else works.” It’s just that they don’t say not to, at least they don’t say it strongly enough. They’re trying to get read, trying to sell some books or gain a large group of followers; they can’t tell everyone, most of whom have already hit their kids, that they’ve caused irreparable damage. Who wants to hear that?

Let me pose this question, though: who, in the history of the universe ever solved a big problem by hearing only what they wanted to hear? Who, in the history of the universe ever changed people’s minds by only telling them what they already thought?

So the best of the “normals,” as we call the punishers of the world in my house – the degreed ones, the educators, the psychologists – are writing parenting advice, trying to nudge people toward a slightly more gentle sort of parenting, hoping to lessen the damage parents cause through the betrayal and abuse of punishments, but they can’t take a stand on the principle of the matter, not when they’re hoping to be read. There are a few voices in the wilderness. You can find a few people, try searching on “No Punishment,” or variations of that, there are a few of us, as the least of which I count myself.

Again, with no boss to worry about, I’ll say it.

Trying alternative methods first isn’t good enough to stop the damage; ending “corporal” punishment isn’t good enough to avoid the betrayal, the resentment and the world-crippling harm. It is punishment, all punishment, that needs to be purged from anything we should be proud to call parenting. If punishment is a part of the good important work of parenting – I’m anti-that.

One of Parenting’s Worst Myths

Jeff/neighsayer1 Comment

Let me ask anyone reading this – do you actually know ANYBODY who doesn’t try to discipline their kids? Anybody who doesn’t believe in discipline, anybody who says “Oh, I don’t care how my kids behave. Let the police worry about it!”

 

Of course the truth is, all the families that the misbehaving kids and the criminals of the world come from do indeed believe in discipline and punishment, and that DOESN’T F@#$%^G WORK, and so the kids misbehave, and many people grow up crazy and violent and lead criminal lives DESPITE having been punished and disciplined in their family homes. That is the obvious truth, because if discipline and punishment was some sort of magic cure, then you would have to show me a sizable portion of the population who doesn’t believe in it and doesn’t use it, and you can’t.

 

Can you? I’ll ask again:

 

Do you really know ANYBODY who doesn’t try to discipline their kids?

Ignore that “Tiger Mom” – She’d Eat Your Kids

Link Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/12/elephant-mom-timeof-tigermother/383378/?single_page=true

– And here’s the text:

Being an ‘Elephant Mom’ in the Time of the Tiger Mother

It’s okay for parents to nurture, protect, and encourage their children, especially when they’re very young.

I still remember the first time someone spoke to me about grit. It wasn’t when I lost my dad and saw my mother fall apart.

It wasn’t when my mother died, and I felt like I was falling apart.

It wasn’t when people who I believed would invest in my business didn’t. It wasn’t when the great recession hit our advertisers and my business had to stop publishing a magazine.

It was when I was thinking of pulling my 3-year-old out of a preschool in which she clearly wasn’t thriving. She was anxious, frozen, a shadow of the child she used to be before she started there.

But it was a co-op preschool, meaning I couldn’t just turn around and leave. When you sign up to join a co-op, you also sign up to work various jobs around the school and to commit to being an active part of a larger community. In other words, I had to talk to the other parents at the co-op about my decision. One of them cautioned me: “What about grit?” she said. For a minute, I was taken aback. Was she talking about me or my 3-year-old?

She wasn’t talking about me.

It shouldn’t have shocked my system. I’ve often felt like a misfit around parents when they talk about how kids have it too easy these days or how important it is to inculcate a sense of independence in them as early as possible.

This is the story of my struggle to allow myself to be the kind of parent I want to be. I grew up in India, but moved to the U.S. in my 20s and became a mother here in my 30s. I had never felt like an outsider, ever—until I had a child.

I read a lot of books so that I would be the best mom I could be. And I suddenly found myself wondering, did the Indian parents I saw in my parents’ generation—and many in mine—get it wrong? My father was a big believer in the importance of a child’s first five years. I often heard him tell people how he couldn’t scold me until I was five. He reprimanded his younger brother for raising his voice at his kids before they turned five. Raised voices or not, we didn’t have any concept of time-outs anywhere around us. I can’t recall a time when I cried and a grown up didn’t come to console or hold me. They always did. I slept with my mother until I was five. My father would tease me and say I was my mother’s tail, but neither of them did anything to get me to sleep alone or in a different room with my siblings.

My parents weren’t the only ones with this kind of approach. The phrase I would hear in almost every home we visited during my childhood was some version of’Let the kids enjoy themselves.’ They have the rest of their lives to be grown up.And the social fabric of our world supported them. We would go to the fanciest of restaurants with our parents and run around and play tag. No one would stop us—not the managers, not the other diners. It was normal. Soon enough, the servers would join in. It was lovely.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that my parents and their friends necessarily had it right. Some of them produced kids who were happy, some of them didn’t; some of them raised CEOs, some of them raised stay-at-home moms. I’m justsaying that it’s okay to be an elephant mom, an elephant dad—an elephant parent.

If you’re wondering what ‘elephant parent’ means, it’s the kind of parent who does the exact opposite of what the tiger mom, the ultra-strict disciplinarian, does. Here’s a short video clip that shows how real elephants parent. And that’s what I’m writing about here—parents who believe that they need to nurture, protect, and encourage their children, especially when they’re still impressionable and very, very young.

My elephant mom was a doctor with infinite patience. I failed a Hindi test when I was in fifth or sixth grade, and I remember going to her, teary-eyed, with my results—and hearing her tell me that it didn’t matter. There were many more tests ahead. As I sobbed in her lap, she stroked my hair, hugged me, and told me there would be another test, and I could pass that one. (I did get the annual proficiency prize for Hindi a year later at the same school.)

My grandparents were doting parents, too. On both sides, the families lost everything in the partition of India. They had to flee to India from what is now Pakistan. My naana (mother’s father), originally a doctor from a wealthy family, began saving every rupee to educate his girls. He stopped going to the movies, his favorite past time. Both he and his wife stopped buying new clothes and began stitching them at home instead.

My father knew grit. He came to Punjab in India on a train with bullets flying around him—and people dying in front of his eyes. (Riots accompanied the 1947 partition that divided India and Pakistan.)

After his father died suddenly, he looked after his mother and brought up his four siblings in India. He and my mother paid for them to study in school and college and funded their weddings. Yet, my father never talked to me about grit. If anything, my parents protected me from pain; perhaps they knew that life would eventually have some pain in store for me, sooner or later. They learned how to raise their kids from their parents. And I learned how to raise my kid from them.

But my husband, who is also Indian, and I are raising our daughter thousands of miles away from where we were grew up. There aren’t any families of Indian origin at my daughter’s preschool or even in our immediate neighborhood. “Our way” isn’t a way that everyone around us understands. When she was a baby, we wouldn’t let her cry herself to sleep. It wasn’t a judgment on those who followed the sleep expert Marc Weissbluth’s advice. It was and is a cultural belief. Even now, our four-year-old will often ask us to put her shoes on, and feed her, much to the consternation of many fellow parents. But we do it because it connects us to our uncles and aunts who would have said she has the rest of her life to do it herself.

To make sense of the world where I was raising my child, I went to meet Angela Jernigan, who runs Parent Connect East Bay in Berkeley. She helps people find and build a support structure in their parenting journey. “We don’t have the village anymore,” she said. “It’s very hard for parents to be connected (to their kids), to give their kids the experience of being felt and heard.” For that to happen, parents need to feel connected and supported themselves, which in our fragmented world can be hard to do, she explained.

Jernigan has heard words like grit and resilience thrown around in her own child’s elementary school. “I explain that us having adult-like standards for children is the wrong way to build resilience. Parents have to be nurturing to build a core of strength with children,” she said.

Nurturing. Vulnerable. Empathetic. That’s how parents need to be, she suggests, when kids are having a “big feeling” (in other words, a meltdown).

I heard something similar in a TED talk by Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston’s Graduate College of Social Work, who studies the human connection. “You can’t selectively numb those hard feelings,” Brown said. She was referring to emotions like guilt, vulnerability, and shame—emotions kids and adults feel. In an uncertain world, Brown said, we like to make things certain. “We perfect, most dangerously, our children.”

And why we do that probably warrants an entirely different discussion about our cultural fears and insecurities. Have we failed as parents if our kids aren’t the most well-behaved, toughest, and smartest kids in the neighborhood? Jernigan’s clients are more often than not people who are trying to be the perfect parents, raising perfect kids.

Literature, discussions and forums about parenting abound. As we look for the best ways to raise our kids, we gravitate toward what makes sense to us. After meeting Jernigan, I couldn’t help but think that if there were so many parents flocking to her group to learn how to better connect with their kids, maybe many of the differences I’d noticed weren’t as fundamental and deep-rooted as I’d believed. Perhaps parents, regardless of where they’re from, have more in common than not. The mom who spoke to me about grit also, on a separate occasion, spoke to me about wanting a slow separation from her child.

Studies and facts indicate that, regardless of what parents might say about being tough with their kids, they are spending more time and money on them than previous generations have done. A 2012 study by sociologists Sabino Kornrich and Frank Furstenberg that was published in Demography found that parentsspent more on their children’s education and care than on consumer goods from 1972 to 2007. Studies out of the University of California at San Diego show that college-educated parents in the U.S. have dramatically increased the time they spend with their kids over the past twenty years.