Child development

Leading by Example is Not Optional

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

Is that what we think? Do we say to ourselves and our peers, ‘I’m going to lead by example in this case?’

Like, the other times, when we did something and hoped no-one would see it as an example: yesterday, that thing I did? Don’t do that. Do as I say, not as I do. But today, today, I’m leading by example. This I do want you to emulate.

Like that is up to us.

I’ve enjoyed this form of literary masturbation in the past, the binocular peep show I will call the two-pronged blog, so I’ll try it again. Part One – the Middle East.

Let’s start with a harmless fantasy. How about we just get the Hell out of the ME, completely? America’s oil production is up, Alberta is already destroyed anyway, might as well milk the plateau that starts at the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains for all it’s worth, plus there’s still the Gulf. We’ve got oil here. I say we offer the Israelis some plot of land about the size of the one they have now, say Richard Gere’s place or something . . . and just walk away. Leave the various clans of Islam to sort it out among themselves. And in doing so . . .

Lead by example. We should leave them a letter or something, like –

“Dear Arabs, we’re sorry we took your oil and your blood for so long, but we’re stopping now. I don’t know why we did it, we were such pricks. All we can say is, we’re sorry. We wish we could explain it somehow, try to make some sense of it, but no, we just suck, and we’re sorry. We know that isn’t very satisfying. Of course you’re still pissed. All we can say is that we’re trying to change, and maybe, if we can be better for a few decades, maybe future generations of our peoples can have some sort of normal relationship. We acknowledge we’re leaving you in a terrible mess, but we think if there is one thing we can agree on, it must be that our efforts to clean it up only ever make it worse.

Good luck,

Love,

The West.”

and then we concentrate on getting our own house in order, see if we can’t establish something, a form of life and government that may be recognizable as an attempt to establish the Christian dream of Heaven on Earth . . . you know. Lead by example.

Because what do they see of the West over there? Conquest, war, dominance, that’s what we show Islam, and we hope that they don’t see that as an example. We don’t get to do that, we don’t get to say ‘don’t follow our example yesterday, follow it today.’ That’s not how the world works. People are watching us all the time. Everything we do is an example, we aren’t invisible until we say ‘see me now!’

Of course, part of this conversation must always be, action speaks louder than words. The world is always watching, but it is rarely listening, rightly so, of course. A great deal of what we do is far more important stuff we only say.

And so for the macro-view, geopolitics. Of course, the fractal seed, the base unit for this, is parenting. It doesn’t matter what moral lesson you are trying to teach your child if you teach it with any sort of negative stimulus, literal pain, loss of a loved object, loss of personal freedom, whatever.

Say what you will, you’re making your child’s life worse.

And your child will see it.

Why I Stayed? The Hopelessness of Popular Issues

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

I’m not bitter. Well, OK, I’m a little bitter.

In my day job, as an uneducated working man, I have customers all over town and one customer in particular that is an hour’s drive away from home, an hour and ten minutes from my office, and I listen to the radio in the van, the CBC, sometimes affectionately known as the Canadian Broadcorping Castration. At least that’s what we called it in a long past job, when I worked for a competing outfit, a small town Cable company. The CBC has some good talk stuff, some good comedy and fiction programming. I turn it off when they play music. I find modern mainstream music dreadfully boring, and don’t want to fall asleep at the wheel. There is some good talk, as I said, but the noon hour, call-in, current issue show can get me down. When they talk about issues of bullying, or this week’s issue, violence against women, things I have put some thought to, hopelessness looms and the world looks like a stupid, mindless place where nothing will ever get better. It seems like no-one is trying to find a root cause for these things.

When I hear repeatedly “Why I Stayed?” and all the usual phrasing around it, I want to answer, I even went so far as to call in the other day, but I chickened out before they answered, even though I had gotten through, somehow made it past the usual busy signal, I balked for two reasons. One, it’s hard to be the curmudgeon, interrupting a naïve, shallow conversation with the nasty truth, and two, it’s even harder when the poor fools trading banalities scoff and ignore you! I didn’t want so publicly to be casting the pearls of my insight before the unassailable popularity of the clichés the talkers were employing. There are plenty of clichés we use for that sort of thing; some good ones have been attributed to Mark Twain.

Domestic violence is a specific form of bullying – and bullying is a specific form of punishment, specific, namely, in that it is unauthorized. When someone deals out punishments – verbal, physical and emotional abuse – and the crimes that these abuses are intended to discourage are not in line with a broad social consensus, then that is bullying, abuse, violence. It is abusive if the crime, such as being a minority or a female, is not considered to be a crime by the larger majority, but the tools of abuse and punishment are the same.

The punished person, the victim of abuse is told that they are wrong, told that they are bad, told that they deserve the mistreatment, and they are mistreated in any number of ways. This is life for many children, this is life for many children who are over-punished, and many of the girls who are treated this way throughout their childhoods find their way into abusive relationships. Why do they stay?

Because this is NORMAL to them. Verbal and physical abuse is NORMAL to many of these girls, it’s the only life they’ve ever known, so they stay because they’re unaware that there is any safe place to go to if they leave. Now here’s the nasty part:

If there are many women who wind up in these abusive relationships who do not report abusive childhoods, if women find themselves in that situation having had no documented history of being abused, that is our clue that even “normal” lives are making adult abusive situations appear to be normal. If they miss the clues that may have tipped them off to a partner’s impending abusiveness, it is because they have learned not to see the abuse in their “normal” childhoods first. As have we all. This is the problem with these “cycles of abuse.” The cycle operates whether or not we acknowledge abuse, whether or not abuse in some part of the cycle is “normal,” legal, expected, or even mandatory.

I’ve said it elsewhere: our “normal” use of punishment is a cause in the world, a cause of the violence we consider to be beyond normal, a large part of all the cycles of violence, cycles of abuse. That women who we wouldn’t consider victims of childhood abuse, even women who don’t consider themselves to be victims of childhood abuse find their way into these binds is evidence that they have lived in these binds before. Do the ‘math.’ If two and two make four, it cannot be allowed to matter that we don’t LIKE four.

This is what I call “reasoning” or “logic.”

If someone doesn’t like my theory here, I would ask – what is their theory of domestic violence? Is it that men are just violent swine, that it’s “in our natures?” Of course many men are indeed violent animals, and of course that is terrible, and they need to be responsible for themselves. Of course, the men who are completely free of sexism are few and far between – but to say “men are pigs” is only a description, only a label, it is not an explanation for anything. To simply call an abuser an asshole and stop there is no more helpful that to call the victims fools. How does labeling people that way explain the many men who do not abuse their women, or the many women who won’t be mistreated? Or how does it explain the abused woman’s part of the cycle of violence, how does it explain why they stay? Is this simply a manifestation of that old, logical saltpeter, Original Sin, people are just bad, and we shouldn’t try to find the reasons for these sorts of things?

Again, Original Sin doesn’t explain when bad things DON’T happen. So, I’ll ask my strawman critics again – what is their theory? What natural process explains domestic violence?

This week it’s violence against women, and last year it was school bullying and cyber-bullying. I have written on bullying before, but I’ll discuss it again soon. For now my point is, these two controversies have had the cumulative effect of depressing me. Listening to people discuss these things in a blind, unanalytical way, trying to solve an effect with no acknowledgement of the cause . . .

Well, that is just sad and pointless.

I almost want to accuse the media of knowingly and willingly selling mindlessness, because mindlessness is popular, we eat that shit up. And the hopelessness they throw in for free.

It All Starts when We Punish our Kids, #5

Jeff/neighsayer1 Comment

It all starts when we punish our kids.

What “all starts?” Well . . .

  1. Rape.

First and foremost, rape is violence, so for that aspect of it, see Part #2.

Second, rape is misogyny, at least man-on-woman rape is. That is Part #3.

The analogy of rape to punishment is pretty straightforward, it’s a stronger person forcing their will on a weaker one, and there is often a lot of victim-blaming: the punished child has “brought in on his or her self,” and the rape victim “was asking for it.” But it doesn’t stop there, this analogy has more.

There is the issue of force, the issue of implied violence. We would say of a large number of instances of parental punishment that it isn’t violent, that children simply take their medicine, apparently willingly, just as the male dominated criminal justice system may often judge that a woman who wasn’t severely battered may not have been raped, that she may have been willing, perhaps that she “was asking for it.” Implied violence is invisible, of course – well, “of course” in certain circumstances anyway. Especially so in these circumstances, when we have all been raised in the system of punishment, when we are all willingly blinded to the “invisible” implied violence of that system, when we have all been subjected to it, threatened throughout our formative years, and with primal memories of force and violence from our baby and toddlerhoods, when threats were ineffective because we lacked language skills – and this is the best case scenario, this describes people who were never actually struck or manhandled during the majority of their early years. So very many of us believe there was no violence behind our parents’ discipline, or at least we believe it doesn’t matter. Of course, we must, there isn’t really much choice, and by the time we can safely choose to see it, we need not to again, so we can take our turn dishing it out upon our own children. The window in which we might face that truth is pretty short, and missing it is what we call becoming a grown up, achieving maturity.

In those circumstances, when needing to be blind to our parents implied violence and then to our own, when that needful blindness rules our lives, in those circumstances, the implied violence of rape will usually be invisible.

Here’s the rest of the series:

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/08/25/it-all-starts-when-we-punish-our-kids-4/

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/07/20/it-all-starts-when-we-punish-our-kids-3/

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/07/19/it-all-starts-when-we-punish-our-kids-2/

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/07/19/it-all-starts-when-we-punish-our-kids-1/

It All Starts when We Punish our Kids, #4

Jeff/neighsayer1 Comment

It all starts when we punish our kids.

What “all starts?” Well . . .

           4. Depression.

The damages from abuse are many, but they’re becoming well known. I’ve often listed the categories of them, physical, psychological, emotional and cognitive, but the damages themselves are:

Impaired cognitive development (trouble in school, poorer grades);

Behaviour problems;

All manner of disorders: eating, depression, anxiety, self-harm,
addictions;
Physical injuries, sometimes permanent and/or resulting in impaired physical development;

Etc., etc.

The thing is, the list of damages that have been so well documented as resulting from what is called corporal punishment – that is the same list. This is why corporal punishment is fast being outlawed all over the world.

All punishment is corporal punishment – that’s the big secret. Therefore the list of damages that result from all punishment is the same list. (See Part #2, Violence.)

Now, clearly, it is usually, if not always impossible to show causation from even childhood abuse to teen or adult depression, let alone childhood punishments to teen or adult depression in specifics, but the science is in. Statistically, connections have been repeatedly shown. Documented victims of abuse and corporal punishment have higher incidences of depression and the secondary manifestations of depression listed above: addiction, self harm and suicide, as well as many, less obvious symptoms.

In a personal perspective:

1. I have suffered depresion myself, and I can’t really connect it specifically to childhood abuse or punishment. I was the last of four children, and I suffered the least punishment of all my siblings, which I accomplished the old fashioned way, by doing what I was told. Now, avoiding the punishments didn’t save me from depressive episodes throughout later life, but it’s possible that the environment of punishment is itself a cause for depression. I mean, I got the message, the one we all get, whether we wish to consciously grant it power over us or not: my parents would rather hurt me than accept any serious inconvenience from my behaviour.

Again, I can’t say specifically that that did it – but it certainly could do it. And statistically, it almost cetainly does.

2. One of my two unpunished daughters has suffered some teen depression. The environment at home wasn’t that way for her, we never sent that message. That message is everywhere for kids though, daycare, school, the homes of other kids. It probably even had a subconscious presence in our house. Both myself and my wife were raised in punishing homes; perhaps my kids felt the stress of us fighting our programming, perhaps they could feel that they were getting away with stuff that we never did as kids, and maybe they could sense the unconscious reactions we were fighting. That might do it.

Another factor may be that our girls were sort of alone, because of the way we raised them, because they were the only un-punished kids they knew. That may have set them apart, and they certainly have felt lonely and not a part of the group, especially during the teen years when the other kids were rebelling and sharing their parental war stories with each other. (My impression is that they found most of the other kids somewhat mean and . . . how to say it? Limited.) That may well be a depressing aspect in her life too.

Plus, of course, other random things in life also happen. Whether by sub-conscious transmission or something genetic, her depression appeared at the very same age as mine did. There’s very likely something there too. But the first few things, the punishment related ones, they could still be factors.

Plus, of course, other random things in life also happen. Whether by sub-conscious transmission or something genetic, her depression appeared at the very same age as mine did. There’s very likely something there too. But the first few things, the punishment related ones, they could still be factors.

Here is the rest of this series:

 

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/07/20/it-all-starts-when-we-punish-our-kids-3/

 

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/07/19/it-all-starts-when-we-punish-our-kids-2/

 

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/07/19/it-all-starts-when-we-punish-our-kids-1/

 

What Do Dolls Teach?

Jeff/neighsayer4 Comments

How to look after an infant?

How can we suppose that a plastic, inanimate, lifeless, insensate thing that needs no maintenance teaches that?

Shouldn’t we consider that by placing such a thing in the hands of our children might teach exactly the opposite of empathy and caring? A doll doesn’t need food, care or love. A doll is a thing, a possession, something to be purchased, played with and discarded.

Is this really supposed to influence a child in a positive way for any potential future care of the real thing?

Not to mention the legitimate feminist complaints, specifically, why are we trying to train our girls, babies themselves when they get these avatars, that looking after babies is their function? Plus of course, boy’s dolls are made to war with each other . . .

Somebody remind me: what are the upside of these macabre grotesque parodies of human beings again?

To Conflate or not to Equate

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          In debate, and especially in internet debate due to the open, egalitarian nature of the web, conflation is a regular problem, and a constant issue, where even the ubiquitous strawman argument has to take second place in the hierarchy of fallacies. But of course, the assumption that two things are the same when they’re not is only one mistake. There is also the error of assuming things are different when they’re not; there is the inability to tell when two things are really the same.

          Of course, for anyone who’s seen my blogs, you know I’m a one-song jukebox.

          You know what I’m going for here: people need to conflate punishment with abuse a whole lot more; this is a case of extreme over-differentiation.

          We differentiate these two things only by our intentions and our wishes. If we hit a kid with only the intention of hurting it, that is abuse; if we hit a kid to teach it something, to increase his skills and knowledge and thus improve its life forever afterwards, that is not. This formula works for all acts that can fall on either side of this difference, punishment or abuse: blows, confinement, isolation, confiscation, loss of privileges.  If we wish it to have positive effects, it’s punishment; if we only wish for negative effects, it’s abuse.

          Is this how other things work?

  1. If we only hope to destroy the environment, that’s environmental terrorism, but if we wish for positive effects from our factories, then it’s industry, economic growth? Does our wish for positive things in industry mean we are not polluting?
  2. If we only wish to wipe out fish stocks, that is, let’s say, specicide, but if we are hoping to feed the world’s people with the fish, then that is food production? Does our wish for feeding the world mean we are not wiping out our ocean life?
  3. If we only wish to vilify and make war on other cultures and faiths, that is xenophobia, warmongering and intolerance, but if we wish to preserve and promote our own culture and/or faith, that is conservatism, tradition and loyalty, a social form of self-love? Does declaring our faith and our way of life to be correct and proper mean we are not asserting the other side of the coin, that other faiths and cultures must be wrong?
  4. If I only wish to pay no taxes at all, that is tax evasion and selfishness, but if I want keep as much of my salary as I have a legal right to and use every possible deduction available, that is simply providing for my family, being a responsible provider. Avoiding the political discussion, avoiding issues of government waste and corruption, would the government not be in a better position to do its work with more revenue, if I missed a few deductions? Does my healthy self concern and family concern not have its downside in the bottom line for a government that is operating on a deficit?

          I think I’ve made the point by now, and it’s a simple one really – everything has a measurable downside, life is a trade-off in many ways. But working backwards through my list, it still needs to be laid out as clearly as possible, some things need some conflation, some “differentiation” is false and needs to go away.

 – less taxation IS government deficit;

 – preservation of culture IS xenophobia;

 – resource extraction IS depletion of the environment;

 – industry IS destruction of the environment; and

 – punishment IS abuse

          Our wishes do not change these facts, intentions do not somehow invalidate the effects of our actions. Causality, cause-and-effect, happens in the real world and our wishes do not change that fact.

          The science is in regarding the effects of abuse and corporal punishment, and the effects are the same; they include practically all of the problems people suffer generally, they are simply shown to be more common and more severe in people who have been documented as having suffered abuse or corporal punishment.

          The emotional, psychological and cognitive effects of abuse and corporal punishment have their roots in the emotional, psychological and cognitive functions of punishment, in the betrayal of trust and love and in the convoluted “logic” of punishing (such as hitting a child to teach it not to hit, or hurting a child’s feelings in an effort to teach the child not to hurt another’s). These effects cannot be wished away.

          Reporting of these effects can be suppressed, children can learn that they mustn’t point these effects out to their caregivers, but the effects themselves remain.

          Conflate this things, abuse and punishment, please. Wishes do not make for a real differentiation.

It All Starts when We Punish our Kids, #3

Jeff/neighsayer2 Comments

It all starts when we punish our kids.

What “all starts?” Well . . .

  1. Misogyny.

First of all, violence breeds violence and the received violence in childhood punishments is the main root of violence generally (see part #2).

Second, male violence upon women has a terrible secondary effect on the world, and that is modeling gender violence for any children who have to live with it and see it. Anyone who sympathizes with the feminist movement must admit that if this modeling matters, then the modeling of adult violence on children must also matter (perhaps this also fits better in part #2).

Third, another aspect of misogyny we must admit is that it is transmitted by everyone in society; that is to say, it is a disease that affects us all, and one that we all transmit, despite that only half of us suffer directly with the symptoms. Much of all our early education, much of misogyny included, is very likely given to us by our mothers, our primary caregivers.

Much less a part of the usual conversations on the topic of violence, it may be that more of childhood punishing is performed by the primary caregiver, and in much of the world, throughout much of history and still true today here in North America, the primary caregivers are women. Is it too much of a stretch to consider that much of misogynistic violence may be the expression of infantile and childhood rage against the gender who punished us?

Here’s the rest of the series:

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/08/25/it-all-starts-when-we-punish-our-kids-4/

 

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/07/19/it-all-starts-when-we-punish-our-kids-2/

 

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/07/19/it-all-starts-when-we-punish-our-kids-1/

It All Starts when We Punish our Kids, #2

Jeff/neighsayer1 Comment

It all starts when we punish our kids.

What “all starts?” Well . . .

  1. Violence.

This hasn’t changed, despite what we like to think: punishment is violence. All punishment is ultimately physical. Even if in a particular instance a child can be punished without force, if a child is convinced to “take his medicine” in the form of a “timeout” or a grounding, or the loss of a privilege, this punishment is still backed up and made possible only by force and/or violence; the child has learned from past experience that he must accept his non-corporal punishment or see things escalate. Most likely, the child has learned this very young indeed, as a baby and/or toddler, when he is pre-verbal and there really are no non-corporal options.

 

Every instance of punishing models the use of negative stimulus as a way for the parents to get what they want – the very definition of violence and coercion. Plus, actions really do speak louder than words, and so this is what is modelled, despite how often the intended lesson is to discourage that very thing, violence. “Bullying” is the unauthorised version of this very behaviour: making someone’s life worse because they do something you don’t like. Nearly all forms of violence follow this model and the differences are mostly only in the degree of the violence. The difference between “discipline” and abuse is often only a matter of the degree: the principle is the same. Most folks don’t think you shouldn’t hurt a child. Mostly we only think we shouldn’t hurt a child “too much.”

Here’s the rest of the series:

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/08/25/it-all-starts-when-we-punish-our-kids-4/

 

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/07/20/it-all-starts-when-we-punish-our-kids-3/

 

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/07/19/it-all-starts-when-we-punish-our-kids-1/

It All Starts when We Punish our Kids, #1

Jeff/neighsayer8 Comments

It all starts when we punish our kids.

What “all starts?” Well . . .

1. Religion.

Our children, human children are born helpless, can’t even lift their heads, can’t so much as roll over, so our babies’ first experience of us is of all-powerful, all-providing beings. If we add punishing to that, the child’s experience is of an all-powerful, all-providing being that is also vengeful and punitive, one that must have things all their own way.

Sound familiar? After some months and years of this world, the only world the child has ever known, if we introduce the Judeo Christian (and Islamic) God, then this will fit the child’s worldview. That God will make sense to a child who lives in that world –

– So in this sense, punishment lays the groundwork for religion. This is why the religious, and the fundamentalist religious are so tightly bound to their belief: they have always known the basic narrative of the Punishing God to be true.

Here’s the rest of the series:

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/08/25/it-all-starts-when-we-punish-our-kids-4/

 

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/07/20/it-all-starts-when-we-punish-our-kids-3/

 

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/07/19/it-all-starts-when-we-punish-our-kids-2/