here is a terrific new article about Bea Marshall and “Yes Parenting.”
it sounds like she’s doing it right to me . . .
Child-rearing
In Search of a Brand . . .
You can reach my blog at “PunishmentHurtsEveryone.com” or at “AbuseWithanExcuse.com” – I don’t mind these, but I’m not sure . . .
Any thoughts?
I recently found Bea Marshall, and I was jealous. She’s got this “Yes Parenting” tag that seems brilliant to me, a much friendlier sort of monicker . . . here she is:
Bea Marshall
@BeaTheTree
Creative Consultant // Parent // Barefoot // Speaker@MktgSuperheroes #IAmEnough
Sheffield · beamarshall.com
I haven’t yet determined her level of radicalness – I know I’m way “out there.”
I’m guessing Bea is much smarter than I, and isn’t the type to alienate all the parents out there by telling them they’re all wrong, like I do. I’m guessing she is doing as much good as possible, and more than I do, because she’s still within reach of the people, the parents I call “normals.”
I’m sorry, folks.
But we all have our roles, I guess . . .
Please check Bea out.
And if anyone has any help for me and my cause, I’ll entertain some suggestions . . .
Thank you all,
it’s Neighsayer@punishmenthurts
re-tweet me!
From an Online Conversation . . .
OK, first, you’re way down the road, the path of what I call “normal” parenting, it is way too late for you to change and do it my way. Your kids are living in the normal system and simply removing all the normal controls now would probably be disastrous.
(We were discussing someone’s teenager)
Second, you yourself are far down that road too. I have long since given up on expecting any agreement with my idea about child-rearing from someone who has already raised their kids in the normal way, or even done it for a few years. A massive load of guilt is the only prize for any person who has already raised their kids and then has my epiphany and starts to see things my way. I mean, I don’t blame you, or any normal parent, I feel it’s just the system, and as much as anyone is doing what I think is wrong now, I think that parent was first and foremost a victim of the system in their own childhood.
But having said that, we like to think we know what we’re doing, and when we learn anything we did was wrong, guilt ensues.
Generalization? Yes, but the number of people who think of discipline and punishment the way you do is huge. Of all our individual differences and all the variety there is with people, the one most common thing is the belief and practice of punishment in child-rearing. There may be differences in method, and in the rules, but the basic idea is the most common thing that most of humanity shares.
I do think that generally, punishments are a betrayal of love and the caring and protection we owe our kids, and I do think that generally, our kids are resentful about it, and that our kids and especially our teenagers are a whole lot angrier at us and “respect” us a whole lot less than we wish and we pretend. What is normal, what everyone expects, angry, resentful teenagers, is not built in, not automatic. We had none of it with our two girls, now 16 and 19.
We didn’t escape some normal patterns, though. Our first was outnumbered and overpowered by us, so she seemed to be the more compliant one, while the second one seemed to be wild and rebellious – that’s a normal pattern, right?
But we didn’t beat the younger one down, didn’t punish her, and I swear to you, the behaviour problems stopped in our house as soon as they were at an age when they could talk and reason (somewhere around six) – which is never the end of behaviour issues in punishing households.
“Expert parenting” isn’t applicable at all. We didn’t know what to do half the time. All we knew was what NOT to do – punish – and that just made everything easier and better, again, after the age of five or six. Toddlerhood was a lot of work, a lot of legwork, a lot of chasing, holding, talking . . . but punishing actually seems to CAUSE the bad behaviour. We learned that if you never punish them when they’re small, you never have to. You may be right, we may have had it easy with just girls, although the second one was pretty hyper and had her own mind.
Because we never punished, never committed that betrayal, our girls have always still been communicative with us, the lines of communication have never closed. They don’t have to hide, they don’t have to keep their own counsel.
Regarding “Boundaries”
“Boundaries” are a favourite buzzword for parents and parenting gurus alike. We all have ‘personal boundaries,’ of course, but ‘boundaries for kids’ aren’t the personal kind, or they aren’t all the personal kind. Kids are bound in more ways than that. Many more.
“Testing for boundaries” is a very popular idea, the theory being that kids are frightened in a big, boundless world, and we therefore owe it to them to provide some boundaries, to make them feel safe.
I’m sorry, but I call bullshit.
The “big, scary, boundless world” – that is the world we all grew up in, that is the world our species evolved in, it is part of us, and we of it (or, for the religious, this big, boundless world is the one God made for us, and the one we have dominion over, rather than the other way ‘round). This unbounded world is our natural environment. We were made for it.
From where I’m at on this subject, what I see is a certain amount of chaotic parenting in a very complicated world where even if the boundaries were consistent, which they often are not, responses to the crossing of them usually aren’t.
I see kids “testing for boundaries” because there is no logical system of boundaries. After all, every culture, every nation, every creed, right down to every family has its own idea of what the boundaries need to be. To take that idea two steps further, every family is comprised of two different families’ inherited set of rules, and even within each of the two, individual differences can be big. After that, kids are individuals too. So every child’s “system of boundaries” is a one-off, as individual as fingerprints. The common factor is only that every person must learn the boundaries, or else.
All a kid can really do is test each individual boundary, each situation empirically, in the absence of any system that he could extrapolate from or deduce. That is what “testing for boundaries” is. It is a child learning which particular, strange, just invented yesterday set of rules he will be obliged to learn, or else.
What I am trying to say here, is that it isn’t a natural tendency to push limits that causes your child to test boundaries, and he isn’t going to test them to the point of jumping over a cliff, or killing someone, not naturally. It’s not a natural tendency to find out how bad he can be, what he can get away with.
He’s just trying to learn his way around in the mad, chaotic world of your rules, what you think of as your “system.”
Admit it, there is no “system,” no method to our madness. Our one-off set of rules/boundaries is the result of millennia of random culture, blended with the random experience of our parents and ourselves, along with our random reactions to that experience. Face it.
We’re weird. The worlds we make for our kids are individual, weird and random ones. They’re only trying to make sense of the senseless.
“Yes” Parenting
Fail at Controlling Your Kids
This is it, this is what I’m saying.
Not “control your kids without punishment,” or “control your kids without physical punishment.”
I’m not trying to tell anyone that is is possible to control your kids without punishment.
It’s not. I admit that.
What I’m saying is, punishment harms them – us. We were kids too – so controlling them harms them, so: give up the control. Control them a whole lot less.
Protect them from serious safety issues, but don’t punish them in order to train them to protect themselves from these serious safety issues, because this punishment harms them. When they’re small, too young to understand, that’s YOUR job, protecting them, not theirs.
Protect yourself and your expensive or otherwise treasured things from them when they’re small and experimenting with the world and with their power, creative and destructive power, but don’t punish them in order to train them to protect you and your stuff from their creative and destructive power, because this punishment harms them. When they’re small, too young to understand, that’s YOUR job, protecting you and your stuff, not theirs.
Other than that, don’t be controlling your kids, the cost is too high, the cost in trauma, the cost of their trust in you and your love, and the cost in their cognitive development.
You can TRY to control them, with speech, even distraction, don’t get me wrong, you’re supposed to teach them, you want them to know you’re paying attention, that you care. You can TRY to talk them out of stuff, talk is OK, but if it’s not working, it’s not working, don’t escalate to punishing. Let them learn the real-world consequences of their actions, let them learn about the real world.
Believe me, it won’t “work” most of the time. With no tool more powerful than talk, you are going to lose the battles with your two-year old.
And that is how it should be.
If you always win, if you do what it takes to win every time, if you succeed at controlling your kids, that’s only a short term win for you. Punished kids feel betrayed and abused. Punished kids, by the time they can converse, don’t like you any more, and they don’t want to listen.
If you want them to talk to you when they can, if you want teenagers that are willing to converse with you, keep it to talk when they’re small, never escalate.
Lose the battles.
Fail at controlling them.
Beware of parenting advice that tells you you can win, because winning with your two-year old means losing your older kids.
You want to win the war?
Lose the battles.
Negative Effects on Cognitive Development
I see rewards and punishments as very detrimental to learning about the real world. I think the kids’ minds are not properly developed by the adults always substituting artificial effects for real world effects that would have had an actual relationship to the cause.
Not every punishable situation is a safety, or a life and death matter.
They do say that over-punishing has the effect of some hampering of cognitive development, and I think this is why, because punishments and rewards interfere with actual, real life learning.
And if I’m right about that, then the increase of negative cognitive effects is linear, not only present in “over-punishing.”
Wouldn’t you think?
Also, punishment wouldn’t have to physical for that negative effect, would it? Any punishment that substitutes an artificial effect for a real cause would do that . . .
Regarding the Online talk about Bullying
There was a post on here recently, about a bullying incident, I think it was one that went viral, about a boy who was being bullied for bringing his My Little Pony backpack to school and the school basically told his mother he was asking for it, and he should just conform – of course I’m paraphrasing, but you’ve probably heard the story anyway.
Of course I find the school’s reaction appalling, it’s victim-blaming and all that, wrong from every possible angle.
But there was a comment stream about this story that went on forever, and I’m sorry to say, very few comments that had anything useful to say. Mostly, all the commenters wanted to punish the bullies. The school should, or the parents should . . . and that shows a disturbing lack of understanding.
Punishing CAUSES bullying.
because
Punishing IS bullying.
The only differences are who’s doing it and why. The differences are: children are not authorized to punish and the reasons they punish are not sanctioned. The process, and the rationale are the same, and are as follows:
someone (a kid) does something that some more powerful person (bigger kid/bully, or parent/authority figure) judges to be wrong, and the bully/authority figure imposes some sort of hurt on them, it’s that simple.
Every time an adult punishes a child, they not only demonstrate and teach the process, but they make the punished kid feel helpless and powerless, thereby creating in him a need to find someone else to do it to, a need to find a situation where he feels he has some power again.
An example follows, and there will be a quiz afterwards.
Billy gets defiant at dinner and refuses to eat his vegetables, something his parents think is wrong, so they punish him, by banning him from the internet for the evening. This tells Billy that he lacks the power of choosing to play online when he likes, or eat what he likes, shows him that the exercise of power is a socially acceptable thing, and that it is the method his parents use to modify his behaviour, to stop him doing something they think is wrong.
Now Billy goes to school the next day, he’s with his friends, and he sees someone doing something he thinks is wrong – wearing something “wrong,” doing something that Billy has judged that he wouldn’t do, something that seems wrong to him.
The quiz:
1. What have the adults taught Billy to do in this situation?
(Bearing in mind, perhaps the parents have told Billy not to bully – but, action speaks louder than words. What have they SHOWN him?)
2. What pre-existing need does Billy have that this situation may appear to him to fill?
. . . now here’s the tricky part . . .
3. What will punishing Billy again do?
It may be debatable whether there are behaviours that can be improved by punishing – but the behaviours that are actually CAUSED by punishing, they can’t be.
Hundredth Monkey Time
Word is getting around about corporal punishment. The science is coming in.
That’s a good thing, I’m not complaining. Check out these Time articles, brought to my attention by Morgan – on WordPress, she’s here:
http://wordpress.com/read/blog/id/61364609/
and here are the articles:
http://healthland.time.com/2011/06/28/would-you-record-yourself-spanking-your-kids/
and
There is starting to be a lot of this stuff, and it’s good stuff. The first article states that something like 80% of families in a study that recorded their family households were recorded using corporal punishment methods – perhaps a surprise for those who haven’t raised kids yet, that so many resort to it – and these were families that knew they were being recorded. This seems new to me, mainstream press that states that corporal punishment is not going away.
The second article pretty much lists all the extra risks that corporally punished kids are in for throughout their life, as compared to less “spanked” people.
Again, all good info, I’m not complaining.
OK, I’m complaining.
This looks good, I think we may be on the brink of the Hundredth Monkey effect here, in terms of corporal punishment, it may be that professionals at least, and maybe even parents are getting the idea that it’s not good for us after all.
But all this talk about “corporal punishment” is misguided. It assumes there is some other kind, which there isn’t. How can any punishment be enforced, if not physically? We may wish to impose a non-corporal form of discipline, but it is in the enforcement that it becomes physical; it is in the imposition of it wherein the physical part lies. Be honest:
Why would our kids accept our punishments if we weren’t willing to back it up? Why would a person be “grounded” if they had no idea that there is anything to enforce it? Again, be honest: what is a punishment if we don’t make it happen? It all rests upon physical means ultimately.
So, if we’re heading into Hundredth Monkey territory, if this idea is going to take hold, let’s be honest about it, lets grab this opportunity and make sure a true idea, a real-life idea is the one that takes hold, and that idea is this:
It is punishment that is the cause of these poor outcomes. There is no harmless variety, all punishment is ultimately corporal; we are corporal beings, after all. What sorts of punishments would not be? Mental, psychological, emotional? Do those who decry only corporal types of punishment advocate for the mental variety? Are we to promote psychological punishment, emotional punishment?
This is an all-or-nothing sort of thing.
The question is not “HOW should I hurt my kid,” it is “SHOULD I hurt my kid,” and the answer is, of course, “no.”
The question is punishment or not. Make no mistake, do not be fooled my imitations, the science is coming in, but it needs to take one more step. People are being hurt by punishment, and the problem is THAT they are being hurt, not HOW they are being hurt.
Do Animals Punish?
I don’t think they do. I think punishing is the human difference, the human genius – as well as the human madness.
I think animals teach their children by example.
People have told me that animals punish, that that’s what they’re doing when for example, a lion or lioness snarls and yells and swats a cub, or maybe bites a cub when the cub tries to eat the food the adult is eating.
Now if the adult cat here is trying to teach the cub to wait its turn, or just not to try to take the adult’s food, maybe, but I doubt it. I think this is a case of teaching by example. I think the adult is teaching the cub, by example, to protect its share of the food. This is an important, real life lesson for a lion. The lion that doesn’t do that will be starved out.
If this is an example of punishing, I have a few comments:
1. Is this the only thing lions do that looks like punishment?
– yes, I think it is. I don’t think they punish their kids for other things cubs do wrong, like wandering away into trouble, bothering the alpha male, not learning how to hunt, or just lazily not hunting. I think for wandering, mom might bring them back, but that’s all. I think they let the alpha male look after his own peace of mind, or the cub gets eaten, and I think a lion that won’t hunt or can’t learn may eventually be exiled and starved, but I haven’t ever seen on TV that a cub is beaten for refusing to learn.
(If anyone has seen that, if there are animal behaviourists in the house, please, let me know.)
2. Teaching by punishing is a human thing. As another example, how does a prey animal, a deer or a rabbit “teach” its young to run and hide from the predators? By example – because, let’s turn that upside-down: does anyone think a deer or a rabbit hangs around to punish a child who doesn’t run while the wolves approach?
No, doing the wrong thing while simply telling your child to do the right thing and punishing him when he doesn’t – say, abusing your child about smoking and/or drinking when those are things you do – is a luxury animals can’t afford. The deer, the rabbit, they teach by example, and hope to stay alive to do it again tomorrow.
Abuse with an Excuse 