It’s a sad thing, but a vicious cycle, and a real one, in many families: reverse flow.

In some families, and to some degree or other in many families, sad to say, it is the children who sacrifice, the children that spend their days protecting the adults from their bad feelings, making sure the adults feel loved.

Adults know how important it is for children that they feel loved. Unfortunately, for so many, that is not always the priority for parents and caregivers, too often the priority seems to be discipline first, and love second. For children, however, for that very reason, that choice is not available, they are not able to exercise that sort of prioritization.

When an adult requires a child’s love, that child had better just give it up. An adult in the throes of feeling unloved, and adult who is experiencing their infantile lack of love is a dangerous thing to a child. A child in this situation has no choice. This child must set aside his own needs and serve the adult’s needs; this is a matter of self-preservation, and the child, almost invariably will look after his life first, and search for love later.

Unfortunately, what often happens is this search for love later in life becomes a desire to have children and continue this backward cycle.

(As a half-humourous aside, I must observe that in the world I am hoping to help create, saying “I want a child” will begin to be seen as a form of “I want a human being,” alongside of horrible phrases like “I want a Negro,” or “I want a pair of Vietnamese nymphets.” These are human beings, not possessions of some sort. It should be seen as a horrible thing to say, and it should be obvious that saying it signals an unhealthy psychological need as much – and more importantly – as it does a natural manifestation of the procreative urge.)

I’ve said it before, and I know I’ll be saying it again:

This generation needs to lose at both ends. We may not have gotten the unconditional love we needed as children, but we need to break the cycle. We need to not get that love again, we need to not suck it out of our children. That doesn’t save us anyway, it only continues the cycle, it only hurts our children, and theirs, and theirs, ad infinitum.

The buck should stop here. Let’s be the last unloved generation.

When I was a kid, and still pretty young, I realized my parents were crazy.

There was a moment that I remember, although I’m sure it’s not an isolated incident. We were in the car, going somewhere or coming back, all of us, me and my brother, my two sisters, and my parents, in the big family car, Mom and Dad in the front, kids in the back, either the Meteor or the Parisienne. This would have been in the mid to late 1960s.

My brother was hyper as Hell, he could get on your nerves, and had gotten on Dad’s. He’d gone too far; he knew he was in for it, and so he got scared and started crying. This was at least partly from real fear, maybe partly a ploy, something kids do to try to tell a parent that they’ve made their point, but he was really crying. Dad apparently found this noise to be not any less irritating than my brother’s preceding noise, and growled (perhaps you’ve heard this one before?)

“Stop crying, or by God, I’ll give you something to cry about!”

To my mind at the time, the child, my older brother by a year and a half, was already crying from fear, and my father’s solution was simply more fear. This seemed unreasonable to me; I was crying also, and I too was only more afraid and only cried harder after that. That may not have been the only time, but it’s the one I remember the most, and I decided in that moment that grownups were crazy.

The difference between me and most people, between me and you, is that I’ve never changed my mind about it. To reverse myself about that is, definitively, to become crazy. To join the ranks of the mad, and I’m not doing it. My eyes were clear in that moment.

Now, I know you’ve all been there too as kids. I hope I can in some humble, respectful way, suggest that if you have changed your mind in that way, that you reconsider, retrace your steps, and start again. Support the sane, frightened child you once were and reject the madness that we call ‘parenting, discipline, punishment, consequences.’

Support the child you once were, and support the children in your world now.

And support me too! Follow me on Twitter. I will continue to try at least to put something out in this topic weekly.

Abuse with an Excuse – Doctrine in short form . . . Part #1

 

A. Damages

1. Abuse in its several forms damages people. The forms are these: physical, mental (cognitive), emotional and psychological. The damages have the same forms. This is well documented.

2. Corporal punishment also damages people, and the damages take the same forms: physical, mental, cognitive, emotional and psychological. This is well documented. The corporal punishment of children is being outlawed in much of the world, driven by the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child.

 

3. Non-corporal punishment cannot actually exist, it’s a logical fallacy – an oxymoron, in fact. The argument goes like this:

 

– punishments are unpleasantnesses, they are by definition, something the punished person would not want, and so they are necessarily imposed, forced upon the punished person, against his will. Anything forced, anything imposed, involves either direct physical means, or at least the threat of physical means.

– punishments are employed when reason and talk – non-physical methods – fail, or are presumed to fail. This is often true, that these non-physical means fail, babies and young toddlers can’t be reasoned with, and even for older children who can be, punishments are usually only considered when any child is being unreasonable in the first place. When non-physical methods have been attempted and then ruled out, then logically what remains is physical, either directly or in potential.

 

Therefore punishment is impossible except that it’s physical. The only possible exception to this logical proof is in the case of punishments that are purely mental, emotional, or psychological, and these sorts of punishments are also universally considered to be unacceptable and abusive.

 

When children submit to their non-corporal punishments, this is not a disproof. It is only that the child is making a choice, the child is either remembering his baby or toddlerhood punishments, the physical ones, or more likely the child knows that if he resists, that the punishments will escalate and become corporal punishments, or most likely both, some combination of the two.

 

4. Conclusion: there are no non-corporal punishments. All punishments require force and physicality. Therefore all punishment is corporal punishment, therefore all punishment cause the damages associated with corporal punishment.

 

Abuse with an Excuse – Doctrine in short form . . . Part #2

 

B. The Cognitive Damage

 

1. Punishments/penalties are all artificial consequences, contrived ones. It is not really a simple ‘cause and effect’ phenomenon when some active agent chooses the effect for a cause. In this way, our contrived consequences are substituted for the real world, natural consequences a child may experience when he explores or misbehaves, and therefore any real world learning experience is circumvented. This is the function that is in play when we note, through many good studies that corporal punishment hampers cognitive development.

 

When standardized punishments are substituted for the nearly infinite number of random real world consequences of childhood exploration as well as misdeeds, the vast and varied learning that may have happened is severely lessened, and the only learning that does happen is artificial and contrived. This is definitive of serious arrested cognitive development. It follows that the resulting impairment of thought will vary, of course with many factors, but certainly with the degree to which a child is controlled. A child who has more real world learning experience will be better able to process information regarding the real world than one whose learning years held few real world mistakes and learning opportunities.

 

2. Of course, parents need to protect their children from extreme danger. Life and limb certainly take priority over individual missed opportunities for real world learning. These safety hazards are not the most common situations parents and children face, however, and this is not a valid argument for the use of punishment generally.

 

Some may say that children need to be punished to learn to obey in every situation, so that their obedience will be guaranteed when there does arise a hazard, a real threat to life and limb, that a child needs to be conditioned to obey so that he may be ordered away from a street or a river and will comply immediately. This, I would say is a valid argument only if this sort of conditioning didn’t have a serious down-side. I believe that the damages that result from punishing, and certainly from the all-encompassing environment of punishment that this argument implies, brings a terrible cost also, up to and including a considerable cost of life and limb, in the form of violence, crime and suicide, along with the many social costs that are not as visible, that result from the cognitive hobbling that is produced by these methods.

 

Abuse with an Excuse – Doctrine in short form . . . Part #3

 

C. Childhood Misbehaviours are Irrelevant

 

1. When we are punishing our children to teach them not to cause any harm in our lives, not to break anything, not to hurt anyone, we are causing permanent harm in our attempts to avoid short term and material harm. The damages of abuse and corporal punishment are long lasting, while the damages of childhood misbehaviours are, for the most part, either material or temporary, sometimes both.

 

Temporary damages are bruises that result from infantile violence or carelessness, or simply missed or disrupted adult social occasions; material ones are broken dishes, damaged or stained clothing or furniture – of course material damages can be either permanent or temporary; a loved glass heirloom is forever, a coloured wall until the next painting. Things like painting the wall cost labour and money, which, if it happens to a modern person living in debt, may be a permanent harm to their finances. Young children can cause real harms, but again, as in the previous section, this would only justify the damages of punishment if those damages were small and temporary, and they are not. The damages of corporal punishment (and it is my position that there is no other kind) are long lasting and impact every aspect of life. This, again, is well documented.

 

2. Childhood explorations and mistakes, when they go bad, can cause some damage, things get broken, caregivers and other children get bruised and inconvenienced, but for the most part, these are individual, one-off incidents, that is, single incidents, with a single instance of damage per case. If we consider that each instance is a learning opportunity, each instance can teach a child a single lesson such as the fragility of pretty glass objects, or the fragility of human relationships (when one toddler hurts another, and the other expresses his feelings somehow), we can see that trading any one such lesson off against a lifetime of suffering the damage of having been punished is a bad bargain. The long term damages of punishment would only be justifiable by considering that the damages of the child’s misbehaviour are also long lasting. In reality, the occurrence of a misdeed or a mistake by a child will rarely be habit forming. These things, dish-breaking, punching other children, do not become chronic if they go un-punished. In reality, punishing increases defiance and misbehaviour in the long term.

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 . . .

 

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

http://healthland.time.com/2012/07/02/physical-punishment-increases-your-kids-risk-of-mental-illness/

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.

It’s what I was trying to say with the title – really, letting them do whatever they want, despite the way the punishers try to frame it – IS NOT EASY. And that’s not why I do it, or anyone should do it. It’s doing it the hard way, the long way, and the right way.

Beating your kids into always letting YOU have YOUR WAY, always – that’s the easy way, the fast way, and the wrong way.

It’s not comfortable either. It was scary, uncharted territory. But it worked.

I see what people say about how things are all going to Hell as being the result of half measures, the result of confusion. The chaos we have going on today in our kids and our teenagers is because of the force we are still using, not because of the gentleness we’re starting to use more.

A lot of thought went into it. I hope you will read my blog. I’m afraid a plan just to “not spank” can’t really work, there will be more decisions to make, or you are likely to end up there despite the best of intentions.