Maggie's Farm

While in theory I agree with you, and certainly I use your philosophy when training dogs, it doesn't work with all kids, in all families. WHen my wimpy husband read the monks of New Skete he refused to let me discipline my now 75 pound monster as a puppy, and I was stupidly convinced to try it. The dog is loving, gentle, and completely disobedient, jumps up, would be a menace if I did not yank him around now. Obviously, the way I grew up training dogs, with a swat on the nose with newspaper, etc. worked better than nonviolence on the current beloved dog-brat.

But with kids? I am biased, because I was the victim of various forms of child abuse myself, including drunken beatings by my father, pinches, punches, kicks and ferocious spankings by my bipolar mother, and being starved, deprived of heat and blankets in my bedroom, etc etc. Not to mention other worse forms of abuse by a grandparent. The one constant refrain was spare the rod, spoil the child. I heard a lot of "this hurts me more than it hurts you" and it was bullshit. A few episodes of salutary violence had a good effect in our family. Like the time our grandmother washed my brother's mouth out with laundrysoap for swearing. He never did it in again in her presence. Or my father beating my brother for punching me. I don't think he ever hit another woman, ever again. But he received so many beatings from my father that they only made their peace when the latter was in the grave.

My point is not simply to vent but to explain that when I finally got up the courage to have kids anyway, after years of fearing history repeating itself, I girded myself with many things I vowed to do better. I didn't want my children terrified of me, hiding in fear, hiding bruises, burns deliberately administered, etc. I knew that I had inherited a terrible temper as well as heavyduty instability from my family. I sought professional help for the emotional shit, and struggled to develop self control. But I never trusted myself to allow even the possibility of hitting a child.

The kids we love more than anything else in the world, can also make us furious at times. You know that professionally, and as a mother. If I ruled out spanking, I could at least be sure that I would not lose control and really hurt a kid physically as our parents did.

I yell a lot. I am small and fierce, and have very high standards. My kids know that if they do anything wrong, I will not hide or make excuses for them. I have a kid who verges on conduct disorder, in addition to a million other diagnoses. I cannot see how even a rationally administered spanking could have ever helped him. When you have a kid who goes in and out of psychosis, who can be violent, it is doubly important that the parents control themselves, and do absolutely nothing that they could use to justify violence.


I should add that I am not a pacifist, am very pro-military,and your points about the police and soldiers, etc. are well taken. But I merely wanted to stress that some of us who choose not to spank our kids are doing it to break a cycle of family violence, and to model a better way to kids who are already so messed up. Many people would say that I should have just not had kids, given my family's and my own obviousl genetic deficiencies. I had them away, believing that God would help us love them and raise them to be GOd=fearing good citizens regardless.

I have never yet found a disciplinary system that works for kids like my troubled one. My normal kids are great kids, disciplined, hardworking, compassionate, etc. so I have obviously not screwed them up by not spanking them. But my messed up darling? Some elements of the cognitive behavioral stuff work when he is not psychotic or homicidal. But mostly just repetition, and the slow process of helping him internalize his Christian faith , etc.

Enough. Guess you struck a nerve. Since his violence is always directed against us parents, guess we will pay the price if we have made the wrong decision...

Robert, agree with you and most others here that government should keep their nose out of our parenting, and that every kid is different.

Interesting that time outs worked for your kid. We found that they had no effect on any of our brood. Not wanting to spank them, left us with little. The most dreadful punishment I came up with (that they seemed to hate) was the BORING MOMMY LECTURE OF DIRE CONSEQUENCES IN FUTURE LIFE. I would say "People who hit other people get put in jail, and then they have worse things done to them by the other people in jail, so it is in your interest to SHAPE UP." While hubby disapproves of this, it seems to put a crimp in the Cain and Abel style.

But honestly, the one thing that stops aggression dead in tracks is me yelling "Say whatever you like to her, scream and yell, but don't hit. I don't hit anyone , and I won't let you do so either." They know I mean it. It's the same as when I tell them that I will kill them if they drink as teenagers. " As long as you're underage and living here, you don't drink. I don't, and you can't. End of discussion." They pretty much do as I do, not as I say.

In quieter moments, we've had the frustrated discussions about schools' prohibition on defending oneself from bullies. The kids know that when I was bullied I eventually punched and kicked and made myself so obnoxious to the bullies that they left me alone, and I have commiserated with them that they can no longer do this in school. One has to coach them to be stool pigeons, or to run away, or to avoid conflict.

One of the complicating factors in current public debate about the discipline of children, at home and in public, is that not only are all kids different, but all parents interpret discipline differently. Certain cultural groups still believe that it's okay to beat the shit out of their kids, in ways that make strict WASPs look like pussycats.

Personally, I find the thought control and PC rubbish rammed down my kids' throats to be more obnoxious than the occasional sadism of frustrated old teachers of the type I studied with as a kid. They whacked bad kids, and praqctyic ed psychological torture on the uppitty smart ones like me, but there was not the same kind of thought control as now. Every day I remind one or the other kid not to share parental opinions, not to express themselves on certain issues, lest the thought police get them or us. I am beginning to get a feeling for what parents must have felt like in Nazi Germany, not wanting kids to rat them out for having expressed doubt about the latest party lines...And I hate having to teach my kids to avoid discussing important subjects, to dissemble, to avoid conflict.

lhm, if I had to do it again, I would have homeschooled. But at the time, we thought that our quirky, brilliant, but socially unskilled kids would pick up better social skills from other kids and more gracious teachers than spending 24/7 with us. We wanted them to be more likeable and pleasant company than we were.

In fact, they have had wonderful relationships with their teachers, which have helped compensate for nearly zero extended family ties. We were blessed that despite sending them to public schools, all their teachers (at least in the elementary years) have been devoutly religious, old fashioned, and had rigorous academic and moral standards for their pupils. The high school teachers are a more mixed lot, with a lot of amoral bimbos who know less about the subjects they teach than some of their pupils...All the same, living in the same place their whole life, they will often bump into a kindergarten teacher in the supermarket who embraces them fondly, the tartar of fourth grade who tells them in 10th that she always believed in them, and a general sense that there are grownups besides their parents who care about them. Of course, the people at church are more present, and they trust them more, but the teachers have been a real blessing in their lives. The other kids, for the most part, have not. Curiously, the kid with problems has found a few really good friends at school, but the more typical kids have found school socially excruciating. Snobbery, consumerism, the drug and alcohol abuse of their peers, girls dressing like sluts and acting out a script from "Mean Girls" etc. Mine have friends from their advanced classes, but they could have made friends at church and avoided the daily gauntlet of school and the hos and the homeboys and the future golddiggers...

So I encourage parents of young children to have the courage of their convictions and home school. It's the freedom to protect your kids from the negative peer group for a little longer that is the chief benefit.

Our kids are all oriented towards adult values, tastes, and standards of behavior and some people have castigated us for not allowing them to be wholly part of teen "culture". To which I just say "Tough." My daughters know that they are worth more than a Wonderbra and giving head to a teenaged boy to be popular. Sorry to be so crude, but that is what I hear kids talking about shamelessly as I wait to pick mine up...