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Old June 8th 04, 03:25 AM
Nathan A. Barclay
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Default Parent-Child Negotiations


"Carlson LaVonne" wrote in message
...
Nathan,

On the other hand, a two-year-old has few bargaining tools. He or she
is physically tiny, compared to his/her parents. This little child is
just beginning to understand case/effect, and only in immediate
situations. When this little child begins to understand cause/effect,
the spanked child learns to hit. The non spanked child learns other
ways to handle anger.


Actually, there is at least one form of meaningful two-way negotiation with
a two-year-old that parents can engage in: redirecting the child's
attention. When a parent tries to redirect a child's attention, the parent
is saying, "How about if you do this instead?" If the child rejects the
parent's idea and tries to start doing something else, that is, in effect a
counterproposal: "No, I don't like that idea. How about this?" Much of the
communication is nonverbal, yet a form of genuine negotiation is taking
place in an attempt to find a solution acceptable to both the parent and the
child.

But like other forms of negotiation, that form can break down if the child
refuses to be redirected and keeps going back to a behavior the parents
consider non-negotiable. In theory, parents could spend the rest of the day
trying to redirect the child, but that is often not workable in practice.
Which can bring us back to the problem that parents have to either tolerate
unacceptable behavior or resort to some form of punishment.

As for how spanking affects children's learning to hit, it seems to me that
three factors almost have to be involved. (1) How often the child is
spanked or hit. (2) How well the child understands that the spanking or
hitting is associated with a particular behavior, and (3) how much the
spanking or hitting as punishment looks like other forms of hitting.

The first of these issues is self-evident. In regard to the second, I'm no
expert on two-year-olds, but I suspect that if a parent says no a couple
times and tries to redirect the child's behavior a couple times, even a
two-year-old can probably start to get the idea that he or she is doing
something the parent doesn't like. If I'm right, that would provide an
enormous head start toward making the connection that the swat that follows
was a result of unacceptable behavior, not just because the parent was
angry.

Regarding the third, if spankings are always on the bottom (or maybe a swat
to the back of the legs for a child in diapers, as long as it's not hard
enough to be dangerous), that makes spanking less of a precedent for a
child's going around hitting people anywhere he or she wants to than if
swats from the parent land in a wider variety of places. A ritual such as
putting the child over a knee or lap first might do even more to draw a
differentiation that the kind of hitting parents do when the child
misbehaves is different from other kinds of hitting.

Of course even under the best of circumstances, spanking would almost
certainly have some potential to help a child learn to hit. On the other
hand, teaching a child not to hit is something that parents are going to
face sooner or later whether they spank or not. So if parents use spanking
carefully and judiciously, I'm not convinced that the difference is big
enough to be worth worrying about.

Nathan