|| U.N. rules Canada should ban spanking

On Thu, 09 Oct 2003 12:37:46 -0500, "Michael S. Morris"
wrote:




Thursday, the 9th of October, 2003

Ray Drouillard wrote:
Committee on the Rights of the Child issues decision in Geneva
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=35000

[...]
The U.N. body says Canada should "explicitly
prohibit all forms of violence against children,
however light, within the family, in schools and
in other institutions where children might be placed."
[...]
Paul:
For more context,
http://www.unog.ch/news2/documents/newsen/crc0338e.htm and
the report by the Canadian delegation
http://www.unog.ch/news2/documents/newsen/crc0329erev1.htm
I said:
I'm not sure that any context could make this kind of
action against the corporal punishment of children in the home
other than outrageously objectionable.
Kane:
You are outraged that you cannot bully, humiliate, injure, torture,
your children at your whim?

No one I believe said *anything* about bullying, humiliating,
injuring, torturing or indeed *anything* about *at my whim*.

Of course not. You apologists use the language to hid from the truth
of your actions. You lost the capacity to discriminate as a child
because of the pain and humiliation you suffered. It's a rather common
occurance. You'll find it in studies on torture under ritual
continuous torture. The victim becomes bonded to his or her torturer
and will defend them. And will minimize the torture and even come to
claim he or she deserved it.

We were talking spanking, which has zero to do with any of the
above.

Sorry about your thinking errors. It's not your fault. It will be if
you don't examine it further though.

Tell me. What does a spanked child fell the first time they are
spanked? The tenth time? The hundreth time?


Kane:
Fancy that.

Yeah, fancy it.

Fancy that you fancy that.

I said:
It seems to me a prime
example of legislation by people who appoint themselves as
scientific experts on stuff that science cannot possibly
address,
Kane:
On the contrary.

On the contrary, on the contrary.

On the contrary, on the contrary, on the contrary.

This is absolutely unaddressable
by science.

It is addressable by science. Science addresses the unaddressable all
the time. That's the point. It's to find new knowledge unavailable
before. The wonder of technology is that it gives us finer tuned
answer as time passes and it improves.

You cannot possibly control hundreds or thousands
of possibly important variables.

Gosh. Have you looked down at your keyboard? Take a quick look over at
your computer case...there is a cpu in there. And memory.

Even your puny system can run simulations, models, that will control
for hundreds of thousands of "possibly important variables."

Scientists do this all the time now.

If no control then no science.

You are incorrect. Scientist do experiments to FIND the variables when
they are unknown and computer modeling is now big time. They can
calculate the forces in an auto crash and thousands of variables to
build better restraint and crash systems.

If you want to provide a cite to a study, I would be happy to
critique
it directly.

I will. Go back to your childhood. Try to find out the truth instead
of the nonsense that spanking drove your poor young mind to to survive
and not lose the love of your parents.

The brain scan studies show, almost as an aside, something we've known
for most of human existance: if you are trying to learn something
someone hitting you and or saying distracting humiliating things to
you distracts.

You don't learn what you wanted to learn, or what someone wanted to
teach you. You learn how to survive in such circumstances...and that
is usually survival tactics. Avoidance, violent retaliation, lying,
bluffing, bullying, crying, whining, begging. And sneakiness.


Kane:
Science does address this issue.

No, it does not address this issue at all. What addresses
this issue is ideology. And, well, my ideology is a better
(as in objectively better) than yours.

No, you are wrong yet again. Brain scan studies show what has always
been known, that when teaching someone something, if you distract them
with pain and humiliation they will not learn what you wanted them to,
but a fake a simulation of what you wanted them to learn. As I said
above.

Kane:
Brain scan studies show that distractions inhibit and
distract from learning tasks,

This is the fallacy that measurement of something equals science.

I did not bring up science. I brought up measurement. YOU tried to
segway off into "scientific" studies. I brought YOU back to the fact.

So, tell me. If we can measure brain activity, find those places
active during successful learning, and they show disruption when they
are interferred with, do we need a scientific study of that
measurement to understand them in the context of learning?

Kane:
and if you aren't spanking to teach what ARE you doing it for?

Simple, to punish my children for disobeying a rule.

Then you have done half the job, and poorly at that. Children who stop
disobeying the rule only have to wait until they are larger than you,
or old enough to pull of sneakiness and not be caught. It's coming.

It's call: "A TEENAGER."

Happy parenting.

Precisely so that they learn obedience to important
commands, precisely for their own safety when they
are of an age too young to reason about it.

Now there is a death sentence if ever I've heard one. Blind obedience
kills the dog across the road that thinks he heard, over traffic,
"come" rather than "stay."

Very few trainers are good enough to teach that dog to, under duress,
do what is wanted or was taught by pain and humiliation.

In fact, in the situation that you are trying to teach your child to
be safe in...usually disruptive and full of tensions and
indecisiveness....the child is likely to recall not the command but
the pain and become MORE confused and likely to make the wrong choice.

Every read the Embry study? Yet another research you won't want to
believe.

"
Dr. Dennis Embry of the University of Kansas at Lawrence did a
study of toddler street entries which found, to the author's considerable
surprise, that toddlers who were spanked for running into the street did
it more in the long run rather than less, while nonpunitive approaches
were much more effective. The method which worked best to stop toddler
street entries consisted of a combination of giving reward stickers for
safe play, and defining allowed play areas in positive rather than
negative terms ("safe players play on the sidewalk" rather than "don't go
in the street"). "

Ease to google up. A clear indicator...and this was many years ago, of
how the human brain works in a child and how learning takes place.
Real learning. Not "survival" reactions to pain and humiliation.

It also
is muchly to be preferred to the "time-out" in that
forgiveness and forgetting are immediate.

I'll one up you. Forgiveness should be even before the teaching. A
child learns to listen and respond much more devotedly and closely,
without distraction, to the parent that knows the child doesn't know
and needs to learn. Forgetting should not be the goal.

Time-outs aren't to teach anything. That's the momma's fallacy. It's
for her to take a time from noisy distracting kids...no crime, but she
shouldn't lie about it. Children get good at telling when parents are
lying. They then learn to lie.

Time-outs are rejections. Time-ins are for teaching...as in: "John,
come here and sit by me. I want to explain to you why hitting is not
okay in our family."

Lesson
learned.

What lesson? Ever get a speeding ticket? Paid the fine? Never sped
again?

Case closed.

Fraid not. They'll just sneak, or wait until they are Teens. Hope you
have them adopted out by then. You won't like what you have produced.
Punishment for learning the rules tends to turn out either compliant
but sick little twirps, or violent mean brutes, or sneaks...who are
capable of both when needed...the latter are often referred to as
sociopaths.

We don't do that again.

Not while you are watching.

Think about this. A teen confronted with an opportunity to engage in
some forbidden behavior, possibly illegal, can have one of two
memories to fall back on....a punitive, pain inflicting parent
admonishing him, or a loving gentle parent who would be disappointed
if he chose wrongly.

Which do you think will win?

And if you think you punishment model will, you have forgotten you own
teen years.

The
time out strateches the whole thing into a drama, with
no clear end and no clear lesson taught.

That's why I consider it just another pointless punishment the child
will learn only avoidance by. Kids in time out don't think about what
they did and shouldn't do, but vengence..."I'll get her for this" and
how to be more sneaky next time.

And that is
the problem.

You have made the usual erroneous assumption of all spanking
enthusiasts about non-spankers. You assume we are still punishers and
have no other things in our bag of parenting tricks but punishment to
stop unwanted behaviors.

You can always tell a child which has not been
disciplined. He's precisely the sort of child the "childproofing"
one's house, and the schools and the daycares notion got
started for---the idea that the children cannot be expected to
behave themselves and opbey simple safety rules, and instead
the world needs to be made safe for them.

You are wrong. The need for the schools and daycares to child proof
comes more for another reason. The child of punishers, let out into
the world, who have been repressed in their need to explore the world,
burst out in holy fits of exploration.

Children that are taught lovingly obey the safety rules they can
understand when they can understand them. Too young and the
reponsibility is on the caregiver. That's why we have child restraints
of various kinds.

We are keeping the child alive long enough to age to the point of
reason.

I said:
and then bolster social engineering programs with
"studies" that do not show what they purport to show.
Kane:
"Social engineering" is what YOU do when you
proport to teach children using physical and psychological pain.

I spank my children, or did at a young age, in order to
demand obedience at that age.

Why would you "demand obedience" at all. If too young, safety is your
job. If older they can learn by gentle means. In fact you have likely
seriously retarded the development of a normal conscience and in it's
place put fear of retaliation.

That's one of the major problems in the world today.

For their safety and in
order to give them good ethical habits of respect for other people
and for other people's property.

They teens yet? Gone sneaky and or defiant yet? That's what you are in
for.

If you are cruel enough though you might finally get them out the door
thinking you did well only to be inflicting them on the rest of the
world.


Kane:
Your opponents at least aren't taking you literally out behind the
woodshed.

My children do have the freedom to disagree with and oppose me
as soon as they reach an age of reason.

If they have not reached that age how can you see training them like a
dog to be teaching them anything?

And how is normal development actions and behaviors prior to the age
of reason, disagreeing or opposing you? They can't reason, they can't
"oppose."

Much of the mental and social ills in the world are caused by parents
failing to see that the oppositional and defiant is nothing more than
the force of nature in the child for an organism to explore and
experiement.

That is what play is for. It's the child's work and pain and
humiliation are interfering in it. Direction is what is needed, and it
need not be painful.

Kane:
Whose the more honorable party, those that want parents to learn how
to teach their children without the deliberate use of pain and
humiliation or those, such as you, that want to continue to lie to
each other about what you are doing.

The issue is whether you actually do teach the children so
that the child, for instance, fastens his seat belt as a matter
of habit, and stops upon command when he is about to run out
into the street, or reaches by habit for his parent's hand in
a supermarket parking lot.

You don't fasten the seatbelt or supervise it? You let him get out of
your control when he is too young to understand traffic hazards? You
don't take HIS hand rather than expect him to take yours?

You are expecting reasonable behavior from a child not able to reason
cause and effect yet. Interesting.

Hitting to teach is simply adding one more complexity to the
complexity that children have when they are tiny.

And sadly, each of your examples above can be more powerful taught
using other painless and non humiliting methods. You really must read
the Embry report.

These things are not reasoned out
with a young child, is the problem, and that is a problem that was
well understood and addressed by the ancients.

Yes, we have improved so much since those days. No children are killed
under the wheels of chariots any more. No child is pulled away to
their deaths by wolves in the supermarket aisles. No child falls from
the chariot now that he has learned to fasten his seatbelt like a
robot.

What a lot of folks find is that despite all this "training" you think
you are doing with pain, the child still hasn't got it down until they
are old enough to reason it out, or are at earlier stage where they
wish so hard to please mommy and daddy...about 5 yrsold.

Hence, you begin
in authority and discipline,

You begin in fear and humiliation and you get the usual results. You
begin as a patient teacher, forgiving, and willing to repeat the
lesson or learn new ways of teaching it, and you have the child's
trust for life.

you inculcate good habits,

Good habits come out of pain only when the pain is a result of a
mistake the child made and can recover from. You giving them pain is a
betrayal.

and the child
grows into free choice

What free choice is there in having one's thoughts and behaviors
driven by memories of pain and humiliation?

The outcome is called neurosis. The child has to develop protective
forgetfulness to be able to function.

Compare it to the child that remembers a loving gentle parent that
directed them rather than threatened them.

with a default mode of good habits to
sustain him and keep him safe while he grows.

"default mode?"

Your child is a computer?

I said:
In my opinion, the decline of the widespread acceptance of spanking
in the US is directly correlated with the widespread bad behaviour
of children in the US, not to mention a whole lot nastier set of
adults.
Kane:
Actually you are completely wrong. In the US, for instance, some of
those "unscientific" studies show that 90% or more of citizens report
they have been spanked.

No, I think I am completely right. The number used to be about 100%.
The leftish social activists have tried to equate spanking with
abuse,
and have consequently tried to shame it underground. As a result,
many parents don't spank except as a last resort, by which time they
are angrier and spank less consistently and in a less controlled way.

You are wrong about 100% I grew up in about as working class as you
can get. Spanking was not in everyone's repertoire of parenting
methods. I knew many families it never happened in and some kids were
stunned to learn others were spanked.

It's a myth perpetrated by the media and those that can't rise above
bullying to parent.

And the amount of abusive spanking in an uncontrolled way was about
the same then.

So are you saying that spanking then should be something other than a
last resort?

Kane:
Children are being spanked at at least the same, or possibly
greater rates than in the past and more abuse is an
outgrowth of spanking that didn't work (as it mostly doesn't) so was
escalated to injury.

Sorry, but your statistic neither shows this (since the survey
surveys
adults)
and there is no evidence that abuse comes from spanking.

I don't need much more evidence than my eyes and ears to know what
comes from spanking. And what apoligists will claim about it.

I see a child that is running toward the street and momma runs after
him and grabs him and smacks his butt. If he's old enough he wouldn't
have run toward the street. If he's too young to understand, the
spanking isn't going to do a thing to teach him.


Kane:
The nastiness you are experiencing in people comes precisely from
being humiliated and tortured by parents who believe your nonsense.

Nope. It comes from kids not being disciplined and, consequently,
disrespecting the property and person of other people.

I know hundreds of completely unspanked children. They are highly
respectful of others property and persons. It is the spanked and
humilitated child that has the problem you claim.

My wife,
a veterinarian, has story upon story to tell of children coming
into the exam room with parents and Fido, and children making noise
and
climbing all over mega-expensive equipment while parent is trying to
tell vet what is wrong with Fido. And, interrupting every moment or
two to tell kids to stop doing whatever it is they are doing, and the
kids just ignoring the command. This comes from no discipline. No
expectation that good behaviour *will* happen or else.

And you are going to come up with proof, other than your opinion,
those children weren't spanked at home? Or right outside after they
left?

That story is typical of spanked and humiliated children. They bust
out in public.


Kane:
Non spanked children are consistently better behaved and far less
likely to be involved in criminal activity. And I don't mean that a
child who is spanked then when not spanked for a few weeks shows signs

of improvement. I mean a consistently gently parented child.

I seriously doubt it, and doubt you can give *any* study to show it.

I doubt you can give any to show that spanked children are better
behaved. You just "know" it, don't you?


I said:
It looks to me like US conservatives were exactly
right to oppose this Convention.
Kane:
What makes you think the idea of not spanking children is exclusive to

liberals?

Sorry, I do not use "liberal" to mean "social progressives". I am
liberal.

Kane:
I'm a conservative and I consider those that spank either
stupid, ignorant, or vicious, not to mention socially maladjusted
because of the spankings they got as a child. I know plenty of other
conservatives that agree with me, and rather a lot of liberals who do
NOT extend their politics to their child rearing practices. They
spank.

A majority spank at some point or the other. The issue is whether it
is wrong and shameful to do so,

It is wrong and shameful, as it is shame making. A child need not be
ashmed of his curious nature, or her experimentation, and each
instance is an opportunity to teach, not train.

so that spanking ends up being associated
with last-ditch frustration and anger. Or whether it is a line of
first
resort,
in which case it is controlled and immediate and, well,
attention-getting.

And if one has a small repertoire of teaching skills that require no
pain or humiliation or punishment at all and work everytime?

You are making an excuse for what you lack.

It is not hard to outthink a child, unless one is too reliant on
spanking as a first resort.


Kane:
Have a good one, Mike.

You, too, Kane.

Mike Morris
)


Kane