Slashdot Mirror
Childhood Stress Leaves Genetic Scars
sciencehabit writes "Traumatic experiences in early life can leave emotional scars. But a new study suggests that violence in childhood may leave a genetic mark as well. Researchers have found that children who are physically abused and bullied tend to have shorter telomeres — structures at the tips of chromosomes whose shrinkage has been linked to aging and disease."
So much for Stick and Stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
Could the telomeres of chromosomes be lengthened? Would this theropy have the affect of causing the cell to handle longevity better?
Could it be that less genetically gifted children are more prone to be bullied?
Child abuse isn't taken seriously? Here in the states, child services can take your kid away from you if you so much as look at it wrong in public.
I'm not trying to excuse this behavior, but did they account for the possibility that parents who give shorter telomwhatevers are more likely to abuse their children?
I was wondering what he was talking about too. Since when is child abuse not taken seriously? Of course, I am assuming he is talking about real child abuse and not spanking.
Unless it happens on school grounds. Then people turn a blind eye.
So you already know the answer but choose to reject it.
A study (http://www.pnas.org/content/109/17/6490.full) was published in PNAS today showing how low-ranking monkeys have worse immune systems than high-ranking monkeys. (In monkey societies, 'high-ranking' is a euphemism for bully.) We've known for a long time that subordinate monkeys have worse health and live shorter lives in general than dominant monkeys, but this is one of the first studies that describe how this actually happens, genetically and physiologically.
You mean you include spanking as child abuse?
Spanking is child abuse. IN what way is hitting a child 1/10 your weight to provoke a fear response that will traumatize future relationships not child abuse?
And that's not even getting into the fact that 'spanking' is a vague term.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Are you suggesting that a child's genetics are capable of detecting the force with which you strike their bottom?
The evidence here is about psychological/emotional trauma, which can be applied by parents in ways that are traditionally acceptable, such as spanking.
Spanking can be traumatic.
Traumatic events can have this affect. It isn't that complex.
There is a difference between spanking and beating the crap out of a kid. When I was little, spanking was a few small pops on the butt with a sandal or a open hand.
Of course. The trauma that it inflicts on the brains of children is every bit as real (and measurable) as the trauma inflicted by other forms of abuse so there's no reason to exclude it.
One more thing for me to stress about. I'm going to die before everyone else too. That explains why I have grey hairs at 23.
The Ontario CAS says that spanking is an open-handed slap on the bottom that doesn't leave a mark. If you close your hand, use a tool, hit any other area of the body, or leave a mark at all; then it's child abuse. They actually mostly think the open-handed slap on the bottom is child abuse too, but they allow it as a concession to reactionary old gits like yourself.
Spanking can also help stop a kid from doing something that ends up being even more traumatic.
That's a common theory that has been debunked by improved evidence. All forms of physical aggression have the same effect on the child.
In the way that there is a big difference between a swat on the butt and a haymaker. One upsets the kid for a few minutes and they think "Boy, I'd better not do that again. My means business."
The other causes bruising, broken bones, lasting trauma, and emotional scars.
Unless, of course, you'd like the assert that the vast majority of all youths from prior to the those born in the last decade or so (when it because trendy to sling around terms like Child Abuse and dilute their true meaning) were all abused children?
Unless it happens on school grounds. Then people turn a blind eye.
Especially if other kids are doing it. Then the school administration gives their silent consent by doing nothing about it. Or worse, when it's physical abuse, they punish both the bully who attacked someone without provocation and the one who defended himself, just to add that element of mindfuck to existing injustice.
I am thankful to have had parents who told me I would not be in trouble for legitimate self-defense even if the school system was far less reasonable. What I found was that if you knock out one of them, the rest tend to leave you alone, for the nature of a bully is to find a doormat who will not fight back. I believe the school officials who have no doubt studied child psychology and the like are also aware of this and understand the injustice they facilitate. It is not mere bureaucratic ignorance but some kind of desired effect, a sort of unwritten portion of the curriculum.
People who can and will stand up for themselves, even when a price must be paid, are extremely undesirable to increasingly tyrannical governments. It's something they would discourage and it is not difficult to understand why. It's amazing how hard that is to accept for people who cannot comprehend that organizations, like individuals, can also be selfish and encourage only what is in their long-term interests.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Actually, I am in my 20's.
I know stories where a pretty, popular girl gets insulted by her pretty, popular friend - and takes her life, and everyone gets up in arms about "stopping bullying".
Only, that's not bullying. The way I see it, the extreme reaction (suicide), is due to this ridiculous importance the media puts on being popular in high school - "the most important time in your life".
The real victims of bullies are kids with physical or developmental problems. Maybe slightly autistic, maybe downs syndrome. The ones who don't fit in, and aren't cool. I haven't seen one sad major media article about these kids, and I have to believe they're still being called "retard", are assualted, and have rocks and such thrown at them every single day. And if they speak up, they'll just be told they need to deal with that - boys being boys and all the rest.
If they fight back, of course, they'll be suspended, arrested, or whatever it takes. After all, it's just not right to hurt the feelings of one of the pretty, popular children.
On topic - are you sure that bullying is causing genetic problems, or are they bullied precisely BECAUSE of those problems? Cause and effect, and all that shit.
And I wish I could stop hearing about bullying. It's being used to describe the wrong thing, the whining and complaining is coming from a sense of entitlement, not any real desire to treat the weird, awkward or different children as equal to the rest.
Ever since the 1960s, child abuse has been touted as the worst thing an individual could do to another individual--it's pretty high up there in America. I was under the impression it was being taken seriously.
Congratulations. You've removed 2 of the 10 billion or so possible people that can abuse a child.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
It's already known that stress can seem to accelerate aging. Ever see those pictures of presidents before a term, then after? 4 years passed for everybody else, but it looks like they aged 10 years.
Psyche and soma are not fully distinguishable.
Why don't you look at some of the evidence regarding historical levels of child abuse and then come back and say whether or not this is an unreasonable statement.
Actually, if you RTFA you would know that the measurement only applied to two or more kinds of violence exposure. Thus, the occasional spanking without other forms of violence would not qualify as harmful under this study.
Inflicting physical pain upon a child is abuse.
But maybe spanking is the way out for an adult who knows no other options or who chooses not to take the time needed to solve the situation otherwise which may or may not include changes in the adults behavior
Sorry, but that opinion is not healthy. Abuse is abuse, but on occasion a parent (assuming they are actually parenting) will have limits tested beyond any other punishment. Normally, I see your type of comment from one of two kinds of people.
1. Those that have no children so have no idea what parenting is.
2. Parents who's children are monsters that have no respect for any authority. Generally the parents are either ashamed or afraid to take the kids out in public, or the children are so poorly behaved that people don't want them in public.
Truth be told, I have spanked my son 2 times in his whole life. The first time he refused to stop what he was doing, refused any punishment (go to time out) and was doing something dangerous. The second time, he was a bit older. He refused punishment and took a swing at me.
Now unlike when I was a kid and just got the shit kicked out of me with a belt, I explained to my kid on both occasions why I had to punish him and how we could not repeat those mistakes. He learned valuable lessons on both occasions. In my opinion, he learned valuable lessons from those occasions. He is going to be an adult soon, and one day may ask for advice when it comes to parenting. I really hope he remembers how he was raised or talks to me before he talks to someone like you.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Even as recently as 2006 a majority of people still think it's acceptable to hit infants, so while some progress has been made it's hardly a solved problem.
Inflicting physical pain upon a child is abuse.
By that logic every parent is a child abuser by default.
"Life is pain." --Dread Pirate Roberts (Wesley)
Not really, I am in a rural area practicing family medicine, a lot of parents do horrible things to their kids and get them back (especially if they are native). A lot of the time it gets blamed on substance abuse, the parents go in for "treatment" and come out and do the same damned things. In fact downloading a cartoon of a naked child seems to hold a worse punishment than doing meth and sexually abusing your child.
All forms of physical aggression have the same effect on the child.
Yes. There is absolutely no difference between spanking with an open hand and bludgeoning a kid with a baseball bat till it faints.
I agree it's still a problem and we have to implement better measures against it. But as a whole, I'd say our society is well-versed in the problem. We know it's there. I believe it's being taken seriously. We just haven't found an effective solution against it. Does that make sense? I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm saying it's a complex problem--difficult to solve. I don't think it's due to a lack of awareness about it.
Sometimes spanking is necessary. It isn't necessarily the first thing I would go to. It depends on the child's personality as well as their age. Also, the whole of the point of discipline and part of the point of raising a child is to modify behavior. I doubt anyone wants to have a jerk for a son.
You forgot child birth also. Not that I remember, but I am sure that my birth was extremely painful.
An infant doesn't differentiate between subtle difference in forms of caretaker aggression. Since parents usually start hitting their children around the age of 12 months and this is time period is more important in terms of long-term brain development that's what I was talking about. An older child processes it differently but by the time they reach that age it doesn't really matter because the long term damage has largely already been done.
Parents need to learn there are other ways to handle discipline and yes, aside from being damaging in yet another known way - previous revelations including lower test scores and greater aggression from children who have been spanked, spanking is the lazy way out. There are more effective, responsible means.
Timeouts for one, if done right and that is key, if done right, are absolutely better. Parents screw this one up by making them too long or delaying them. I for one always found a minute per year of age, given immediately at the time of the infraction regardless of where we were, done standing, done silent and done facing a wall, corner, tree, whatever was handy and followed with an explanation for the punishment and a directive for future behavior was very effective. So effective in fact I would find no need for their use within a couple weeks time. I had compliance.
Now I'll admit these weren't my children - rather I was a nanny for a great many years, and parents tend to have to be around their children a bit more than I had to, so perhaps adjustments would be necessary to maintain effectiveness. Or other avenues explored. My point is simply that there are other ways and they can be much more effective, if done right.
It's a very difficult problem to solve because some forms of abuse are nearly universal. Therefore you can't talk about them objectively without provoking all the emotional defenses of guilt and justification that people harbor from being exposed to or performing those actions.
Actually, if you read the link I posted you'd know that there's more evidence of the effects of child abuse known than just this study.
This just smells like bad science. Not that it's impossible, but a claim like this is pretty extreme and I'd like to see it replicated several times before believing it.
We don't take the child abuse from child services very seriously. Taking a child out of a good family for no good reason and stuffing them into a foster home is very traumatic.
When children are orphaned or must be removed from the home, splitting up siblings is very traumatic as well. Claims of "we TRY to keep them together but it's hard" are little better than "We TRY to feed them every other day or so but it's hard". If CPS were a family, CPS would take the children away.
Your kid learned to behave that way from you. You said it yourself about the environment you grew up in and that definitely affected you personality which in turn your kid picked up on.
Kids are 99% reflections of their caregivers.
I'm not saying that a spanking wasn't warranted but the situation would never have reached that point if they were raised differently.
You admit that spanking is sometimes necessary. It shouldn't be the first thing that parents use but it should be an option and I would not call it abuse.
Inflicting physical pain upon a child is abuse.
Just for the sake of argument let me point out that many things a responsible parent might do cause physical pain. Take dental braces for example. I had those and they ached constantly. Now, I'm not a parent so I've not given serious thought about spanking my progeny, but it is something that was done to me and I wouldn't call it abuse, nor would I say the same about the dental work.
There are plenty of cases of real child abuse without making sweeping statements like yours.
I agree with that. In typical government fashion CPS agencies tend to make any problem they claim to solve even worse.
What I'm talking about though is the fact that even today in 2012 it's hard to get a majority of adults in the US to agree that hitting a 12 month old infant is unambiguously wrong.
Spanking is child abuse. IN what way is hitting a child 1/10 your weight to provoke a fear response that will traumatize future relationships not child abuse?
And that's not even getting into the fact that 'spanking' is a vague term.
Sounds like your solution would be, rather than attempting to correct the wrong behavior (as defined by the PARENT, not the GOVERNMENT) through negative stimuli, to enroll your child in the "Nanny State Special Needs Children Program". As clearly your child is somehow disabled if it cannot withstand corrective negative stimuli rewards for negative behaviors. Such a disabled child clearly warrants "special needs" and tax payer provided treatment.
This leads me to the question of whether you believe all animals are capable of child abuse, or just homo sapien sapiens. I've seen wild wolves correct the established social hierarchy and it can appear gruesome, to say the least. However, it's done for the good of the pack. An individual unaware of it's place in it's social hierarchy has a net negative impact on it's society.
"Life is pain." --Dread Pirate Roberts (Wesley)
I am assuming he is talking about real child abuse and not spanking.
Makes you look like a Grade-A moron and possibly an abusive parent.
Wow! Hyperbole much?
Forget the organizational level for a second, and consider on a human level. Officials working for schools and depend on them to put food on the table would have to understand that authoritarian regimes tend to target and eliminate education.
"Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked." -Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
FTFA: ...But the connection between telomere length and health and longevity is far from clear. "There's a lot of doubt in the field," notes Joao Passos, a cellular aging specialist at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom who was not involved in the research. "For as many studies that show telomere length as a good predictor of health outcomes, there are as many that find no relationship."...
Also, with a bit of work I bet they could find something else the test subjects had in common and thus be claimed to also be a cause for the shortening of Telomeres.
To link this to child abuse is a bit of a stretch based on what I can read in the articles. It would appear that stress has more to do with appearing to age faster than anything. Being abused is stressful. I know first hand.
Waterboarding doesn't leave a mark.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That doesn't at all address the parent, you're just changing the subject.
Yes, there is a difference between spanking and beating the crap out of a kid. There's also a difference between beating the crap out of a kid and quadruple-amputating him for no sound medical reason, but that doesn't make beating the crap out of a kid okay.
Rather than speak to differences between thing X and an obviously worse thing Y, you should clarify why thing X is not a bad thing on its own merits.
Indeed.
Don't put disinfectant on that scrape on your kid's knee, because it stings.
Don't take him in for surgery because there will be post-op pain--after all, the doctor abused him by cutting him open. How is this still legal, in this day and age?!
The examples above are cases in which the end justifies the means. I think that there are better ways to discipline most children than spanking, but equating a spanking given by a clearly responsible and loving parent with slapping a kid because he blocked your view of the television is incredibly simplistic. There is an argument to be had about whether or not spanking can be categorized with my examples above, and it's one I'm interested in, but your position is untenable.
Your brain is not a computer.
Which is what? Society has failed to collapse in spite of widespread use of spankings? I'd like to see data on whether successful people were or were not spanked in childhood. Whether or not it's traumatizing to a child is more or less irrelevant if that trauma shapes them into responsible adults IMO, especially when "trauma" is defined so broadly that it encompasses any negative association with a behavior. The whole point is to modify behavior. I'll concede that spanking is likely overused, and that I've probably used it when it wasn't necessary, but I still assert that it is sometimes the only valid option.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
You could answer that question if you watched the video series I linked in my original post.
If you want more historical context for the effects that different ways of treating children has on entire civilizations you could take a look at this book.
We've already seen that childhood socioeconomic status can have an effect on adulthood DNA methylation which in turn changes gene expression and susceptibility to disease. You may read about it here: http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/10/18/ije.dyr147.short?rss=1
Doesn't it naturally follow then that how a child is treated is just as much a part of that environment of stress as whether or not they got food, healthcare and shelter regularly?
I see these as irrevocably linked.
Which leads me to wonder if the next natural step is a study comparing telomere length with regard to childhood and adulthood socioeconomic status or a study comparing childhood and adulthood methylation of a cohort in the same socioeconomic class, but differing exposure to violence?
That said, I wonder if you could elaborate on what you mean with this smelling like bad science?
Jesus fucking christ. Thanks a lot for hijacking what could have been an interesting bunch of comments with this bullshit about what is or isn't child abuse.
There are levels of trauma and lumping them all together serves no one. There is a huge difference between actual child abuse, as in parents beating their child daily for no reason other than to release their frustration with their own life, and the rare spanking with a controlled force to establish a boundary that the child must learn not to pass.
All this feel-good, "time out", "grounding" has resulted in some of the rudest, loudest and most inconsiderate people on this planet. Starting from the rudest, most egotistic and least empathic children and teenagers that I've ever encountered. Yeah I can see that is just working out fine.
Instead you cited a quote by another in an article about the study. Now that may be fine for a minor point, but to say the entire study fails to prove anything based on one man's generalization, a man who didn't specifically say the same, is, respectfully, downright silly.
Especially when you follow it was contradictory anecdotal evidence from your own experience.
Guilty conscience?
Remember when they used to teach that humans exhale co2, inhale oxygen? And plants "inhale" CO2, and release oxygen? Turns out they take in oxygen, too.
It used to be taught that environmental factors during an organism's lifetime (malnutrition, etc.) did not have an effect on the genetic heritage of offspring (you get a "clean slate" of DNA, so to speak). The opposing idea, that, e.g., giraffes are tall because their ancestors had to reach up to the tall leaves, and then they had long-necked kid giraffes was derided as Lamarckism.
But here we are with a study that says environmental factors can leave a genetic mark.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
You say timeouts are crap, but:
(1) You failed to address that I used them as an example of an alternative and in failing to do so, you revealed that you most likely view the subject as if the situation were dichotomous with spanking or timeouts as the only options out there. They aren't.
(2) Your description on how your parents went about it more closely resembles how I described doing a timeout incorrectly and certainly not how I described doing one correctly.
You really want to tell me that if your father had instituted the timeout immediately after the infraction - without delay, had been standing behind you, keeping your head facing the wall, keeping you silent, and gave not before or during but after an explanation for the punishment, and then a directive for future behavior, that it wouldn't have made an impression on you?
I had compliance for years after only days, or at most a couple weeks, of these decisive timeouts. One prerequisite to doing a timeout right is giving it your attention.
Spanking is the lazy man's way out and only a fool thinks otherwise.
Waterboarding doesn't leave a mark.
Sorry, where exactly does waterboarding belong in this discussion? The AC was describing the Ontario CAS definition of 'spanking' and nothing more. Way to add unnecessary hyperbole to the conversation!
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
It's a valid counterexample to invalidate the principle implied by the Onterio CAS definition. If behavior A differs from behavior B in only one respect, not leaving a mark, and based on this difference A is classified as not abusive while B is considered abusive this definition rests on the principle that not leaving a mark is sufficient to distinguish abusive from non-abusive behavior.
if they were raised differently.
Except for the rebellious part where they do whatever they want to test authority and see what they can get away with.
Now unlike when I was a kid and just got the shit kicked out of me with a belt, I explained to my kid on both occasions why I had to punish him and how we could not repeat those mistakes. He learned valuable lessons on both occasions. In my opinion, he learned valuable lessons from those occasions. He is going to be an adult soon, and one day may ask for advice when it comes to parenting. I really hope he remembers how he was raised or talks to me before he talks to someone like you.
I'm sure you are a fair parent. However, you need to realize that you justified striking your child out of frustration with your inability to control him by effectively saying, "at least I wasn't as bad as my parent." In that statement, you condemned your parents' actions as abusive and affirmed that the lesson you learned from them was not to do what they did. What do you think your son is going to tell people when he emotionally abuses his kids? Or locks then in a basement room without food for days at a time? "At least I didn't beat them like my father beat me."
Both my parents' fathers were abusive alcoholics. My mother justified punching us and cutting us because "at least I'm not whipping you with a leather belt like my father." Her sister kept wooden paddles mounted on the wall with her kids names on them. And my father would refuse to let me eat breakfast, lunch and dinner until I could convince him I deserved to eat. After hours of any response I gave being met with "you're worthless" he'd send me to bed without any food at all that day, and tell me that "at least I'm not hitting you like my father hit me."
They all justify it by comparing themselves to their parents, while condemning their parents. Were they really better because when they hit their kids it didn't put a hole in the wall? Did they really learn anything? Where does this cycle end? I'm not saying its easy to raise kids. I'm saying you have a responsibility to recognize the difference between parenting and lashing out in frustration. If you do it, OK, it happens, it's human nature, apologize, explain and move on. But don't hide behind this claim that it's OK because you're better than your parents. If you need to justify yourself by comparing yourself to them, then you're really not any better, because they (and everyone who's ever been accused of child abuse) hid behind the same bullshit argument.
[Citation needed], because I think you're just making stuff up.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
That's what people tell themselves when they psychologically abuse their kids.
Forget the organizational level for a second, and consider on a human level. Officials working for schools and depend on them to put food on the table would have to understand that authoritarian regimes tend to target and eliminate education.
Target and eliminate? No. They aren't that stupid (would that they were). What they do is pervert education and use it for the purpose of social engineering and indoctrination. Any transmission of knowledge or understanding is incidental and only to the extent necessary that the peons/students can perform useful labor, to form the bottom of the pyramid. They would also encourage conformity and permit various bullying and other abuses to ensure that the immaturities of childhood extend well into adulthood. What they absolutely would not do is teach serious, tough-minded critical thinking skills and raise up people who can educate themselves and do not need to depend on an instructor to tell them what is important to learn.
Sounds just like what we have now in the USA. These things happen slowly from the perspective of a human life, but quickly from the perspective of written history. Just consider how much the USA has changed in the last three generations. Then you can get a feel for what's going on, where it is headed, what the ultimate expression of it would be, and why it would be done that way.
The USA's tyranny is not going to be hard tyranny, the kind that waves a gun in your face and demands that you submit. It is going to be a soft tyranny, the kind that knows what's best for you, that you have learned to depend on. That, however, is just a matter of style, the means. The result is the same.
I have to ask, were you trolling or did you truly not understand that? What real tyrants understand is that the average person is so caught up in their day-to-day affairs that they tend not to be long-term thinkers. They are not skilled at seeing the path something is taking and projecting what the end of that path will be and that skill is not taught to them and they are not self-educators who would acquire it on their own. So if you want to implement tyranny, you do it in baby steps, each one carefully justified and defended by its ardent little apologists. After all, you don't want the terrorists to win, do you? After all, you want to protect the children, don't you? After all, you want the poor to be taken care of, don't you?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
It's a valid counterexample to invalidate the principle implied by the Onterio CAS definition. If behavior A differs from behavior B in only one respect, not leaving a mark, and based on this difference A is classified as not abusive while B is considered abusive this definition rests on the principle that not leaving a mark is sufficient to distinguish abusive from non-abusive behavior.
Well, sure, if you ignore the context. The Ontario definition concerns itself with the act of spanking, that being the application of force to the buttocks; AFAIK it is not an analysis of the relative merits of the application of force to minors.
This is the context of the discussion and I think throwing in an unrelated and highly-contentious subject like waterboarding is at best unhelpful and at worst, trollish.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Yeah, for your mom,...
What isn't really health is failing to find a way to communicate with your kid in a way that doesn't require spanking. First your idea that someone without a child 'has no idea what parenting is' demonstrates that you believe other people, even those who interact with kids all the time, but don't have any of their own are unable to raise a child.
The sad truth is that people who are greatly unable to raise a child have kids. People who are poor at communication, explanation and building respect or trust. You should take a look at why your child was not listening and why they threw a punch at you.
I've never spanked my child nor would I as a trained psychologist ever suggest that someone should do so. That your child is avoiding punishments means that he is unable to understand what he did was 'wrong' or that your punishment was something he perceives as unjust. Rather than striking a child for refusing to accept your punishment (that you would use positive punishment as a way to change behavior at all display a lack of understanding human behavior), you should probably be thinking through your own beliefs and work on communicating and explaining to your child how to work with other people rather than hitting them.
But at the same time little of this is your fault, social and educational systems haven't advanced enough to expect the average parent to know anything really about the science of human behavior.
Once again, maybe genetically inferior children have genetically inferior parents who are more likely to be abusive? Just a thought. Can't imagine alcohol and cigarettes during pregnancy helps much either, but it happens...
Cats, however, take a stepped-on tail as an unforgivable, grievous insult against their Gods. Which are themselves, incidentally.
Your attack on my person is unnecessary and unwarranted. I was not trolling and you have no basis for questioning my understanding of what you said for I didn't question that there was value to what you said. You seem to be one of those people who automatically assumes that any response is made in disagreement.
Rather all I did was insert a factor worthy of consideration. Historically, authoritarian regimes - the hard sort, have targeted education for elimination - perhaps not for the entire population, but large portions. The most glaring example would be Mao's China - but that really wasn't my reference. My implication is that it is happening here in the United States, schools are being targeted. Funding is being cut on all levels, class sizes are going up, teachers and the very concept of education are being regularly attacked by politicians, religious types, etc. Some in fact use the very social engineering argument you are using to justify these assaults.
I would argue that it is those attacks, and not some plot by school officials with high end psychology degrees or evil scheme by the likes of the Obama administration, that do the greatest harm to furthering the development critical thinking skills, the general diffusion of knowledge, etc. Now we come to where I disagree with you. I don't believe that the end result is some soft nanny state. I believe we are heading towards the waiving a gun in front of you type. We have ever more militant police departments, the return of debtor prisons and social programs - which would be a hallmark of this perceived nanny state, continue to be cut far beyond the bone. This country is heading down a very scary road.
Let's not go to each other's throats when we both agree that education is one of the best places to start to fix things.
If behavior A differs from behavior B in only one respect
Behavior A differs in at least THREE respects:
1. open hand
2. leave no mark
3. not used to elicit information from a prisoner
Further the relationship between the principals is very different (caregiver/child v. interrogator/prisoner) and the direct connection between behavior-result is different (clear and limited v. random and continuous).
So yeah, your counter example stinks.
... and trying to justify the sublimated trauma and pain that you still carry that was caused by your own spanking,
much like the generations before you, no doubt.
If it's not OK to hit an ADULT when they are making no sense, why would it be OK to hit a child?
and not to mention what it becomes if the parent is even the slightest percentage off base, incorrect, or overreacting
SPADE == SPADE
I doubt anyone wants to have a jerk for a son.
I disagree; I'm sure countless Americans would want that. Everyone wants kids that grow up to be just like themselves.
um.. child abuse is the other terrorism here in the states.. there's a molester/abuser around every corner, to hear authority speak about it, and DCF can take your kid away with the most, beneign, taken out of context, 'judgments' about your behavior. meanwhile, in school bullying situations, if the bullies are the kids that make the school look good (overachiever 'preps', football jocks whatever), schools look the other way, or worse, punish both parties equally just to cover their sorry hides..worse, in some cases, the bullied kid is actually arrested for showing anger towards them (zomg! columbine!). it's fucked up.
the fact is any sort of prolonged stress shortens your life.. not just child abuse.
You might want to reexamine your premises. The difference in power between a caretaker and child is even greater than the difference in power between an interrogator and prisoner, thus more prone to being abused. Also as far as young children perceive it physical punishment is random. Most children who are hit start being spanked by the age of 12 months, long before they are able to perceive being hit as anything other than random.
Why would you hit an adult who's making no sense? Or a child?
Spanking and other forms of punishment are to negatively reinforce bad behavior, not to deal with someone who's upset and irrational. And yes, we absolutely do hit adults when they behave badly. Well, most of us don't, but the police certainly do. They hit them, with metal batons if necessary, until they comply, and then they're taken to jail. Luckily, most adults don't need this, and most kids raised correctly probably don't either, but there's always some knuckleheads who understand nothing but force.
yes, adult on child abuse is taken seriously, to witch hunt levels sometimes. I figure Wonko the Sane meant abusive behavior between children.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I've never spanked my child nor would I as a trained psychologist ever suggest that someone should do so. That your child is avoiding punishments means that he is unable to understand what he did was 'wrong' or that your punishment was something he perceives as unjust.
What if the child is a borderline sociopath, and simply doesn't care if what he did was wrong? Since about 5-10% of the population is sociopaths, a lot of parents will have to deal with kids like that.
I have a brain and put to its full use, I can't for the life of me figure out how the liberal bogeyman came into this for you, but I'm sorry to tell you that your reasoning is inherently flawed. First off, I have found that people of all political stripes are more than willing to take a study, apply it universally and try to force it on everyone.
I did not, in any way, suggest that timeouts would work for everyone. What I did find was that for the thirty or so children I cared for as the eldest of three, the neighborhood babysitter for twelve years and a full-time nanny for six years timeouts done in the fashion I described were effective for all of them. I got years of compliance after only a few of these. I would add that some jurisdictions around the country have found a similar effect in jail sentences, faster and shorter sentencing apparently reduces recidivism.
I emphasize again that there are alternatives. Some parents have found groundings of all sorts to be effective or ineffective depending on the child, the type involved and the method used to carry it out. Some parents have forced chores as punishments. Some parents force extra schoolwork using workbooks bought from the likes on Amazon - I discourage it because I don't believe education should be thought of as a negative / believe it could lead to some long-term harm, but for some it's arguably effective. Sometimes you just need to apply a little more time. I had one boy who needed two weeks straight before he got it.
What I can say is that there are universal truths. Spanking, whether it is effective or not for getting a child to stop a particular act, is bad for all children. It leads to aggression, lower test scores, etc. Whatever the manifestation for a particular child the point is, if I shoot you in the foot you're going to stop kicking me with that foot, but let's look beyond just getting you to stop kicking me. Put another way, when there is permanent harm, it doesn't matter if it is effective. It could be the most effective method out there and that would change that it is wrong, especially in light of alternatives.
This study may eventually prove to be yet another piece backing that.
It used to be taught that environmental factors during an organism's lifetime (malnutrition, etc.) did not have an effect on the genetic heritage of offspring (you get a "clean slate" of DNA, so to speak). [...] But here we are with a study that says environmental factors can leave a genetic mark.
The study was about somatic cells, eg "body cells" that make up the specialized tissues of your body. Your offspring are formed from germ cells, found in your gonads, and consequently your offspring can only inherit DNA from your germ cells, but never your somatic cells (except in the case of cloning or other artificial techniques).
Telomeres are the "endcaps" of chromosomal DNA. Every time a chromosome is copied, a small portion at the ends of the chromosome get "left off" of the copy, which limits the number of time a cell can divide before the telomeres are consumed and functional DNA segments begin to be deleted. This (usually) prevents cells from reproducing in an uncontrolled fashion, and it's one of your body's main defenses against cancer. That's how it works in somatic cells.
Germ cells, on the other hand, can express a ribozyme called "telomerase," which can bind to the ends of a chromosome and extend the telomeres. This is why animals can reproduce indefinitely even though 99% of their cells are "mortal." (As others have pointed out, when a somatic cell begins to express telomerase it's usually cancer.)
The upshot of all of this is that shortened telomeres in your somatic cells will have no direct effect on your offspring. This particular study in no way supports the idea that environmental factors are responsible for genetic changes in offspring. Your post is therefore ill-informed even if your thesis is correct ("almost everything they teach in American public school is either wrong or simplified to the point of uselessness?").
To rectify your error, your homework assignment for tonight is to study the enzymes called "telomerase" and "reverse transcriptase," followed by learning the "central dogma of biology."
Dismissed.
What made them into sociopaths?
Yet in spite of all this a majority of parents still think it's ok to hit infants at least some of the time.
While I do not personally use spanking, I think that categorizing it as being for "an adult who knows no other options or who chooses not to take the time needed to solve the situation" is incorrect.
Parents, in the mini society we call the family, perform the role of government. If we, as adults, do things like use violence and intimidation to get our way we will find the police using state sanctioned violence against us. I personally think smacking is an appropriate response to violent, bullying behavior in children and most kids will try that out at some stage. It is better for society that we learn this lesson at the hands of our parents as children rather than at the hands of police as an adult. I do note that it isn't the only method I'd recommend to correct bullying.
Additionally, sometimes behavior correction needs to be immediate. Where disobedience will lead to the child's life being in danger taking "the time needed to solve the situation otherwise" could be interpreted as neglect. If you are in a situation where you need to correct behavior right now, smacking could be the best option.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
Most children who are hit start being spanked by the age of 12 months
Citation please
And you have a really warped view of parent child relationships, because power is not the only axis of their relationship.
(Power is a lens that, like other lenses, brings only some things into focus while blurring others.)
Part of the 'terrible twos' is the kid adjusting to the idea of "there is a 'me' and there is a 'you', and 'me' and 'you' are different." If, as you say, children are hit in the first year of life, what they learn is that the world is random and unsafe. A prisoner however, understands that the danger comes from the interrogator and that the world may be orderly but this relationship is random and unsafe.
yeah, at least let the bullied fight back (as long as it doesn't get to the point of death or major physical injury)
maybe disdain for the weak is part of disdain for anti-bullying efforts; this would show who the weak one really is.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Here's one. You can find other studies that have found even higher frequencies than this one if you keep looking.
Yes, and it has very powerful long term effects on their personality.
Bah, humbug. Humbug I say! The English language is a harsh mistress.
what doesn't kill 'em makes 'em weaker.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Nothing, they're born that way, just like some people are born with various other mental problems.
Genetic. That is why it is the people who got spanked as a child who must spank their kids.
I think they have the cause and effect backwards. It is not that abuse causes short telomeres, rather, the short telomeres cause abuse. No, really. Most child abuse is from family members ... who also have the short telomeres in most of these cases. Short telomeres also make people bad and turn them into abusers, bank robbers, and even spammers. And I think Anonymous Coward has short telomeres, too.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
And how often do they really take children out of "good families"? I've had some contact with CPS here in Arizona (my wife used to volunteer at group homes), and the kids there were taken away from their families for very good reasons: abuse, neglect, etc. Being around some of those kids should convince anyone that some people really should be forcibly sterilized, so they can't create and abuse more children. Being in a group home isn't great at all, but it's better than being in an abusive home. If more people took in these kids, then they wouldn't have to be in group homes.
As for splitting up siblings, that really isn't that bad. Many "siblings" are only half-siblings anyway, because the people who get their kids taken away are the kind who have a different father for every kid, and keeping them together isn't feasible when there's 6 or 8 of them. How many foster parents want to take in 6 troubled kids all at once? One or two is much more feasible, plus many times it's better for the kids to separate them from their trouble-making half-siblings. Yes, if there's only two of them and they're true siblings, they should be kept together, but there's too many cases of these bad parents having tons of kids; having only 2 kids is what middle-class people do, and they don't get their kids taken away by CPS.
As for CPS problems (and there are many), this is yet another result of governments that have little or no real accountability to the people.
Is there any evidence that you could see that, if it were to exist, would convince you to rethink your position?
Bullshiat! If raised correctly your child will reflect your attitudes. They may test authority but not to the point of needing spanking. I say this as a parent that has raised several children to adulthood.
Or it could be that you just have bad genes. Maybe you should think about not breeding.
What about this part? It wasn't a detail. Our espoused aim as a country is to educate our entire populace, do you disagree? Would you disagree that that is not the aim of North Korea nor was it the aim of Nazi Germany? Shit, the latter decided to simply exterminate a portion of their population. There are leaders in this country who don't believe that should be our aim. Do you disagree?
You emphasized that education is useful for imposing one school of thought by an authoritarian regime and you pointed out that religious types dislike education because it prevents them from imposing their one school of thought, but you want me to believe that religious types aren't authoritarian. I wonder what former members of the Mormon church, who no longer hear from their families, would say. It's not just corporate interests, there is a religious war in this country. Not a hot one, but certainly a very real one. Take for example the teaching of evolution or sex education. Your indoctrination is alive and well because the religious types have had their puppets infiltrating school boards for decades. Corporations don't give a shit about these issues, although global warming is another matter.
As is anything that has an effect on the bottom line which is of course why you're right about corruption and corporate influence. As for your statement that there's no single leader who is going to seize power, how can you be sure? Would we have foreseen any who have? Even if you're right, when the house of cards collapses, are you really telling me that guns won't be involved?
I'm not sure any of the three of us are on the same page, but the things we're coming up with are interesting.
What, are you saying that sociopathy is environmentally-caused and not genetic? Sure, I'd like to see anything about that. However, I've seen too many examples of kids where a family has 2 or 3 kids or more, all of them grow up to be nice, well-adjusted people, but one is a big fuck-up. You can't blame that on parenting in most cases, because it's generally safe to assume they raised all the kids the same way. The simple fact is that siblings can have amazingly different personalities, and that probably doesn't come from environment, at least not totally, though it certainly can be affected by it (after all, older kids are sometimes treated differently from younger ones or middle ones). I'm pretty sure the consensus these days is that personality is determined by a combination of genetics and upbringing. So sure, a kid who's predisposed to sociopathy might be able to avoid it by being raised by a really great family, but remember there's tons of examples of kids raised by absolutely horrible families who turn out really great, in spite of their parenting, so there was something inside them that prevented them from becoming sociopaths even though their environment would have encouraged that.
There are genetic factors that make a child less resilient to mistreatment but the mistreatment is necessary to form a sociopath. That can be demonstrated with twin studies.
I've seen many examples of people who call themselves and/or outwardly appear to be "nice and well-adjusted" who don't appear to be nearly as healthy upon closer examination.
"Cats are cunts" - Triumph the Insult Comic Dog
Is that the same state where CPS took three children out of their home for an entire month because their parents had the audacity to take a picture of them in the bathtub on vacation and developed them at Walmart like any child abuser is wont to do ?
Horseshit. Children should be taught to respect their own authority. I have my own child and she doesn't act out like that.
The ones that do are the ones taught to blindly respect authority (hell, to respect it at all for any other reason than the person EARNING it--you don't earn it by being better able to hurt someone else) are the ones being beat by their parents when they lash out at the grocery store lines.
It's unfortunate that you've raised another unreasoning person who will follow a leaders instructions without considering them rationally.
If you think children need to respect authority to be able to behave, that's where you're wrong. Children are far more logical than you or I because they've not yet been poisoned by society.
Shut the fuck up already.
The APK model of posting the same shit over and over in one topic is really not something you should seek to emulate.
that can be used on any one just to get out covering any thing they don't want to pay for.
If anything I've said is factually incorrect please show me the evidence that it is so that I can correct my facts.
If what I'm saying is factually true but makes you feel uncomfortable, angry or frightened that's something you should discuss with your therapist because it's your issue, not mine.
Honestly, I have no idea, but I think similar crap is probably happening all over the country.
I never said CPS (in any state) was great, just that it's unfortunately necessary in many cases because the alternative is even worse.
You can't even turn around on google without tripping over cases of threatened or actual removal of children with medical conditions or over mis-understandings or even cultural differences between case workers and parents. The parents are usually treated more or less like trained dogs at that point forced to jump through flaming hoops on command or lose their children.
It certainly does happen. I have no doubt that in other cases it is well justified and that any harm that removing the kids might cause is better than the harm of not removing them. All with no due process. Of course, even then there are plenty of stories that make people wonder if they might have been no worse off with their abusive parents.
As for siblings, That sounds awfully callous. You see no reason why kids who have been ripped out of their home, and away from their parents (bad parents are still a sense of constancy in a child's life) and quite probably away from their friends and their school might need some tiny shred of an anchor? Especially when neglected kids form a strong bond of mutual support. Gee, sorry that's so inconvenient!
You rarely hear testimonials from former foster children about how good the system was to them or what a blessing it was. You hear plenty where 'the system' was as bad or worse than the parents they were taken from. Statistically, kids put through 'the system' are far more likely to end up in jail than kids raised by their own parents or relatives, or adoptive parents.
"Here in the states, child services can take your kid away from you if you so much as look at it wrong in public."
Not back in the 80s, in Texas.
I'll give you two guesses as to how I know. Hint: I'm 30 now.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
As for siblings, That sounds awfully callous. You see no reason why kids who have been ripped out of their home, and away from their parents (bad parents are still a sense of constancy in a child's life) and quite probably away from their friends and their school might need some tiny shred of an anchor? Especially when neglected kids form a strong bond of mutual support. Gee, sorry that's so inconvenient!
What's your proposal then? You're not going to find a group home that has 8 open slots all at the same time. So what happens is 2-3 kids go to one place that has a couple of slots open, 2-3 go to another place, etc.
Worse, many of these group homes and foster homes are pretty bad themselves, run by people who have basically made a living out of it, not because they really care so much about the kids. The only solution to that that I see is big government-run orphanages, but no one like that idea these days.
Statistically, kids put through 'the system' are far more likely to end up in jail than kids raised by their own parents or relatives, or adoptive parents.
No shit, sherlock: the kids put through the system don't usually come from nice, upper middle-class homes with parents who have plenty of money and resources to raise their kids well; they usually come from the lowest classes of society. The lower classes are more likely to end up in jail, foster care or not, that's just the nature of having less education and less resources. It shouldn't be any surprise that lower-class kids are more likely to end up in jail, but that doesn't mean it's the CPS system that's doing it to them. It may be helping, or hurting, or neither; there's no real way to know.
Childhood leaves scars!
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
There's definitely too many adults ready to substitute violence for parenting, but the opposite extreme of a complete ban on spanking doesn't work well either. Let's face it, there are adults out there who you can't get through to without a little force.
Yet even those adults are protected by battery laws, the same laws that specially exempt parents who hit children who are even less able to defend themselves.
Stress is general is bad for one's health. The three S's are a good foundation to build your health: Sleep, Sun, Stress. P.S. Sex would fall under Stress (i.e. inversely proportional)
What made them into sociopaths?
Executive MBA courses?
If only it was that easy...
Nice straw man. I knew I would receive opposition to my view, but I didn't think it would almost universally of the kind where people intentionally misrepresented my intentions. Did I really need to add "as punishment" considering the nature of the article, the other comments, common sense, and the person I replied to before people understood my intent?
I'm curious about how spanking could be classified in the same area in the examples you give. Both situations could lead to issues up to and including death if such problems requiring this care are not provided, and are only necessary because there is no way to prevent this pain while providing the cure to the situation. I'm sorry if I find it hard to believe backtalk is in line with medical treatment. I do not believe social order should be maintained through physical discipline. That is the root of my issue with spanking.
A real problem with spanking as a whole is it is more often not the clearly responsible, loving parents you describe who are doing this. Another part of the problem is how vague the word "spanking" is. I am not strictly opposed to the idea of spanking but the reasoning, implementation, and severity. I grew up in a spanking household. Spanking in my house were incidents that often led to bruising. Lets not pretend this is abnormal in scale. My dad was not an especially violent person, or a drunk. He was a hard worker and a generally well rounded person. I did not even feel the way I do now back when I was a kid receiving these spankings. I certainly did not like them, and it made me fear my father, but I had no interest in the politics of it as I was just a kid. It was around the time my dad broke down in his old age and told me how sorry he was for it that I started to consider the actual issue and form my own opinion.
Honestly, it doesn't matter what I think, or what you think. People will do what they think is right when raising their kids. This can either be terrible or it can be good. But I'm only providing my point of view over what I think is right in this world made of shades of grey.
I've been under the grasp of the radical idea that children, who are dependent, less capable and relatively helpless compared to adults should be granted at least the same level of tolerance and respect that we show to other adults. Given that as a starting point I can justify hitting a child more often than I hit adults and I can't think of a single situation in which I would use force of any kind against an adult that could possibly happen with a child.
I have no objection to using force, up to an including deadly force if required, for self defense but can't think of a single situation in which an infant could threaten my life in such a way as to require me to violently retaliate so that pretty much rules out spanking, slapping, or any other kind of violent physical aggression as being grossly unethical.
Child abuse isn't taken seriously? Here in the states, child services can take your kid away from you if you so much as look at it wrong in public.
Yeah, and then sometimes they ignore children being raped & beaten until there's a body and a new story. Underfunded, under-trained, over-worked--kind of tells its own story about the priority we put on it.
Sorry to say, but your posting is dripping with classism. The foster kids are more likely to end up in jail than kids from a similar socio-economic class who are raised by their parents, relatives, or adoptive parents. There are plenty of abusive (or outright sociopathic) parents in the middle and upper class as well.
If the state cannot or will not take care of kids it takes guardianship of, then it is actually WORSE than the parents who neglect or abuse their kids. What's worse than being a bad parent? Telling someone else they're a bad parent, taking their kids away and then being a bad parent. If doing it right means state owned orphanages or group homes, so be it. Perhaps find a relative and if they are willing to take all the kids, make them able to by giving them the money they would have to give foster parents anyway (definitely screen them, of course. Hopefully better then foster parents are screened). Perhaps they should look as hard at the foster homes as they did at the parent's homes they took the kids from.
I don't think there's ever going to be a solution to the problem that comes from the government just due to their nature. Bureaucracies have an incentive to manage problems in perpetuity, not solve them.
The solution will happen when individual people stop turning a blind eye and stop making excuses for abusive conduct. The extent to which parents who abuse children can hide behind tradition, religion, law and culture to justify what they do is also the extent to which they avoid suffering negative social ramifications for their behavior. When people stop accepting those excuses as valid the problem will cease.
family has 2 or 3 kids or more, all of them grow up to be nice, well-adjusted people, but one is a big fuck-up.
Out of the 3 kids in my family, I'm the so called "big fuck-up" and would probably be diagnosed BPD or maybe ASPD. Doesn't mean it wasn't something that was done to me.
When I was 16, my mom told me what a great kid I was when I was four and how I shared so freely etc, etc. She finished by saying "What happened to you?" In the following years, it became apparent that she didn't want an answer to that, it was an accusation, not a question.
You know, you can pay a ring of pedophiles to be the carers of your children and be considered a fine upstanding member of society, so long as those pedophiles are catholic priests running a school. You don't know what those parents have done, maybe out of ignorance or tradition or some other non-criminal reason, that really fucked their kids up. We aren't all the same. Just because the parents raised them all the same way and it worked for two of them doesn't mean they didn't screw up, or that something else didn't happen to those kids to screw them up without the parents knowledge.
There's a big difference between a spanking and a beating. And yes, if repeated trauma causes genetic changes, obviously the body's response is graded by the severity of the trauma.
More likely, as with most things, the effects are the result of a combination of physical and psychological trauma. Spankings, used as a tool by a responsible parent, don't cause psychological trauma. Beatings by an abusive parent, however, are psychologically traumatic. There is a difference, though I'm aware that people who believe in "Indigo Children" are unable to comprehend that such a difference exists.
Unfortunately, ther. seems to be a dearth of people who understand (and are able to practice) responsible moderation. It's all or nothing, and such people are unable to comprehend gradients between black and white.
Yes, it can be.
That does not mean in necessarily is.
Your post could be read to mean you're a moron, but does not necessarily mean you're a moron. See the difference?
I have never seen a parent spank a child who was just barely able to walk (~12 months). This is a put-up-or-shut-up sort of statement that needs some serious evidence to back it up.
Do you have a source for this claim? Because we can now see psychological trauma on fMRI machines now so there's no longer any reason to let claims like yours stand without proof, especially when the studies that have been done show the exact opposite of your claim - even "responsible" spanking causes brain damage.
So because it doesn't happen in public very often then it must not happen at all? There are numerous references attached to this link.
I know, right? A few slaps never hurt or degraded anyone. Especially the wife! Why can't I just do whatever I want to people as long as I don't cause severe physical damage to them when I think they're wrong? Damn subhumans.
It's interesting that you choose to use the loaded terms "acceptable to hit infants," when "hit" includes slapping the child's hand in that study, and in order for it to support your coupling of "majority" and "infant" requires quite a stretch on what age constitutes infancy. Most people don't consider a 3-year-old an infant any longer, and the largest contingent of physical punishment used to make up that majority is slapping a child's hand. Your previous posts about hitting children at the age of 12 months is limited almost exclusively to slapping a child's hand (something you fail to mention), which is (admittedly, only my own observation) almost as frequently a reaction to get a child to immediately stop potentially dangerous or destructive behavior as it is a punishment.
So, while you could actually use that study's data to make reasonable points to back up your position, you instead spin it to make one particular part of it sound far worse than it actually is.
Your treatment of the facts raises serious questions about your ability to discuss this issue objectively.
If your child is a sociopath, seek help immediately. Merely having them around is dangerous.
Since about 5-10% of the population is sociopaths,
Supposedly it's even less than that.
Still not finding anything resembling a scholarly article which says that. The one you linked later on certainly doesn't, since slapping a child's hand once is not in the same ballpark as spanking a child any more than spanking a child is in the same ballpark as beating them with a wooden spoon or a belt. Also, "usually" implies >50%, and the article you link later disagrees with you there, even if you change "slapping a child's hand" into the much more loaded phrase "hitting your child." You're not doing yourself any favors in convincing someone with a different viewpoint by playing that sort of game. What appears more likely is that, rather than attempting to have a dialogue, you are first and foremost attempting to demonize a large spectrum of behavior by equating it with a much smaller, more extreme, spectrum of behavior. Effective? Certainly. Objective and honest? Not in the slightest.
What the articles worth anything linked there do all agree on is that spanking shouldn't be relied on as a regular form of punishment (a distinction lost on many, apparently including you), and the first one that comes up in the AAP search specifically states "The most controversial form of punishment is spanking. Some believe the child should never be struck. Others feel there should be a return of the 'woodshed' philosophy. Neither is right. The 'never spank' group is apt to be overly concerned about the child's reaction, and the 'woodshed' group does not have the patience to rely on other methods."
Even 1% is a very large number. As for seeking help, it's a bit more complicated than you might imagine, and assistance of any kind is not guaranteed to product a desirable outcome.
Write failed: Broken pipe
No, as it's not possible to actually prove a negative. However, no evidence currently exists to support a claim to the contrary, so it's really only a matter of me inappropriately phrasing my statement.
The only imaging studies I've found on the issue relate to corporal punishment that is classified as abusive. If you're aware of one supporting a claim that corporal punishment which does not act as a chronic stressor impedes brain development, please share.
Not all traumas are equivalent. Clearly, from the imaging studies that do exist, striking a child with an object regularly over the course of several years is clearly chronically traumatic while doing so uncommonly and with an open hand is not clearly chronically traumatic. That satisfies the criteria to deny the implicit assertion made by the poster to whom I was responding (that is, the force used cannot be differentiated biologically).
Oh, like that fact that many boys get sexually mutilated right after they are born?
You're out-voted. Since this is cultural rather than a measurable scientific fact, the vote determines truth and thus you're obviously wrong.
In any case, you really are wrong. There is no lower age limit. The only thing that matters is the question of the child's ability to associate the crime with the punishment. This largely has to do with attention span, so babies need to be spanked without the slightest delay. You can wait a day with a 10-year-old, but you might get only milliseconds with a young baby. It also helps to spank the body part involved, typically a hand that was grabbing something dangerous.
There's a big difference between a spanking and a beating.
No, clearly there isn't, it's a huge gray area that's can't practically be defined in any meaningful way, and that's why most parenting experts don't even attempt to do so.
Just because you have some intuitive sense of what sort of physical discipline is effective doesn't mean J Random Drunkass does. (Well, actually he does, because he thinks just like you, but he's wrong.)
And shooting idiots like you in the brain can stop you from reproducing. Doesn't mean it is ethical or even legal.
Football Odds
I know we did not consider this news either
And there were dinosaurs roaming the earth and I had to walk to school barefoot, through the snow, uphill both ways.
Your generation was lucky, Gramps....
You should have stuck around to the Extinction Event(tm).
There were no dinosaurs, but dodging asteroids while walking to school barefoot, through snow and across blast fronts and stumbling through scorched impact craters, while going uphill both ways was a real treat!
Nevermind the wooly mammoth stampedes, and sabre tooth tigers trying to steal your lunch, packs of Dire Wolves yapping at you on every corner....
But, I digress....*takes double shot of Geritol* AHHH! ;-) ;-) ;-)
Oh, and to parent poster, 'Compaqt':
Get off my lawn! Just mind the craters, whippersnapper.
On a serious note, I think the subject could be studied further to our eventual benefit as a species.
Where I'm headed with this:
I know of stressful times from my family and older acquaintances remembering their lives, backed by history records/texts, there seems to be a significant difference in longevity between those that survived intense, acute stressors, and those that survived medium, chronic stressors[1].
The acute stressor bunch seems to live long lives, while the chronic stressor bunch seems to die sooner.
It could be I am just not knowledgeable enough in this field to know that this has been done?
[1] addressed somewhat earlier here by 'girlintraining (1395911)'.
Hmmm..... /. Quote of the Day:
*
"He missed an invaluable opportunity to hold his tongue. -- Andrew Lang"*
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I think that there are better ways to discipline most children than spanking
Dunno, you get eventually used to the sting of disinfectant and surgery, while definitely effective, is quite expensive. It could work for bigger transgressions, though..
Should be 3. not used to elicit CONFESSIONS from a prisoner.
Torture isn't intended to get real information, just confessions. For which is it quite effective. I promise you I will confess to the murder of Abraham Lincoln if you torture it out of me...every time.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Just like the trauma of falling down and scraping their knees?
Seriously if you actually think that being disciplined when you have been bad purposely is as traumatic as being abused then you do not even kindof understand human psychology or pain.
I'm going to tell you boys and girls a story, and it's posted AC for the obvious reason (other than having lost my user/pass to a hard drive crash).
One of my mother's boyfriends used to smash my head into my brother's head, then he'd drag me off to my room by my head. On the way, he'd smash my head into the wall or a door, just for further punishment.
Just thinking about this makes me very, very angry. This same motherfucker also gave me tinnitus in both ears, because he used to DRAG me - a 5 year old boy - around by the ears whenever it suited him. I'm sure you can guess how that makes me feel,
I hate that worthless cunt. I recently found out that he's still alive, and still living in the same city as me. Now I'm 37, and I'm a big dude. He's still a skinny worthless fuck, and he'll be around 60. Should I choose to, I could revenge myself upon him with little effort.
I'm also quite sure that you can't imagine how tempted I am to do that. Whenever I think about it, my blood burns like fire.
The same dirty piece of shit went out of his way to ruin everything he could for my brother and I. I distinctly remember Christmas 1981, when he woke the pair of us up after 10pm, and made us clean our room up. He also told us, in the tone of voice that I still know to this day means a beating was coming my way, that we were to go and tell our mother what we were doing and why.
Why did he do this? Because she was wrapping Christmas presents. His goal was to ruin Christmas for us. Fortunately, because of my earlier childhood, I could live in my own little world of denial where what I knew was kept completely apart from what I wanted to be true.
Know what my mother did about the abuse? Absolutely nothing. That bipolar bitch also behaved abusively - she would sometimes beat us with a power cord if she was angry.
Does physical abuse permanently impact on people's lives? Hell yes. My life is a mixture of anger, depression, and escapism. I have a high IQ, but I spent my life being beaten up or knocked back by the woman who was supposed to protect me. I'm stupid, lazy, worthless, and so on. Resultantly, I'm essentially unable to apply myself for any length of time. Years of abuse have seen to that.
It wasn't just physical, though. It was mental, too. With her being bipolar, well, I hope it's sufficient to say that when my partner starts screaming in anger about anything, I snap and become extremely aggressive almost immediately. I won't hit her, although I do find myself falling into verbal abuse all too often. Some times I can stop that for a significant period of time. Then again, my partner once decided that she was going to make me angry. It took her three days of constant insults and screaming, a punch or five thrown my way, and all sorts of threats. I couldn't leave, because every time I tried to she would block my way out threatening to call the police and tell them I'd attacked her if I even pushed her aside. When I finally snapped, I think I destroyed half the furniture, computer keyboards, anything I could get at with ease - did I mention that I'm a very big guy? - inside the house in around 20 minutes. It took her days to clean up the mess, and she was crying and shaking when she realised she'd made me angry. She kept trying to calm me down at the time, but it was too late.
Once, I could barely make it through a day without suicidal thoughts. It took me years to break that cycle. Now, it still happens on a weekly basis, but I can swing back into daily. I've been out of it for a few months now, but as I type that, I think I'm heading into another bout in the near future.
I've just been promoted at work. A much higher level of responsibility, and a good deal of power and influence within the business. (I can actually decide the way things are done, what things need to be done, and often by whom. I just nee
Yeap and they've threaten me with it, yet they allow my sister-in-law heroin addict to keep her son. The police have caught her shooting up at gas stations while on probation (and she doesn't have a license as she's ineligible due to all the driving without a license chargers) with her son in the back seat, yet all they did was make her call some one to drive the vehicle until it was out of site so they wouldn't be liable. When my other sister-in-law tried to get custody, they only granted temporary, and she has unsupervised visitation which means she's picking him in a car while high every weekend and he's stuck at her house while she shoots up. Yet neither the police nor children services feel the case warrants their attention, but they haress me about how much ADHD step-child isn't gaining enough weight. THe doctors reaction is have you seen the kid, he never stops moving and the doctor honestly wonders how we've gotten as much weight on him as we have.
I'm sorry, but I work as a social worker in a major metropolitan city - child services tends to let a ridiculous amount go before taking away a child. It pretty much has to leave a mark that's obvious.
Not in schools they don't.
Kids are abused by each other every day and schools turn a blind eye to that.
The terms I used are accurate, you're calling them "loaded" because I'm not employing the typical euphemisms that people use to downplay the significance of what they are doing. With regards to the definition of a majority I wonder if you noticed the section of the paper dedicated to the sample and to degree it is not representative of the larger population.
They just dye their hair gray so that they look more noble and smart. But they probably do get a few more wrinkles from grinning all the time...
I have to challange this claim, at least in part.
It's when they added the "or bullied" part that sent up a flag. Fact is, every single person has either been bullied or been a bully at some point in their lives. It is a natural part of life, and it teaches us to stand up for ourselves. Without that, I have no doubt a lot more people would be more vulnerable to bigger threats, or would take their own lives because they do not have the life experiance to cope with the events around them.
Everybody needs to get past the whole "bulling is bad" mentality.
if your father had instituted the timeout immediately after the infraction - without delay, had been standing behind you, keeping your head facing the wall, keeping you silent, and gave not before or during but after an explanation for the punishment, and then a directive for future behavior
I think one of the key points is "standing behind you". Most parents I have seen using "time outs" IGNORE the child for the duration, often even leaving the room, rather than standing with them. It's a dismissive gesture, and in my experience totally invalidates the punishment. Parents often use time-outs to calm themselves down, and while this is admirable, it is a sign the parent lacks the self-control to be in charge of another human life.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
They do infact get older from experiencing the many incidence of physical abuse ? Sorry for the car analogy, but if you drive a city car offroad, you'll have to fix it more often, and it will eventually go junk much faster. You exchange bits and parts in a car by buying new parts, and the body exchanges dead cells for new ones by dividing cells, and the telomeres shorten. No new concept of "genetic scars" required.
Child abuse isn't taken seriously? Here in the states, child services can take your kid away from you if you so much as look at it wrong in public.
And you have just demonstrated that you don't take child abuse seriously. Well done.
Only in the minds of hysterical right wingers (such as Daily Mail readers here in the UK) do "the authorities" conflate trivial scolding with actual physical abuse.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
One psycopath's spanking is another rational man's violent assault, champ.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You should really see a therapist for these issues. I can't say that my experience was anywhere near yours, but I have had some intense family issues that have affected me later in life. The threat of losing the best woman I've ever met was the breaking point for me to start getting therapy. Sometimes simply talking about your issues to someone who is going to listen to you and not be judgmental can be very therapeutic. I think you did a good service to yourself for opening up here. Now's the time to take the next step and find closure for your own good.
Spanking can also help stop a kid from doing something that ends up being even more traumatic.
Yes, because there are no options other than (a) doing nothing and letting the kid hurt himself, or (b) thrashing him unconscious to teach him a lesson.
I hope you don't have any kids.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Like most crimes, the line between punishment and abuse is often a matter of intent. Unfortunately, MOST parents would deny that frustration and anger play a role in punishment, even when it is patently false to an outside observer. (Giving parents the benefit of the doubt, I would add that MOST of the time, parents aren't acutely aware of these internal influences, despite their devastating consequences.) Emotional and psychological abuse can be just as harmful as physical abuse, but are almost impossible to prove without extreme circumstances.
Our emotions are an open book to our children. The things we hide from ourselves, they see and internalize. It's unreasonable to expect all parents to be self-aware, but we could do a lot more as a society to support parents in that exploration.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
Discipline != corporal punishment.
If you don't know the difference, try talking to some social workers, teachers or police officers before you have any kids..
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You should have chosen "Wonko the Insane" for your username...
Hold stick near center of its length.
Moisten pointed end in mouth.
Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum.
Use gentle in-and-out motion.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
"children who are physically abused and bullied tend to have shorter telomeres"
Science used by weak geeks to further an agenda.
BULLIES UNITE! Lets beat these grown up geeks that provide science to try and gain strength.
Does bullying cause shortened telomeres, or do stupid little b*tches with short telomeres just need to accept their rightful place in the social order?
Child abuse isn't taken seriously? Here in the states, child services can take your kid away from you if you so much as look at it wrong in public.
Which is almost never beneficial to the child.
Spankings, used as a tool by a responsible parent, don't cause psychological trauma
Spankings, used as an easy alternative to reason by an unintelligent, abusive parent, do cause psychological trauma
FTFY
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
"part of the point of raising a child is to modify behavior" I gotta disagree with that. The whole point of raising a person (because the goal should not be to raise children - though sadly many people in the US nowadays do just that) is to teach them the skills needed to be independent, to function on their own and within society. It seems like you think children are by default jerks, and you must modify this behavior; that isn't the case. Barring mental disability, children become the type of person the people around them model.
What, are you saying that sociopathy is environmentally-caused and not genetic?
Modern understanding of psychology strongly favors the model that suggests both environment and genetics contribute to an individual's vulnerability to (almost... maybe [See: schizophrenia, alzheimer's]) all psychological disorders. Two genetically similar children (say, identical twins) may develop quite different disorders based solely on environmental factors.
SO... no, but yes.
So sure, a kid who's predisposed to sociopathy might be able to avoid it by being raised by a really great family
Which you already obviously understand, so why the incredulity?
there's tons of examples of kids raised by absolutely horrible families who turn out really great, in spite of their parenting, so there was something inside them that prevented them from becoming sociopaths even though their environment would have encouraged that.
Which sounds like a covert nod towards genetic exceptionalism, when the reality is that people who overcome abusive backgrounds only accomplish it with some major external support in the form of friends, teachers, therapists, etc.
it's generally safe to assume they raised all the kids the same way
It may be safe, but it is demonstrably false. Parents (that is, people) project different things onto different children (that is, people) and often treat them very differently. Sometimes it's as obvious as gender bias, sometimes it's more complex, but it's trivial to find examples.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
Physical abuse, when it is seen/noticed, is taken pretty seriously. Mental/emotional abuse is not.
Jesus fucking christ. Thanks a lot for hijacking what could have been an interesting bunch of comments with this bullshit about what is or isn't child abuse.
Interesting definition of "hijack", where someone chimes in to an off-topic thread with a comment relevant to the article.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
So if I just occasionally come round to your home and slap you around a little bit, rather than actually maiming you on a regular basis, that's OK?
It is a basic error of logic to say that because A is not as bad as B, therefore A is all right.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Just like the trauma of falling down and scraping their knees? Seriously if you actually think that being disciplined when you have been bad purposely is as traumatic as being abused then you do not even kindof understand human psychology or pain.
Agreed, spanking is not as traumatic as being raped and beaten half to death. That does not mean that spanking is an acceptable practice
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I find it hard to believe a majority of parents hitting infants? The studies I've found show around 1/3 for infants but I believe you would be referring to toddlers (or 4-5 year old children) and older for your statement to be correct (fermat.unh.edu/~mas2/CP36.pdf).
I haven't seen hands used for spanking in public but I have seen parents yank young kids around which probably has the same effect.
Depends on where you are. In my area child services is too understaffed to investigate properly and prioritizes putting the kid back together with the parents.
For example:
"Eli's grandmother, doctors, child protection workers, even a waitress who saw the boy bleeding from his mouth as he tried to eat ice cream. His day-care teachers said he screamed in fear when his father came to pick him up. Still, authorities placed him in foster care only for brief periods and then returned him time and again to his father and to new beatings. On Sept. 26, 1986, Darren, angry that Eli was crying, kicked him in the stomach, beat him with a belt and left him wedged in a toilet bowl with a ruptured lower intestine. Eli died the next day."
(as defined by the PARENT, not the GOVERNMENT)
You say this as if government intervention is always a bad thing. However, the government does intervene at times. Such as in situations of child abuse (and I'm not talking about spanking here). A parent cannot legally do whatever they want to their child. There are limits.
As clearly your child is somehow disabled if it cannot withstand corrective negative stimuli rewards for negative behaviors.
Just like my girlfriend! I slapped her a few times as punishment for disagreeing with me, and she had the audacity to press charges!
Using force will never make your arguments more correct. If you punch everyone who says that 1 + 1 is anything but 3, you're not more correct just because they're scared to say it's anything else, and they don't even necessarily respect you (because you damn well haven't earned that respect).
I also liked your use of the word "it" to describe a child. This is a great attitude if your goal is to pump out children that never question authority and treat children like subhumans.
However, it's done for the good of the pack.
Sounds like awful thinking when it comes to protecting the rights of individuals. Hopefully society is more sane than that.
I would think that as a psychologist you'd know interacting with a child that is your own - though not necessarily biologically - is often quite different than interacting with children that aren't yours. A child can spend all day with a teacher, uncle, etc. and act one way, but act a different way with their parents (or adoptive parents, or foster parents, or custodial persons) because they know their parents must put up with them no matter what, or because they get grumpy at a certain time of night, or etc. while the teacher can switch them to a different class, the uncle can stop visiting, they don't see the child at the grumpy time, etc.
...
But anyway
As a psychologist, what would you suggest should be done when a child is doing something unsafe and the child doesn't see it as unsafe, and therefore sees any punishment as unjust, so keeps doing the unsafe action?
Inflicting physical pain upon a child is abuse.
Isn't inflicting non-physical pain also abuse? Punishment is pain. Stopping a child from doing what he wants to do is denying them his free will, thereby inflicting emotional pain. Why is this acceptable?
Stop! Dremel time!
I'm not pro-spanking, but using "infant" do describe 12 month - 4 year olds is certainly not accurate.
And telling the victim to just ignore them. Or to avoid them, as if the victim were seeking them out. Then when the victim voluntarily stays inside at recess, not debugging the situation, but ordering the victim out so they can't avoid being with the bullies. Or pretend that it's just a part of life that the victim should get used to.
I would cheer to see a school administrator go to jail as an accessory to assault and battery.
There's increasing recognition of the problem, and I hope the awareness eventually extends beyond the minority group that is (deservedly!) getting the initial attention.
There is a difference between spanking and beating the crap out of a kid. When I was little, spanking was a few small pops on the butt with a sandal or a open hand.
Call that a spanking? No cleated boots, no ichain mail gauntlets, no swishing canes, no bloody welts?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Did you read the paragraph of that paper titled "Minimum estimates"?
But apparently looking at them lustfully won't get them removed from a Catholic church.
I8-D
I hate that worthless cunt. I recently found out that he's still alive, and still living in the same city as me. Now I'm 37, and I'm a big dude. He's still a skinny worthless fuck, and he'll be around 60. Should I choose to, I could revenge myself upon him with little effort.
I'm also quite sure that you can't imagine how tempted I am to do that. Whenever I think about it, my blood burns like fire.
You sound like you need closure. Maybe beating him up will allow you to let go.
Or maybe not.
Here's a suggestion you may wish to consider:
Enrol into a full-contact martial arts class. Jujutsu is one example but the actual style is less important than finding an instructor you will feel comfortable with.
Good luck.
Perhaps not in Australia until recently.
I was belted by my 'step father' for years until I ran away.
My mother called the police and the child protection agency on my father when my elder brother kicked my other brother in the eye while on access with our father.
Go figure.
They jump up and down about a black eye and make my father's life hell for a year.. yet they do absolutely nothing when I am belted and mentally attacked by this asshole for years.
I would not doubt that this has shortened my life span, badly affected my health (I have a variant of IBS because of this) and changed my DNA.
It sucks, but it is a reality a lot of us live with.
Perhaps your child protective services are so willing to jump because of the many cases they simple don't see or can't see.
What about the children that are physically unable to knock out bullies? Or the bullies with a big brother that is going to come knock you out for knocking out his little brother? I do not think a child should ever be put into the position to need to defend themselves in that way. More parents should be willing to deal with school bullies in the way that real-life bullies are dealt with - shunning. Taking their kids out of the school. If someone is a bully at a workplace, they are fired, or if no one will fire them, the bullied person moves to a different job, until the company starts to look at why people keep leaving. Outside of school and as an adult, if a friend is a bully, you stop being friends with him. Etc.
IMO one of the big reasons there are school bullies is because the bullies know they aren't going to be kicked out permanently and the other kids can't leave. Since schools are paid based on attendance, being willing to remove bullied children would force school administration to take action; they'd be willing to stop bullying, or in extreme cases kick the 1 bully out, if it means they won't lose 5 other kids.
Though I wonder if it is an issue of parents not knowing that removing their child from the school is an option, and that there are free alternatives, or an issue of parents being unwilling.
Well, most of us don't, but the police certainly do.
I hope they're punished if they hit them when it wasn't necessary. I think most people here would agree that self-defense (or using violence to defend others) is alright. After they've restrained them and stopped them from hurting people (assuming they were), I certainly hope they don't hit them.
Mama Bear: To those parents that are completely anti-spanking... hey, good luck with that. Technically, a timeout is a short period of solitary confinement, which itself deemed torture, cruel, and unusual... So before you go overboard and compare a measured spanking to beating a child... just remember, you still torture them with solitary confinement, so what makes you parent of the year, eh? ;) I'm sure a few of these velvet glovers will turn out wonderful kids. I'm also sure they will put their child so high on a pedestal to scar their unique little snowflakes in worse ways.
Papa Bear: On the other hand, if a parent ever has to hit, leave a mark, turn something red, or use something other than the palm of their own hand, they're going to far. To that kind of parent: You are bigger, stronger, and in control. For you to use a hanger, belt, stick, wooden spoon, knuckes or other hard part of the body, or anything else on a child is abuse! You're beating your child to quench your anger, not teach a lesson.
Baby Bear: Appropriate measure and balance. My son will be 4 this summer. I'm adamant about teaching him not to grab from the counter, but let's say he goes to grab a knife. I will slap the back of his hand or his bottom (after taking the knife from him calmly, of course). This isn't time to "negotiate". My son permanently injuring himself will receive a swift sting somewhere. He's a small child. He's smart, but appealing to his intellect is completely wrong when it comes to immediate danger. He doesn't run into traffic in a parking lot. He doesn't grab at the stove. He doesn't put coins in his mouth. The key is being consistent, and rare. I think the more you spank, and the harder you spank, work against you. I don't want my child resenting me, or thinking I'm out to hurt him. If he does, then I've failed. But if he gets hit by a car, I've definitely failed!
Very rarely do I ever have to spank for another reason, and that's usually if he refuses to stand in timeout. It's measured, not harsh (I am rougher when he and I are rough housing and playing... so its more embarrassing than anything), and I give him lots of warnings. If I say what the consequence will be, I always follow up. Parents that threaten punishment, and don't follow through do their kids a huge injustice just as if they continually promised ice cream for dessert, and never deliver on that either. Parents that punish without explanation are causing more problems than if they did nothing.
Any form of punishment is followed by having him explain what he did that caused the punishment ("I got a time out because I didn't listen when you told me to put up my toys."), followed by me adding explanations for why what he did was wrong, followed by a big hug, wiping of any tears, a kiss on the cheek, and telling him to go up to anyone he was bad to and apologize.
My son, is healthy, happy, knows he's loved, and is a very sweet and polite boy. He's not mean to animals or other kids. Most of the time, I've found talking quietly and firmly to my son ends all that tantrum business while shopping.
I8-D
At least for me, spanking only taught me that hitting someone you disagree with is okay.
If you tell a random stranger that they'll have to go take a time out (random example) if they don't do what you say, do you think they'd listen? Probably not. What if you were to beat them? They might then, especially if it's difficult for them to take action against you. That is the difference. Force can be a powerful thing: it doesn't make someone respect or agree with you, but it can make them do what you say, even if only temporarily. I don't believe that teaching kids that force is acceptable is a good thing.
Then there's the fact that you can't exactly hit an adult just because you disagree with them. If they're living on your property, though, you can "punish" (sometimes by threatening to kick them out or refusing to aid them any further) them in various ways. It is your property, after all.
Not to mention that there are other forms of punishment besides restraint. Threats of no future rewards, etc.
If a person refuses to submit to police authority and be arrested, the police have every right to beat them senseless until they stop resisting. That isn't "self defense" at all; it's beating people into submission.
That isn't "self defense"
I also mentioned defending other people from some sort of harm. But beating them senseless is likely not necessary.
Correlation does not equal causation.
Maybe they have it backwards, maybe short telomeres cause your genetically similar relatives to abuse you or causes you to act in such a way as to encourage or make possible bullying on yourself.
Or any number of other less direct relationships.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
That doesn't at all address the parent, you're just changing the subject.
Yes, there is a difference between spanking and beating the crap out of a kid. There's also a difference between beating the crap out of a kid and quadruple-amputating him for no sound medical reason, but that doesn't make beating the crap out of a kid okay.
Rather than speak to differences between thing X and an obviously worse thing Y, you should clarify why thing X is not a bad thing on its own merits.
By your reasoning, if you give your child a congratulatory pat on the head, it's also child abuse. Theres a difference between that and spanking, but spanking is not ok so therefore a pat on the head is not ok either.
Did I really need to add "as punishment" considering the nature of the article, the other comments, common sense, and the person I replied to before people understood my intent?
YES.
It's communication. You need to do it. He's not setting up a strawman, he's simply responding to your post. If you had all sorts of perfectly reasonable implied qualifiers in there, it doesn't help the conversation any because we can't read your mind.
You know what they call a comment that's lacking important information that's expected to get a opposition?
(Flamebait).
Suspects don't have to be threatening anyone at all for police to legally beat them senseless. They merely have to be resisting arrest, that's all.
And what is your proposal for avoiding beating them senseless if they're actively resisting arrest? Obviously, this isn't completely black-and-white; if it's a very small or weak person, the officer (or better yet, officers), should be able to physically restrain them enough to get them into cuffs without having to beat them. But what if it's some giant musclebound dude high on drugs? Either the officers beat him senseless so they can get cuffs on him without getting themselves seriously injured, or they have to just let him go on his way, which obviously isn't acceptable. There's not much point in having police if they aren't granted the power to use force to arrest dangerous people.
Suspects don't have to be threatening anyone at all for police to legally beat them senseless.
If they're not threatening anyone, then by your own words they're also not threatening the police. They simply need to be restrained.
And what is your proposal for avoiding beating them senseless if they're actively resisting arrest?
I just said that it likely isn't necessary in most cases. If there's a physically strong murderer running around and resisting arrest, maybe.
How exactly do you restrain someone who's much stronger than you, and is threatening to beat you senseless if you don't leave them alone?
Oh, so they are a threat? You said it wasn't self-defense.
Bullshit!
Your statement is either a troll or a complete lack of understanding with the human learning process.
Fact: Humans learn by trial exponentially faster than other methods.
Fact: Humans learn boundaries by testing the limits of their boundaries.
Those two statements are not really enough to teach you something, but it's a start. Psychology is a wonderful thing, maybe you should try to read a book or two instead of spewing what you read on the internet and heard from friends.
Any children's psychology book will tell you the facts I gave above. Just like they will tell you about children being self abusive to try and get their way. It's normal learning and development processes at work not some poppycock you made up to sooth your mind.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Why are you being such an ass?
It's not self-defense if you're able to walk away. It's just like how that asshole in Florida wasn't exercising self-defense, because he sought out the kid and picked a fight with him, when he could have just stayed in his car like the 911 operator told him to.
The cops can just leave the suspect alone, and he won't hurt them. But by trying to restrain him and arrest him, he's going to fight back. That puts them in physical danger.
The difference, of course, between the Florida asshole and the cops is that Mr. neighborhood watch wasn't a cop, and doesn't have legal authority to arrest people on suspicion of a crime. The cops do; that's why they're cops. They're granted powers the rest of us don't have, and one of them is the ability to arrest people, forcibly if necessary.
You interjected frustration on your own, I never stated that. Even in reflection, I would not state that it was frustration. Before I became a parent I read probably 50 books covering a lot of psychology as well as other aspects of parenting. Every single book mentions that children will test boundaries (it's how they learn and grow), and every single book said pretty much the same thing.
There are really two choices when children test the boundaries and ignore authority. 1. Be the person that says "Stop it" for an hour and gets ignored until the child gets bored. This does not teach the child the correct lesson. What they learn is that their ego rules. 2. Apply corporal punishment to get the action to stop, teaching the child that the boundary was exceeded and.. that authority should be respected.
We are living in a society full of egomaniacs and wonder why?
Let me give you another similar situation. Your kid gets pushed in school every day by the same person. Do the right thing as a parent, notify the school. School takes no action. Child comes home frustrated every day. Do you 1. tell your child to kick the kids butt? or 2. let your child get picked on every day for the remainder of the year trying to do what is deemed politically correct?
Without authority, and without consequences, there is chaos. Sometimes, not often mind you, but sometimes violence is the only statement that someone will understand.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
The cops can just leave the suspect alone, and he won't hurt them.
And that's foolish because the suspect would (if the police are catching actual criminals here, and assuming they are a criminal) go on to hurt other people. I hope we're not arresting people for victimless crimes, but I guess it could happen.
And that's foolish
Yes, I was hoping that was obvious. The police's job is to arrest suspects; they can't just let them go because they don't cooperate with the arrest; that'd be utterly stupid.
The point is, the police arresting a resisting suspect is not "self defense". The police are picking a fight (with good cause, presumably). You can't go up to someone, say "I'm going to slap these cuffs on you and take you away, against your will", and then claim self-defense when they resist you with physical force. The police can't claim that either. However, the police do have the right to do this to people, even though it isn't self-defense, and they're allowed to use physical force against suspects if they don't comply. The rest of us don't generally have this right (actually, there are "citizen's arrests", but you better be damn sure you're in the right if you do this; if you're trying to do a citizen's arrest on Jared Loughner, for instance, right after he shot some people, then you can use physical force too just like the cops and probably won't get in trouble for it, but these cases are quite rare. If you hold someone against their will and don't have a good cause for it, and you're not a real police officer, you can get in giant trouble).
Parental child abuse is taken seriously, but bullying isn't.
The point is, the police arresting a resisting suspect is not "self defense". The police are picking a fight (with good cause, presumably).
But I already mentioned defending other people. It is not as if self-defense was the only reason I listed for using force. If they're not defending themselves or others, then I don't think they have any business arresting people or using force against them to begin with.
Give me a fucking break.
What if the person is suspected of murdering someone, but he's not murdering anyone at the moment, and you don't think he's going to murder anyone else for a while? (Maybe he caught his wife cheating and killed the boyfriend, and doesn't have any motive to kill anyone else.) So you're saying the police simply shouldn't have the power to arrest him if he refuses to go willingly? That's fucking stupid.
Man, I'm glad I didn't grow up in your family. That's really messed up.
In normal families, nobody spanks a child who is too young to have their behavior modified by the spanking.
When an infant tries to climb the bookshelf or crawl into the street, you take the child away from the situation. When a toddler does the same thing, you apply the least amount of force necessary to begin training the kid never to run into the path of speeding cars, and never to overturn huge heavy child-killing objects. If the kid is extremely difficult to train, you might have to swat his butt pretty hard to keep him from being killed.
Apparently in your family, where weird "power disparities" exist (in normal families, power relationships are constrained by mutual affection, which is why spanked children don't simply murder their parents in their sleep) spankings have no purpose. But in normal families they make offspring have a higher chance of survival to adulthood.
What if the person is suspected of murdering someone, but he's not murdering anyone at the moment, and you don't think he's going to murder anyone else for a while?
Looks like you're protecting people from a very real potential threat.
So you're saying the police simply shouldn't have the power to arrest him if he refuses to go willingly? That's fucking stupid.
I don't know if you're willfully misinterpreting me or not.
I don't know about most. One thing about the studies that have been done is that parents involved in them frequently admitted that anger and frustration played a role in their behavior.
That I'll agree with. I think where there's disagreement is between those who believe the above is the only thing that ever happens, versus those who don't.
It is not, however, an error when A actually is both not as bad as B and is also acceptable in its own right. Your example already pre-supposes both are wrong, so adds nothing to the discussion. But I'm guessing you knew that already, and instead decided to take a cheap shot. I see why you may believe anything you don't agree with is the "unintelligent, easy route," as it was the first route you, yourself took here.
A loaded term is anything designed to elicit a particular response, especially when that response is not backed up by the evidence when presented neutrally.
Your use of language is the exact definition of "loaded."
With regards to the definition of a majority I wonder if you noticed the section of the paper dedicated to the sample and to degree it is not representative of the larger population.
Which means your drawing conclusions from it other than what are actually contained within is a stretch at best.
Your arguments are intellectually dishonest, plain and simple. While you could have chosen a route to argue your point which was firmly grounded in fact, you instead choose to twist and manipulate things in order to paint them in a particular light. The only thing you manage to do is make it harder for anti-spanking people to be taken seriously because of your blatant misrepresentation of the facts. You won't convince anyone who wasn't already convinced, and anyone who reads your sources critically will suspect (rightly) that you are not being forthright and therefore your entire premise is untrustworthy.
Would you argue that spanking does not create stress on a child? Let me remind you we are on a thread dealing with the potential long-term effects of childhood stress. In addition to this study on the length of telomeres, I would note that I read a study a couple months back on childhood socioeconomic status and its relation to adult DNA methylation. The study looked at shelter, food, occupation of the father, etc. Would it be a terrible stretch to conclude that all of these are stress factors and that if both studies are correct, then childhood stress would have an effect on both telomere length and adult DNA methylation? I don't believe it would be. Spanking, as a cause of stress, would therefore not just have an effect on telomere length but also methylation, with long-term consequences increasing the likelihood of premature aging, cancer, etc.
How would you know now, at whatever age you may be, whether or not the effects of those childhood spankings aren't ahead of you? What arrogance is this to proclaim so publicly that you are so very aware of your genetic future? Look, I'm happy you did so well on your tests and perhaps you really weren't trying to be aggressive, just passionate perhaps. Still, do you really believe that you would be so aware as to know whether or not you are aggressive compared to your peers? Or for that matter whether you house any emotional trait that could be detrimental to others that may be linked to your childhood experiences? Have you had your telomeres measured against your peers? Checked your methylation?
Let's say you're right, and such a person could exist. Even if you were the rare example that somehow managed no effect on your telomere length, methylation, test scores, level of aggression, etc. with no post traumatic psychiatric conditions, doesn't it sway you in the slightest that the vast majority, well over ninety-some percent, would have lifelong negative effects of some type inflicted and that in light of alternatives, perhaps another method would be better? You really want to claim so explicitly that I am baseless in this?
Please, rethink your words my friend.
There's a big difference between a homicidal maniac who's almost surely going to kill again if you don't stop him, and someone who killed because he got really mad at a particular person and probably won't do it again (this is why there's different degrees of "murder"). There's also people who aren't murderers at all, just thugs who steal or whatever, but who refuse to comply when arrested. Someone who's just a thief isn't a "very real potential threat" (physically) to anyone, but it would be stupid to prevent the police from using force to arrest him if necessary.
With respect, you're no sample - you're a guy and his sister. There is a wealth of data out there that effectively concludes that virtually all children will have some long-term negative effect of some type. Do you deny it? These were but two examples in a thread discussing what may prove to be another related to premature aging among other effects. You may have escaped the aggression and lower test scores, and kudos to you on that, but how can you be sure that there isn't some other effect you're not yet aware of?
As a pacifist, shouldn't you agree that there are better ways to solve problems than with violence? Isn't that the definition or why would you think it would be any different with a child?
Personally, I think you managed so well because your parents gave you other attention besides spanking. That what spanking you got was most likely because of a tip they were given and they probably didn't use it terribly often. Of course I'm baseless in these assumptions, but would you tell me I'm wrong?
but it would be stupid to prevent the police from using force to arrest him if necessary.
But when I'm talking about "force," I mean actually beating them. When they're apprehending them, it's presumably because they committed some sort of crime (even if it's theft). If they try to beat the cop after that, it really is self-defense. And I mean real self-defense against actual harm, not just, "Oh, he was restraining me, so I attacked the cops." Intent (of the cops) matters very much.
It's remarkable that in opposition to my comments, people cling to only the two given examples in a thread that was started over yet another possible long-term effect of childhood stress. I doubt you would tell me that spanking doesn't cause some level of stress. You want to know what is dangerous? This tired response that you managed to escape both of these examples of harm is supposed to somehow validate the method. Look, kudos to you on surviving it so well, but you know what? Most aren't that resilient.
You want to know something, I was spanked. I don't believe I'm particularly aggressive and I've always tended to do well in my classes. I'm arguing this from a genetics research lab on my campus, but who am I to say that some consequence isn't before me or that something I do that I'm not aware of is a manifestation of those spankings? Like you, my siblings weren't spanked and they turned out just like me.
Look, I've done my reading. Most children see some consequence, be it in aggression, tests, possibly methylation and now possibly telomere length, among others. When most have some effect, and you can never tell prior to the fact which child will manifest a long-term consequence, why would the method have any validity to you? I mean I could see the point of proponents of spanking if such effects were as rare as any vaccination, but they're quite the opposite. Why wouldn't you immediately disagree with it in light of alternatives? What is this "need to be spanked" you speak of? If you mean power, don't you see that there are other ways to apply power? I have.
Although I guess that is a terrible example because someone is bound to come along and think thermisol is responsible for Autism.
Pro-tip: It isn't.
I have posted quite a few other sources in this thread besides the one you are talking about. That you haven't looked at them as well doesn't reflect well on your own intellectual honesty.
Thanks for the advice. It's something that I've known deep down for a while, but to hear it actually said makes it a bit more... real. I'll see what I can find.
Yeah, one lands them in prison with years of street fighting, the other lands them in Madame Wanda's BDSM parlor for their hourly session away from their family and political responsibilities.
Spanking: Do you want YOUR children into S&M?
Thanks for your suggestion. I have thought about it in the past, but one thing I've learned is that I always regret any outbursts, verbal or physical. The heart of your idea, though - confronting those responsible - could help. Thanks.
When my toddler reached for the power outlet I smacked her hand. If I could not reach her quickly I shouted and startled her. Either way she was traumatized and cried, but she does not try to play with power outlets anymore. Do you honestly think you can reason well enough with a 1year old to get them to stop touching something?
Still the GP. I meant to type this at the end, but to be honest, I was so taken aback by the two absolutely non-judgmental and well-meaning responses that I completely forgot to.
What I was going to say was that I hope you've overcome your issues.
Seriously, guys, thanks. It's been quite touching reading them.
I don't think it was a straw man at all. I have seen people take exactly the stance that I attributed to you as an overreaction to other people saying that spanking is not abuse. There was no intentional misrepresentation--GP said "Spanking is child abuse?" and you replied "Inflicting physical pain is child abuse." That rationally includes all physical pain regardless of intent. It turns out that what you meant is rather different than what you wrote, so thank you for clarifying.
I don't believe backtalk is in line with medical treatment, though I failed to make that explicit. There was another poster who mentioned that he spanked his son only twice, and one or both of those times was when he found his son doing something incredibly dangerous. The example that's stuck in my head is finding a child playing with a gun--and I recognize it's a poor one because responsible parents keep them where kids can't get to them. But in an instance like that, where the child cannot be expected to understand why he can't do this particular thing, it may take more than stern words to stop him from repeating it. And that's probably the approach I would take--first, get the child out of harm's way; second, tell him sternly never to do that again, and why it is dangerous in case he can comprehend it; and third, remain on the lookout and if he's heading towards the danger again, then maybe it's time for a spanking. I believe that for it to be effective it must be used sparingly, and for it to be punishment instead of violence it must not be done in anger.
I do not have children, so this is all hypothetical. I agree that there are problems in reasoning, implementation and severity. That says to me not that the entire practice is barbaric, but that people can misuse and abuse it. The same can be done with many (any?) form of discipline. Do you see a difference between inflicting physical pain versus emotional or psychological pain as punishment? Doesn't most punishment involve some kind of pain, even if it is the pain of having to sit on the couch while your siblings continue to play? That sounds trivial to an adult, but it is far from it for a child.
I had a good conversation with someone here a year or so ago where we discussed this pretty thoroughly, and I came away with more respect for his point of view than I had before. My own reaction against those who choose to never spank their kids is that that often means they do not discipline their kids at all--you can see examples of this all over in public: kids being given whatever they want in order to keep them from causing a scene--t's like the kids hold all the power and the parents none. So my perspective was almost the complete opposite of his and I suspect yours. Discussing the subject in-depth helped me to see more ways in which alternatives to corporal punishment can be applied, and I think my conversational partner left feeling like maybe it isn't the great evil he thought it was coming in. I probably would have responded to your post even with the "as punishment" qualification, because I think that's still overly broad and I am genuinely curious about the aspect of emotional and psychological pain. The tone of my response would have been more like this post than my previous one, though.
Your brain is not a computer.