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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."
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.
Spanking can also help stop a kid from doing something that ends up being even more traumatic.
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.
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.
"Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked." -Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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.
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.
Smallpox only kills 1 out of every 5 people it infects. The fact that not everybody dies isn't evidence that the disease isn't harmful.
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.
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I went to primary school in the 60's and throught those 6yrs there was an girl in my level to whom nature had not been kind. ALL the other kids would yell "Allison's germs" and run away when she approached them in the schoolyard. It didn't help that her parents sent her to school with dirty clothes and oily hair, this just reinforced her status as the lepoar of the schoolyard. Sometimes she used their fear against them by delibertely following them, or steal their marbles by chasing them away. These 'attacks' often ended with her falling to the ground in tears. I'd like to say I befreinded her but I too saw the germs and not the Allison.
Everyone remebers what happened to them in the schoolyard, it's much harder to remeber what you did to others. It's neither an remedy or an excuse for this behaviour but I beleive the Stanford prison experiments clearly demonstrated what old time religion had intuitvely known about human nature from day one, how did 'middle class' germans willingly become death camp gaurds, and why are kids so cruel? - Stable, strong societies survive, the "golden rule" found in most societies and religions combined with resrtricing the definition of "others" is a powerful stabalizing force, war against non-others is a powerful strenghtening force.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
Any others?
The USSR had great educational systems; they taught people to be physicists, rocket engineers, classical musicians, gymnasts, etc. No, they didn't teach people to be independent thinkers, but they poured lots of resources into higher education that benefited the state.
North Korea is about as authoritarian as they come, and they certainly are working hard to produce scientists and engineers to build them bombs and rockets.
Nazi Germany was certainly authoritarian, yet they had higher education too. How do you think they produced so many aeronautical engineers and rocket scientists?
Mao's China was really an exception, as Mao was a very stupid man who was basically an anti-intellectual farm worker who led a revolution and then forced his idiotic ideas on everyone, which led to the "Great Leap Forward" which was really a great leap backwards and resulted in countless people starving to death. He wanted to get rid of all "intellectuals" (anyone with an education) and basically make it a country of uneducated workers. China suffered greatly under his leadership, and only got better once other people took over. China's current leaders only pay lip service to Mao, and don't follow his methods at all; most of them are actually engineers.
Education is very important to authoritarian regimes, because it allows them to impose a particular school of thought on the entire population from the top down.
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.
The religious types aren't authoritarians; they hate public education because, at least these days, it prevents them from indoctrinating everyone else's kids with their religious beliefs, so they're always working against it. If this weren't a pluralistic society, this wouldn't be the case. Go to any religious schools and see if the concept of education is being attacked there; it isn't, because the religious people have complete control over the instruction(/indoctrination).
Furthermore, the attacks on educational funding in this country aren't evidence of creeping authoritarianism; they're evidence that there's many different forces at work, and this one is working against centralized authoritarianism. What's going on in this country is really rather complicated; it's not like other nations' revolutionary times where some jerks rose up and seized power militarily and then started imposing their ideas on everyone, as seen in the early Soviet Union, Mao's China, Castro's Cuba, Hitler's Germany, Napoleon's France, etc. One way you can see this is that there's no one person or small cabal in power at this time; Obama has a high office, but he's shown he isn't pulling any strings, but rather he's the puppet with his strings being pulled by various other interests. Furthermore, there's still a big division in power between the state and federal governments, with a lot of states openly challenging the federal government on various issues. If you want to boil things down, the main thing you can say is that the governments in this country (and more so at higher levels) are extremely corrupted by corporate influence. There's no single leader who's going to seize power like Stalin or Hitler or Napoleon; instead, various interests are going to be constantly fighting each other until the whole house of cards collapses.
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.
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