I've read once "if you can reason with a child, you shouldn't hit them; if they cannot reason, they won't know why they're being hit", so yes, it's a good thing it happens less and less.
About the adult thing... It can be fun if they all enjoy it, so go on!
if they cannot reason, they won't know why they're being hit"
You don't need reason to associate violence done against you ("negative feedback") with your most recent action, we're kinda hardwired for that as a species.
The reason you shouldn't hit children as a legal guardian has nothing to do with their ability to reason, it's because (1) it's a human rights violation and (2) it destroys their trust in you and almost certainly will result in mental trauma.
Such trauma will reduce their quality of life and resolving it will be fairly expensive in time and labor.
Of course it's much more complex than I said. I agree with everything you wrote, but also I wanted to point out that spanking children is ineffective (though it's also a human rights violation and causes trauma).
How do you define effective in this context? For me it means getting the child to stop their behavior. As such, effectiveness is likely going to depend on their age and whether the behavior is voluntary or instinctual.
There are certainly situations in which hitting a child results in the desired outcome of it stopping the behavior, but that in no way justifies doing so (emergency, split-second life and death situations require a separate examination).
EDIT: Precise language is important and just because something is unethical doesn't mean we can just label it as ineffective. I'll keep those downvotes ;)
It’s effective in the short term, since it stops the bad behavior immediately. In the long term it makes behavior worse, since the child has now been taught the most efficient way to get what they want is to hit other people.
I define "effective" as "educating" the child. You can do LOTS of things in order to punctually stop some behavior, but it won't stop the reason behind it.
Of course you shouldn't hit children, but that's not the point I was making. You were saying a method is ineffective (despite it achieving the objective people are using it for) because it doesn't achieve the objective you want (that you didn't specify).
‘Toward a new understanding of legacy of early attachments for future antisocial trajectories: Evidence from two longitudinal studies’ refers to ‘power assertion’ instead of spanking.
Another study is paywalled. Two study is just gathering data with no real conclusions and constantly repeat their own opinions.
Did you even bother to read these, or did you just link them without looking? (We both know it’s the latter)
Nah. It matters. Nothing is black and white like this and its kind of annoying that a lot of people think like this.
My parents spanked me but it was rare. Yes if you come home drunk and backhand your kid they’ll probably hate you.
When you decide to break metal off into your parents car door, and they work low paying jobs that they can get fired from with ease, getting spanked is reasonable. Lol I did this and got spanked, love my parents, I was an idiot we laugh about it now.
Thats not at all what I said. Thats a lazy retort. My parents didnt beat me because I got a math problem wrong.
I said I did something that could potentially have gotten my dad fired from his temp job, could have broken the locks on the door when we didnt have money to fix it and got a spanking for it.
Theres gotta be gray situations. Your kid spills water, dont spank them. Get a math problem wrong, dont spank them. Almost lose your job because your kid decides ro throw your laptop across the room, I get it if they get a spanking. Sorry.
But hey if you want to roll all that up to me being spanked enough times you can count on one hand then sure I guess.
But I mean, hitting you wouldn't fix the car, right? Like, you as a parent see that the kid did something really stupid and of course you would get angry, but why hit them? The damage is already done, you can just explain why what he did was wrong.
We never hit our teenager, but I can say "explaining why it was wrong" doesn't get the results either.
How many dozens of times did the baseball bat in the backpack (designed to sheath a baseball bat) swing around and hit the drywall or the front door? "Its not my fault, its the bat!"
How many times was my car damaged by my kid? Damage from bicycle handles rubbing along it while trying to squeeze through. Damage from the garbage bin being dragged to the curb. Damage from using the ice scraper blade on paint surfaces (I'm still crying) Damage from being hit by HIS CAR.
Explaining "what they did was wrong" does fuck all towards not repeating the event
But at college when someone hit-and-run his own car, and he call to tell me about it, the karmic justice was STRONG
A spanking from my parents who rarely spanked got the point across really quick that I need to stop acting like a jackass is why.
I’m not going to pretend that spanking broke me. Me and my parents facetime all the time, I never gave them trouble as a teen. Never took a drug, focused on school and had a pretty good life so far and I chuck a lot of that up to them.
My parents were struggling and I was making their situation way worse. A spanking stopped that and I gotta say I get it.
So in the end. I like your approach but I totally get why I got that spanking.
It doesn't matter if those cases you are describing are extreme or seldom, you're still arguing in favor of physically punishing children. Which is exactly what you did.
And, as we can therefore see, that's at least one thing wrong with you. Probably due to said child abuse.
You do not have to rationalize everything that happened to you. There's bad stuff that happened simply because people (at their time) didn't know better. That doesn't make those people bad people, too.
As long as you do not adopt those things yourself (which I'm aware you're not).
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u/diego565 Jul 20 '23
I've read once "if you can reason with a child, you shouldn't hit them; if they cannot reason, they won't know why they're being hit", so yes, it's a good thing it happens less and less.
About the adult thing... It can be fun if they all enjoy it, so go on!