On 6/22/2012 1:27 PM, Steve B wrote:
"Carol Kinsey Goman" wrote

Only idiots spank their kids.

True. And the kids turn grow up to be disrespectful idiots just like their
parents.

I don't believe it's necessary to use corporal punishment to discipline
children. I gave my child one little swat when he was young,
immediately felt stupid for having done so, and never did it again. He
has been effectively disciplined when he was young, and now at age 11,
he is a superior student, a model citizen at school, a superior and
coachable athlete, and parents of classmates and teammates encourage
their children to cultivate friendship with my son because they know he
is a good kid who will encourage good behavior in their children. He
never got away with any misbehavior at home. If he did something wrong,
he was sharply rebuked, the wrongness of the behavior was explained to
him, and he suffered consequences. He seldom needed correction on any
given issue more than once. All this was achieved without corporal
punishment.

I've never announced pompously or sanctimoniously that I "don't believe"
in corporal punishment, because I never saw a need to say anything. I
was too busy trying to ensure that my son received effective discipline
in other ways.

The problem is that parents who *do* make a big deal out of saying they
don't believe in corporal punishment typically are the ones who don't
believe in any sort of consistent discipline at all; or, they pay lip
service to it, but they're too lazy and self absorbed to provide it.



Take the parents and throw them in jail.

Yeah. Really leave the kids unsupervised for six months.


That will give them time to decide how to fix the problem.

And I guarantee the first thing they do when they see the kid is beat the
holy living crap out of them.


Those children should be put in a work camp, for a minimum of five years.

I could change their attitudes in two weeks.

That's fine. The remainder of their five years will be both
reinforcement and punishment. It is an outrage that no meaningful
punishment will be meted out to these vermin.


No, I could change their
attitudes in less than an hour, but I'd like to spend two weeks with them to
fine tune it. The first week would be to break down, the second to rebuild.
The solution is not to break them down, but to affect a change in them.
They are obviously broken right now, and need some help to learn the proper
way to treat people, as I can see they didn't get it at home.

I would then "counsel" their parents.

I was in scouting for about six years. I would get kids and wonder, "How in
the hell did this kid get into this state of mind?" And then I met the
parents, and all was explained.

Yep. I wasn't involved as an adult leader when my son was in Cub Scouts
for a couple of years, but I've been involved in his athletics, and I
see it with kids there. Some kids show up and expect to be indulged,
want to get away with weak effort and bad attitude and disruptive
behavior, and then expect to be the star of the team. When I meet and
observe the parents, it's never any mystery how their children got to be
that way. The paradoxical thing is that often, the parents are very
enjoyable to be around as adults; I can think of one boy in particular
on a youth baseball team I coached last year whose parents were great
people, at least as far my interaction with them as adults. All three
of their children had very high LSQs (little **** quotients), and the
way the parents failed to discipline when they were misbehaving in
public was glaring.