This isn't black culture vs. white culture. If I were to generalize, I'd say it's much more of a middle and higher class white culture vs. just about everyone else culture. Corporal punishment is pretty normal within the southeast Asian culture, (using them as an example because I work with many Hmong) and they aren't all turning out to be juvenile delinquents. Here's what's being missed in this discussion: A lot of the indignation toward corporal punishment seems very visceral; as if justifying its use is some unthinkable abberation of the norm, when I think it's safe to say when taking a broader worldview not using corporal punishment to disipline one's children is in fact the abberation. So if the general thought is that corporal punishment of one's kids is terrible because it inflicts lasting psychological damage, then that would seem to imply that the vast majority of the human race is completely fucked up. Is that really a resonable conclusion? I really think there's some deep seated cultural elitism about this. I think at least part of the stigma regarding corporal punishment comes not from concern for the welfare of children but from notion that if you as a parent feel the need to use spankings and the like to discipline your kids then you're inferior to your non-spanking peers, and judged accordingly. I can't speak for other cultures but within the white culture of the middle and above classes, whenever there's a discussion amongst parents about their parenting strategies, there's absolutely an implicit gamesmanship occurring regarding who's the best parent - and using corporal punishment is akin to cheating.
I think there's a lot to be said in the spanking parents v. non-spanking parents debate. But it absolutely baffles me that someone could look at this video and not see it as a case of clear-cut abuse. The only people I've come across who can do such a thing are either abusers or have been abused themselves and have long since internalized the message that this sort of behavior is the "norm." Both options make me extremely sad. I think this blog post (SPOILER ALERT: I'm linking you to a feministy-type site) articulates the serious problem(s) with this video. It's long, but totally worth a read. She watches the video and outlines how he failed his daughter as a parent, minute by minute. I refuse to speak about the things I went through as a child/teenager as far as corporal punishment goes, but this really, really resonated with me.
As I read the messages on here from people defending and downplaying the actions on this video, I feel they are ignoring what makes this case abuse. It's not just the physical act (which is very excessive), but it's the non-physical parts that truly make this an act of violence and terror. I believe in corporal punishment, really I do. I received said punishment in school and home, and learned to do, and not do, certain things because of it. I took part in dogpiling and roughing up a kid on my football team just because I was caught up in the mob mentality. My coaches took those of us involved, paddled us, and made us run extra laps. They did this in a routine, calm manner, without cursing and lording it over us, and in fact, showing more restraint and mercy than we showed the kid we beat up. This showed me that you are truly responsible for your actions, and not to join the mob "just because". Like I said earlier, I also received abuse from my mother for the slightest infractions. I remember one day she picked me up from baseball practice and was already angry with me for the fact that practice ran longer than she felt it should have. We stopped at a gas station, and she had me run inside to pay for her gas, then pump it. As I ran in, I didn't see a woman behind me, and didn't open the door for her. When I got back to the car, my mother started dog cussing me, and telling me she was going to whip me when she got home. She spent the next 20 minutes berating me, telling me I was "a disrespectful piece of fucking shit" and other words. When we got home, she took my belt, and started whipping me with it, telling me over and over, "ALWAYS HOLD THE DOOR, MOTHERFUCKER! YOU HEAR ME, YOU LITTLE MOTHERFUCKER?!?!?" Then she had me work out in the yard for her all afternoon and wouldn't give me water. To this day, I'm not able to enter a door without holding it open if someone is within 50 feet of it. This is partly out of manners, and partly out of the visceral fear still running through my veins. Maybe many people in this world don't view the lashings as abuse. I disagree with them, but as I said, corporal punishment is viewed differently throughout the world. What is truly abusive to me is the verbal beating the judge and his wife gave to their daughter. THAT is what really hurts me the most in this video. Screaming at your daughter, getting in her face, cursing her, threatening her, then making her go sleep on a sofa in another room? This is what can screw up someone worse than any physical abuse anyone receives. And anyone that doesn't see what the judge said to his daughter as terrifying and abusive really has their head up their ass.
Um, yeah, pretty much. If all signs point to that conclusion, then it's probable. The human race is completely fucked up. In general, we don't know how to really love or care about each other. If you believe otherwise you either a) have your head in the sand, or b) are adorably naive and/or really young. Just because something's the norm doesn't make it right.
Exactly, FUCK cultural relativism. Remember when Whoopi Goldberg came out in defense of Michael Vick's role in in dogfighting? How about Warren Jeffs and the FLDS polygamists? Just because you and your immediate circle of friends and family consider an action or behavior to be acceptable/non-issue doesn't make it so. Simply because certain Ethiopian and other immigrant communities believe that female genital mutilation (aka female circumcision) is important, we should allow it to happen? Would you allow your wife, sister, or daughter to have her clitoris sawed off for the sake of cultural bias? Parker: what makes your crock-of-shit argument about cultural relativity any different than these examples? Don't misunderstand me; I'm not saying that parents shouldn't use corporal punishment - I believe it is a valid parenting tool; but it frightens me that you can't distinguish how this bully of a father crossed the line.
Over history, we've made mothers face their children while slowly being impaled through the anus on a giant pike and exterminated nations just because they used improper thinking. We are a fascinating race, sure. But we are a blip on the radar in the history of planet earth and you can be damn sure we will all kill ourselves long before we truly prosper. Because we are that fucked up. Most of us think there's an invisible being out there who has total control over all of us, love it and believe in it without question, then kill or shun anybody who thinks otherwise. We're pretty fucked up.
It absolutely is, and I'm not even talking on the level of war/genocide/institutionalized rape/etc. Just on a much simpler level look at what we find entertaining. A vast majority of it is the suffering of others. Kicked in the nuts? Hilarious. Someone getting upset because we intentionally acted like a dick to get a rise out of them? Genius. People being made fun of? The height of comedy. We as a culture have an empathy deficiency that is so large, and so widespread that we don't even notice it until we come across one of those rare people that does have genuine empathy for others, and it's a massive shock to our system because of how outside the norm it is. Most of us can't even conceive of a psychologically healthy way of being, that's how severe the problem is. Spend five minutes on the comments section of any youtube video or news article or facebook page and be shocked, even when you look past the utter stupidity on display, at the cruelty present. That's not something you beat out of children, that's something you beat into them.
After seeing that video all I want to contribute is that if my dad physically and verbally abused me like that when I was 16 I would have killed him in his sleep. Crown I'm pretty sure you're stoned and confusing your dad's childhood with Bukowski's in Ham on Rye.
Like so many things I think this topic is over analysed and then people run with whichever extreme gives them the biggest chubby while going to great extremes demonising the opposition. Smacking is fine, beating is not. If you still have to smack a child when they are older than 5 you have probably already screwed the pooch and lost control. Middle ground you fuckers! It’s more often than not where sensible people get stuck while shaking their heads in wonder as the lunatic fringe fuckwits toss their shit at each other while foaming from the mouth.
Well, my father beat my ass just like that girl was beaten...and for much smaller infractions. Except he favored whiffle bats. Let me tell ya, those things fucking sting. My father physically subjected me to probably worse than what that girl's been through. And let me tell ya...there's a reason I live 1,000 miles away from my alcoholic abusive father and my stick her head in the sand mother. On the other hand, I work in a profession where I get calls from a gangbanger's momma, demanding to know why the fuck I put her baby boy in jail because "It's racial profiling! That's all the probation office does!" I refrain from saying "You and your Crip son need to be beaten hard with some kind of inanimate object." I really think some of these stupid kids on my caseload need a beatdown. It's a very conflicting feeling.
Yeah, but you're certainly smart enough to recognize that you feel they need a beatdown because it's what you know, it's what you were taught. So it may or may not be appropriate or productive, which doesn't matter - your gut isn't telling you that because you rationally believe it's productive (you might, but it's besides the point), it's just perpetuating what it knows.
Abused people learn different things from their beatdowns. Some feel that the tough love they were given made them a harder, better person, and that so-called "knowledge" should be passed down. Others, and I'm hoping most people find that living thought that sort of horror of which I cannot relate to was not their fault, and should not be inflicted on a child that's simply expressing their free will. I am very thankful for the latter. Believe me, if he was not a good person (which he is) my father could put dents in me that no mechanic could repair. Kids will be kids, they teach themselves to rage against he machine one way or the other. Try to force them to do something, and they'll want to do the exact opposite. Abuse is not the way to keep power over your children. Do you know what you DO have on them, though? The one thing a parent can always use against their child without it being cruel in any physical way? The power to embarrass them in front of their friends. which is the worst possible thing you can do. There is nothing more embarrassing on this planet than a parent. Don't do what I say? See how you like it when I walk you to school wearing nothing but rolled-up bib overalls and a sombrero (which I own both of). A tet-HUT!!!!
Alright, honest question. If this method fails, what won't? Hell, what if this method backfires so badly that your kid does *insert awful thing here*? You would rather have a kid suffer at the hands of his peers through absolute humiliation and possible ostracism, than have him suffer at the hands of his own parents, who at least give a shit about him and have been through the whole growing up thing? Doesn't ring true to me.
Okay. This should be interesting because yesterday I had to discipline my youngest, he is 7, and this is one of the few rare instances where I feel I had no choice and his ass clearly needed to get hit. If I was wrong, I'm fully prepared to be red-dotted into oblivion. Kind of long but not unnecessarily so. After school he did his homework and we let him go to his friend's house one block up from ours. We let him go there nearly every day after school because there are a lot of kids up that way and he plays well with them. He asked if he could take his brother's skateboard. Normally I don't let him bring it because his older brother, 12, has Asperger's and he flips out if anyone messes with his things. I said yes because at school on Monday he had been to the honor roll ceremony and received Terrific Kids and every other award they gave out that day. We were/are very proud. He's doing really really well in school and is very popular. I told him to be home by 5:00 P.M., like I do every time he goes up there. We even bought him a cheap watch to take with him so he knows what time it is and will come home because we have had an issue in the past where we have had to call up there and tell him it's time to come home. He's been grounded for this 3-4 times before. Yesterday 5:00 came and went and he was not home. My wife called up to his friends house and talked to him and he argued with her, was not listening, and was trying to manipulate more time up there. She told him to get home. He hung up. My wife was understandably pissed. She called back and yelled at him. I was outside weeding some flowers and she came out to tell me what just happened and states, "He's grounded tomorrow". I was mildly annoyed with him and I said, "Oh, absolutely." I also told her, "When I was a kid, one time I didn't come home when I was supposed to and my father beat me with a ruler until I pissed myself. Maybe that's what we should do, because I don't know what else to do." (No I didn't beat HIM like this and never would.) I only mentioned this to her in passing because it has been an ongoing problem and every time we relent and let him go back up there, after a few days, he pulls this shit. My wife said, "No I think we should take away his evening time with you. That will hurt him more." I agreed and left it at that. Every night we have a bedtime routine where I read to him and joke around and ask about how his day went. It's something we both really look forward to and is a great way for him to go to bed and end the day. Now when he goes to sleep even after our time together, he likes to read a book until he falls asleep. If this routine is skipped for whatever reason, it really bothers him and he has trouble going to sleep. A few minutes later I hear him on the skateboard riding down the block yelling back at his friends the whole way. I look up from my weeding and I watch already obviously a little annoyed. He stopped in front of our house and had an exchange with my wife. He yelled at her and slammed the skateboard on the ground which his brother also saw him do. From inside the house I hear his brother, now absolutely hysterical screaming and crying because he has Asperger's and that's just how it is. He over reacts to the most minor incidents and completely falls apart at any perceived slight. My youngest knows this... very well. I'm still only mildly annoyed, so I calmly wipe the dirt from my hands and go inside. Just before I go in I hear a door slam. Now I'm more angry. I go inside and ask, "who slammed the door?" My wife said it was her because she was so upset at what he did to his brother knowing how he is. I go in the bathroom and wash my hands back to being just a little angry not intending to hit him at all. I open his door and he is lying on his back on his beanbag chair with the TV on reading a comic book with a smug expression on his face. It was obvious he couldn't care less about everything that just happened and the chaos he just caused. I calmly walked the 3 steps over to where he was, take the comic book out of his hand, reach down, grab him by the arm and pull him up. His expression changed instantly and he said, No, no, no. I whacked him on the ass with my open hand, but it was a glancing blow because he had his hand blocking his ass and he was fighting me. I got around his fighting, moved his hand, and gave him two solid hard whacks and told him that was for not coming home when he was supposed to, making his mother angry, and being a jerk to his brother and that maybe next time he will think of his hurting ass before he did anything like that again. That was the first time I've hit him in years. I did NOT feel good about this, but I didn't hate myself too much because I think he absolutely deserved it. Later that evening he apologized. He still went to bed early and did not get read to or have time with me. Honestly, that seemed to bother him more than my hitting him. He could not go to sleep until I hugged him and told him that I loved him which I gladly did. Tiber's am I an asshole? Was I wrong? Did he need his ass beat?