Eh... I can count on a shop teacher's hand the number of times I was actually spanked or swatted when I was a kid, but after talking to my Mom about it, I think she made the right choice the times she did.
To give a specific example, once was when I was about five, I had just learned about electromagnets, and was actively trying to shove bare wire into an outlet. Yes, the spanking did make me a little afraid of poking around outlets again. No, it did not make me resentful, and more dedicated to wirepokery than before; my parents were consistently trustworthy, so I took their fear reaction as something I should genuinely respect. And that very small amount of added fear in my life quite possibly saved it. If I got spanked for every little thing, I could easily see that shifting to resentment. But appropriately, rarely applied, I can say with certainty it worked for me.
> But appropriately, rarely applied, I can say with certainty it worked for me.
No, you can't. Maybe it did, but you don't know how you'd acted if they'd just talked to you instead. It's easy to think we can untangle how a given event shaped us, but we really are horribly bad at it.
It ignores that people who never were spanked regularly can tell similar stories about just having been talked to (that's how I learned not to stuff wires in outlets). You can't tell if they are right about how it affected their behaviour either. In either situation we're guessing based on how it made us feel.
I don't think the very occasional spank is likely to be massively damaging, but I also don't think its necessary - I grew up around the time it was outlawed in Norway in the 80's. It was publicised enough that the one time my mother slapped me when I was a child, I threatened to call the police because I'd heard about it on the radio.
People insisted the change in the law would be a disaster and that children needed to be spanked, and it'd be all doom and gloom.
It was largely a non-event, apart from some pastor that made a big point of protesting and telling everyone how he still spanked his children.
Children still learn not to put wires in electrical outlets whether their parents spank them or not (as I'm writing this, I've had flashes of recollection of scary scenarios that feel like they may have been things I was told about as a child, but I really has no way of knowing if that's a real memory or "fabricated"). There was no massive rise in badly behaved children, or sudden surge of people electrocuting themselves. Of course, nor did it make us all magically better adjusted.
> but you don't know how you'd acted if they'd just talked to you instead.
I have an entire childhood of other experiences I could relate to you that tells me that I do, in fact, know how I would have reacted in I had just been talked to. And I am genuinely grateful for the (very few) times I was swatted, because there are things in this world that fear is the appropriate response to.
You appear to have spent your childhood in a safe country. I did not. If what I am saying sounds foreign to your mindset, consider yourself lucky, and I mean that with genuine sincerity.
>It ignores that people who never were spanked regularly can tell similar stories about just having been talked to (that's how I learned not to stuff wires in outlets).
You understand the innate survivorship bias in this example, right? Of course you can talk to the people who never poked wires in to an outlet- they're still here to talk.
Similarly, there's an innate survivorship bias in your case as well. There are people that were spanked as a kid that grew up violent, despising their parents or simply engaging in more dangerous behavior due to the breakdown of trust. I can guarantee you there are kids that decided to poke wires in an outlet solely because their parents decided to spank them.
We also know that hitting your pets does not work either, yet for some reason we seem to believe that hitting children is effective.
>There are people that were spanked as a kid that grew up violent, despising their parents or simply engaging in more dangerous behavior due to the breakdown of trust.
My point is that negative reinforcement has its place, not that it is desirable in and of itself. My parents very seldom used it, but it wasn't completely off the table, and I am confident that I benefited from that approach. That is a fundamentally different situation than one where spankings or other physical punishment are so common as to have children lose trust in their parents. I always trusted my parents.
>We also know that hitting your pets does not work either, yet for some reason we seem to believe that hitting children is effective.
Speaking of pets and pain: the hotwire that I used around the horse corral kept both my dogs and the horses safe, with only an absolute minimum of actual pain. No animal needed more than one or two incidences of contact to learn to not mess with the fence, and there was no more effective solution available. Note that this isn't hitting or striking an animal out of anger- it is a very specifically directed form of negative reinforcement to prevent otherwise dangerous behaviors from spreading. It works very well, and does not cause the affected animals any long-term trauma. The just learn to respect the wire barrier. Just like they know that it will hurt if they touch it, they also know that it won't chase or bother them if they leave it alone, and that's usually how it goes, no stress beyond the first few contacts.
> I have an entire childhood of other experiences I could relate to you that tells me that I do, in fact, know how I would have reacted in I had just been talked to. And I am genuinely grateful for the (very few) times I was swatted, because there are things in this world that fear is the appropriate response to.
Sorry, but with all due respect: You do not. You know that with the accumulated past experience you had, you acted a certain way in a different situation. You do not, for example, know if the reason you acted differently when just talked to was that you'd gotten accustomed to more serious reactions for something serious and therefore interpreted the talking to as less important and dismissed it. You make the point yourself that it was rare, and is something you tie to really important lessons, so it would make sense if you dismiss being talked to as implying something isn't that dangerous.
Of course, again, we can't know.
> You understand the innate survivorship bias in this example, right?
Yes, I do. But you do not seem to have understood that the point of giving that example was that your example is also down to survivorship bias, and to illustrate why that makes anecdotes like this (both of our anecdotes) worthless as a means of determining how well either alternative works.
My point was not to prove that "my" alternative is better, but to illustrate why personal experience is a poor basis for drawing conclusions about this (and again: yes, that applies to my experience too).
The basis of your claim appears to be "people are incredibly complicated, everything ties in to everything, therefore we can make no claims about what works and what doesn't."
To which I respond: if things were truly that un-understandable, we would have been unable as a species to have additive culture that improves over time, because what we think about how people and the world work vs. the actuality of things would be too divorced from one another.
And yet we can positively point to growth of knowledge across all human endeavors, in societies around the globe. I therefore fundamentally disagree with your proposition.
Which is ok. It's fine to agree to disagree. We could both be wrong, after all. :)
My point is that none of us can say. Any such anecdote will be affected by biases and post-rationalisations and we even have no reason to assume we remember them correctly.
On the contrary, we have very much every reason to believe things probably happened somewhat like but still different in ways to how we remember them; I have memories of events from that age that I know for a fact can't be real. Why? Because in some of them I remember myself in the third person.
The idea that we can reliably assess how a certain action affected us is a nice fantasy, but that's also all it is. Sometimes we get it right. The problem is we can't be sure when.
At 2 years old there's only one thing a parent can do to avoid a child touching a hot oven: make it physically impossible for the child to access a hot oven.
As if that is always possible. You would need to build a big enclosure padded out with cotton wool. Many dangers in the real world, you can maybe stop the kid touching an oven, but you won't be always there to stop him/her from dangerous situations.
Were your responding to 'make it physically impossible for the child to access a hot oven.'?
If yes, then you're wrong: its (99%) always possible. Just buy and install a kid's barrier and park the 2yo in his room during the cooking. Or use a cold door oven. No need for a 'big enclosure padded out with cotton wool'.
> Many dangers in the real world, you can maybe stop the kid touching an oven, but you won't be always there to stop him/her from dangerous situations.
100% agree, unfortunately. My point was that, agreeing with the parent (no pun intended), at 2yo, you don't loose sight on your child if it's environment is not 100% safe, end of the discussion.
While I agree with the comment saying the only thing you can do with a two year old is prevent them from accessing it, your 2 year olds reasoning also demonstrates why spanking them does not work reliably in that kind of instance either.
Kids that age are in some respect smarter than we often think, but in other respects they're totally helpless.
So he's understood that the oven is hot, but not that it being hot means he will hurt himself if touching it and that as a consequence he shouldn't. That's reasonable for him. He needs to make several other connections to determine it's bad: Many other things are hot, but not hot enough to be dangerous. He needs to also realise that too hot equals pain, and this means realising that touching the plate equals pain, not just hot. That's a step or two two long from starting premise to consequence for a 2 year old.
You'll see the same with kids that refuse to dress up when going out when it is cold out. It's hot inside. They've been told it's cold outside. But they also need to realise that this means they will be cold if they go out without dressing up even if it's hot inside.
Sometimes what works with very young children is to help them connect those dots. With my son I'd open the door, step out, so he can feel he's cold, and then tell him we needed to put warm clothes on to stay warm. Or you can be explicit in explanation: "we need to put clothes on so we stay warm when we go out" instead of "we need to put clothes on because it's cold outside".
For things that can be painful, try expressing that: that the oven will hurt. That it is hot, that's a separate thing (for now).
With a two year old you're not getting away from trying to prevent access, but my son certainly responded to just having the causal chains from "do things adults consider dangerous" to "will hurt" shorter.
Another strategy that keeps giving even now that he's 9, is to give constrained choices, and make him decide or decide what he thinks the right answer is: "Do you think the hot oven will hurt a lot or lots and lots?" (or when facing a 9yo that wants to decide everything: "do you want healthy dinner A or [marginally more popular] healthy dinner B?" as opposed to "what do you want for dinner?"). Choosing a specific framing is a scarily effective way of guiding them to where you want them to be (and it works scarily well on adults too; we're not nearly as much smarter than a toddler as we'd like to think).
I certainly can't say if the above works for you, but it's worth a try.
Not speaking for the person you asked, but another thing my mother did when I was about the same age was to allow me to touch a hot stovetop when she knew it was still painful-hot, but not serious-burn hot.
I think it was the correct choice. My curiosity was sated, no punishment was involved, and she made the (for me, anyway) right choice of letting me experience the direct consequences of my actions when she knew they wouldn't be too bad.
Young children have a very limited ability to understand cause and effect. It simply isn't possible to explain to a toddler that "if you run out in the road then you might get badly hurt", because their brains still have a limited grasp of "if... then" and "badly hurt". I am strongly opposed to corporal punishment in the general case, but I am willing to concede the possibility that it is a necessary option in cases of genuine life-or-death emergency.
Operant conditioning. Running in the road and getting spanked are both tangible experiences. Being hit by a car is entirely hypothetical until it actually happens. Learning the association "running in the road hurts" or "running in the road makes me sad" requires less much less cognitive development than understanding the hypothetical "if I run in the road then I might get hit by a car, and getting hit by a car will hurt". The latter requires a degree of imagination that many young children have not yet developed.
I'm not saying with any confidence that spanking is necessary in these circumstances, only that it may be justifiable given the risks involved. You need some sort of strong negative stimulus. It's not nice, but neither is being hit by a car.
The grandparent didn't say young children don't understand cause and effect, they said they have a limited understanding. A limited grasp on communication as well. Saying they shouldn't do something does not land as well as an immediate pain response to doing something bad. "No that is bad" has no meaning if it's not associated with something bad.
How can corporal punishment be a necessity in a life or death situation? I think you mean in preventing the recurrence of that situation. Screams and tears of fear and other emotions will suffice. One day my 3 yr old decided to bike away in a park near a pond. I cried when helpful bystanders found him about 1km away. (Don't search in concentric circles! Go for the playground.) We all share that memory even though a lot of other memories of preschoolers fade. No corporal punishment necessary.
Honest try to respond. I guess a child needs to associate the right emotion with a situation. Violence is a bad example as a resolution and fits with the emotion of anger. A scream or tears can be a result of fear. In case of danger fear for a childs life is a more fitting emotion imho than anger.
There are plug covers you can buy for < $0.10 each that solve that problem.
Hell, my parents also told me when I was ~4 not to stick anything in the electrical outlets. No spankings were involved. I listened because why wouldn't I?
(Well, at least until senior year in college, when I was like "What happens if I strip an Ethernet cord and stick it in an electrical outlet?" I'd missed the exploding-wires demonstration in my physics course, y'see. Did not get electrocuted, though I did get a spectacular pyrotechnics show.)
(These did not exist when I was a child, but had they been available, I'm sure my parents would have used them.)
>I listened because why wouldn't I?
So did I, about a vast majority of things, until I didn't, because I thought electromagnets were cooler than verbal warnings were deterring. I think you will be hard-pressed to find a child anywhere in the world that doesn't push boundaries.
> Plug covers are easily and rapidly removed by curious children, and are potentially a choking hazard.
Ultimately that comes down to the plug design. Schuko sockets (used in most of Europe) are typically indented into the outlet enclosure. This enables IKEA[1] (and others) to make covers that basically can't be removed without tools.
I do think sockets should be fundamentally redesigned from the ones we have here in the US. There are so many, better examples in use around the world. One small plus is that most of our outlets are only 110v, which is somewhat safer to deal with.
You are arguing that the spanking AFTER you tampered with a wire saved you.
First, you could have died before the spanking. Punishment after the fact never rights a done wrong.
Second, at the age of 4, if your parents had just sat down with you and told you that you can die from electric shock, don't you think that would have made a lasting impression either?
Which is riskier? Playing Russian Roulette once? Or a dozen times?
My mother gave me a spanking to impress upon me that playing with household electricity at my level of understanding was not a joke, period.
4 or 5 year olds, even precocious ones, do not have the cognitive machinery to be able to assess this kind of risk, and if they are unusually curious (which I was), well... Sorry, mom, about all the gray hairs I probably gave you over the years. (She seemed to have loved me well enough regardless. :D)
My parents sat me down and calmly explained everything they could. Which, as I mentioned before, worked great, until the appeal of something else overwhelmed verbal warnings, which was also not uncommon. Sometimes it was electricity, sometimes it was fire. I can think of another time maybe a year or so later when I discovered a box of strike-anywhere matches, and proceeded to light them one after another to wow at the sparkles, and watch the changes in the match as it burned. My mother took a different approach this time, and as 'punishment', gave me an entire box of matches, of which I was supposed to light them one at a time, let them burn down, then drop them in a bucket of water and repeat until the box was empty.
I suppose she was trying to allow me to explore my fascination with fire in a safe way so that I would get bored with it. Honestly, I can see some merit in that line of thought. ...but instead of getting bored, once I was done, I went and asked for another box. (it turns out fire is fascinating.)
I did get good at learning just how long I could hold a match before I risked burning myself, and how to strike them properly. So that was a plus. I also learned that the embers of the spent match can be kicked back up in to flame again for a surprisingly long time, too. So I'd say it was a good lesson, no spanking involved. But electricity is not nearly as forgiving, and I genuinely do think a swat in that kind of situation can be a useful thing.
I did not spanked children and they knew not to play around electric outlets well before 4 years old. 4-5 years old are actually capable of these things. You have to repeat the instruction to them consistently and they will learn.
My kids are six and four, and explaining to them that something could seriously injure or kill them is definitely enough to prevent them from ever doing it. I can't imagine spanking them to try to make a point, but if anything I expect that would influence them to trust my warnings of potential injury less.
As a complete anecdote - I remember when my parents told me when I was very little that eating rotten/mouldy food could get you seriously ill, I think I even asked if you could die from it - to which they said that yes, you could.
And after that, I had a complete phobia of everything that seemed even slightly off. I became incredibly picky, because that one spot on the slice of cheese could be mould or because the ham smelled not how my 8 year old brain thought it should smell like.
No spanking involved, but the psychological damage was much greater I think.
Yeah, that's true, you definitely do have to be careful with that kind of thing. Kids really can take things to heart and believe them so strongly that it's difficult, even when they know you're the one who originally gave them the information, to moderate it. I usually try not to speak in terms of absolutes, but let them know what _can_ be dangerous, especially for kids who don't yet have enough experience to know which situations are dangerous and which aren't—so if they want to use/touch/whatever it, please ask an adult first. So it's not the thing itself that's inherently dangerous, but rather using it before you have enough experience. (Still do have to emphasize the potential danger though, lest they one day decide they do in fact have enough experience now.) This seems to work well for my kids, but of course ymmv.
Yeah, one time I told my 3 year old not to touch a wild mushroom. Mostly because I'm grossed out by it. But now she's got this crazy attitude towards mushrooms, the weirdest plants in the world that people eat but are dangerous. I have no idea how it's going to shake out. If I could do it again I would have let her touch the freaking mushroom.
I shorted an electrical outlet when I was five. I had the whole exploding wires show, the fuse blew out, my parents thought it was just a defect in the installation. Learned my fear of electricity first hand. Fortunately the wire I was using was isolated in the middle portion and only sparked at the ends. Even today I dread making repairs on the power circuits of the house and call in a specialist, even though I understand electricity. It's just that I imagine the possible shock too vividly.
These are not recommended in the UK; UK sockets have internal safety features which plastic plug covers are actually more likely to compromise (by a child e.g. inserting one upside down. The plug cover will usually be thing enough to bend and make this possible, and then the shutter will be up and the contacts exposed.)
Wouldn't is a choice; couldn't because your mental faculties were not developed well enough to e.g. suppress the impulse to stick things into outlets is another matter.
> But appropriately, rarely applied, I can say with certainty it worked for me.
For me it was "appropriately, rarely applied", and it was still awful and the negative consequences are still with me. Yes, it's harmless in some cases; so is falling out of an aeroplane.
> Yes, the spanking did make me a little afraid of poking around outlets again. No, it did not make me resentful, and more dedicated to wirepokery than before; my parents were consistently trustworthy, so I took their fear reaction as something I should genuinely respect.
Wait, so was the thing that underlined the message the physical punishment or your parent’s fear reaction? You seem to be equating them, but it's quite common for parents to demonstrate fear without physical punishment, and to administer physical punishment without showing fear. They are essentially orthogonal concerns.
I should clarify. I did not know my mother (the one who caught me performing my well-designed science experiment with the wall outlet) was scared at the time; I only learned that when we spoke about the experience when I was older.
Chinese kids are beaten all the time if they get a A- instead of an A+ on their report card. Maybe that's why the Chinese economy is on track to overtake the United States.
Drugs are much more expensive and more difficult to procure than they would be if they were legal, so reducing consumption. On that basis the drug war clearly works.
If violence is unnecessary and there’s always an alternative why are all states fundamentally enforced and maintained by violence?
So do you think that if from today all the crimes were depenalised there would be no whatsoever increase in thefts, assaults, murders and all the other crimes?
I think that instead we would see a massive increase.
> Most people just don't want to steal, assault, murder, etc. because of their own morality, not because of the law.
I strongly disagree. Many (but not all!) people would be more likely to steal – given an opportunity – if they were absolutely sure they wouldn't face any negative consequences. Similarly, a lot more people would punch someone in the face if they insulted them or cut in line, when they would be absolutely sure that the other person wouldn't punch back.
That doesn't mean that most people are inherently evil, just that they're non-perfect, flawed human beings. Social pressure and the justice system keeps them in line, not their morality.
That only means there wouldn't be a massive increase in the number of perpetrators. I expect that the set of people who aren't morally against it would be willing to do it more often if the risks went down.
If violence worked as a strategy, then it would work better the more of it was applied. Instead, what we see is that the more violence applied, the worse the outcome in the long run.
If taking Tylenol worked as a strategy to reduce pain, it would work better the more of it was applied. Instead, what we see is the more Tylenol taken, the worse the outcome in the long run (taking the whole bottle will destroy your liver...)
> If violence worked as a strategy, then it would work better the more of it was applied.
This does not follow at all. This whole argument is total bullshit. It may end up being the right answer for parenting (don't use violence against your kids) but the reasoning is astonishing. Every single one of the statements is false and only the conclusion is true. What a masterpiece!
> If violence worked as a strategy, then it would work better the more of it was applied.
I am generally opposed to violence, but...that really doesn't make sense. It's not generally true that, if <foo> fixes something, 10*<foo> fixes it 10 times better.
To give a specific example, once was when I was about five, I had just learned about electromagnets, and was actively trying to shove bare wire into an outlet. Yes, the spanking did make me a little afraid of poking around outlets again. No, it did not make me resentful, and more dedicated to wirepokery than before; my parents were consistently trustworthy, so I took their fear reaction as something I should genuinely respect. And that very small amount of added fear in my life quite possibly saved it. If I got spanked for every little thing, I could easily see that shifting to resentment. But appropriately, rarely applied, I can say with certainty it worked for me.