Ha ha ha My mother always use to say to me, I only hit you because I love you. She was funny even when she was angry. There is nothing wrong with smacking your kids, if they deserved it. I deserved every single beating I got, and now the young dudes I use to run around with, are now in jail and are proper bad-asses. Yay, for mom... she kept her son away from the bad boys.

unfortunatly ppl think that hitting there children when they 'naughty' or 'bad' gives them power and the right to hit them whenever.

Amen to luncheon and cheerios!

// 'reverse-tantrum'

hahaa. thats like what i do to my dog when he barks about nothing while i'm trying really hard to sleep. i just go outside and bark right back at him, that shuts him up!

2X4?? maths always hurts somebody!!

good advice moosus. i'm not really violent as in, i fight with someone and i want to hit them, more violent as in - if someone does something to piss me off, i can get aggrivated so much that the possibility of hurting them physically doesn't seem wrong in my head. i dont actually hit/hurt people, thats wrong. i tend not to fight with people either because, as with you, i don't see the point in it, it's immature, petty and pathetic [going to an all girls school i see a lot of this everyday]. the things that happen in early life shape you as a person, and sometimes those negative things creep in and make you just that little bit worse off, it doesn't make you a bad person, it just makes you more aware.

in saying all that though, it kinda would help if i stopped having recurring dreams about standing on pigeons, and crushing fingers *rocks back and forth*

//why do we discipline children by punishing them with physical pain?

its easier than inflicting mental pain? not as "permanent"? faster? doesn't take a lot of brain power to do?

Limegreen you poncy liberal,

nothing like a short sharp smack to make a kid realize what they've done,
Shame, my friend, that's the best way of changing behaviour.
Funny thing is once smacking becomes a taboo youll get those even more crazy enough to believe kids should have identicle rights (but not responsibilities of course) to adults - then where will that leave 99% of the parents out there?

I can't phsically put my hands on you unless in self defence yet what the hell a parent s'posed to do when there toddler flat out refuses to go to bed, get in the car for school..... (as they often will at a certain age). Any physical force could be defined as 'violence' by Lailla Haire and the like.
Kids just aren't little adults, as some would like to believe.

well as i've stated before, my brother and i were treated differently according to our personalities...

and personally i found that a telling off was more disturbing to me than a smack, i don't know why...

different children need to be treated differently, i'm not a parent, but just baby sitting for friends i've noted that different kids react better to different treatment... there will be kids that can take a smack and others that can't...

personally the bigger question for me is, when is it too old?

//personally the bigger question for me is, when is it too old?

when the child can say the words: "you hit me, i'll hit you"...

// talk about fence sitting
I'm fence sitting almost exactly as much as you are...

don't take this as me been offensive, i'm not a parent so i'm not qualified to say you're right or wrong..

is it possible that a child so young does not understand been struck... that maybe a 3 or 4 year old would and there for can be reasoned with and understand.. where as a baby is suddenly just been hurt 'for ne reason' ?

//you just have the unpleasant thing paired with whatever you did

its like when you're training a pet. say you're teaching a dog to sit, some people find that giving a dog a treat or giving the dog complements eg/ 'good dog' when it has done what it was supposed to do is a good way of training it, because they learn that good things come out of it.

the same things work for kids i guess, eg/ "if you eat 3 more pieces of carrot off that plate you can have 5 minutes more play time before your bath".

seriously noizy?

for sure, email me jenni_punk@herplace.co.nz

//I can imagine it'd be a lot different if either of them was a runaway ADD terror

Well, I was one of those, and I marvel every time I think about it that my parents never once struck me. Whenever I got into mischief, and trust me that was pretty often, my parents would simply logic me to death. We would have endless discussions on the ramifications of my actions, even when I was as young as three I remember these... I also recall a more than a few times when they'd sit me down and make me write out pages and pages of complicated extrapolations of the possible future results and global effects of my wrong-doing. I still have a few of these tucked away somewhere. They're hilarious.

My older sister, however, very rarely misbehaved as a child. But nothing motivated her to goodness like the threat of a solid smack on the bum.

//The other thing is, if you take a softly softly approach like the wife and I have, the moments you do pull out the heavy firepower, the point is made hard.
//Judge each case on its merits

the little kid i babysit, oscar, is three years old and the form of "punishment" you talk about noizy is exactly how his mum and dad deal with him. oscar is a good boy, and will generally do most things you ask him to do without much convincing, but there are times where he just wont do anything you say no matter how many times you ask him to do it.

i have seen jane [his mother] practically pull her hair out because of this disobediance, but i have never seen her hit him. if oscar has got to the point where he will do nothing you say, he is given a firm warning, if he still doesnt do what you want him to do, jane will walk him to his room and shut the door. it doesn't seem like much punishment, but it is a last resort and to oscar this is tough, he learns his lesson right away [tear usually follow] and generally won't do what ever he has done again.

hmmm....pardon my hippieness but violence does not solve violence.

but the point being the occasional smack around the bum or hand does not work, it makes it worse - just read my story for the facts.

[ external link ]

// violence does not solve violence.

agree with you there. But I think what I was getting at with my post above was that in some cases, a smack is the *only* way some parents can get their kids to behave. Obviously, in 99.99999% of the cases, smacking isn't required, and, by the sounds of your upbringing, you'd fall well into the category of kids who didn't 'deserve' to be smacked.

The obvious solution to kids who are so out-of-control that they need a whack to calm them down is another drastic solution: drugs. I'm not sure which way I waver on that. The USA has obviously given us an example of how mis-diagnosis can lead to a virtual mass doping of young kids under the auspices of correcting 'behavioural problems'. As has been argued elsewhere, how much of those problems are just down to (ahem, I really hate these words) 'bad parenting' as opposed to actual, real psychological problems is anyone's guess. I'd be on the side of the argument that says a lot of that ritalin is going into kids that really just need some parental discipline. And not specifically smacking. I'd still go with my theory that virtually *all* kids can be taught to behave through the non-violent techniques, but that there's a very very small minority that need something more. And whether that's the occasional smack, or a pill, is really up to the parent. Or, like velocity's example, you could just guts it out as a parent, put up a child who refuses or doesn't respond to non-violent discipline, and hope it all turns out ok after 10-20 years of (presumably hellish) home life.

I hate how churches do that to families. I'm in south Auckland and we have a ridiculous amount of churches in this area that has a negative stranglehold on the poorer comunity. There is a hate that is generated from younger people here who are disciplined for openly questioning their church. Its like that old Japanese saying "Every nail that sticks up, must be hammered down".

//I will just have to really try my hardest and all because of someone else's weakness.

Which is a much better (and more difficult) option than just perpetuating what you're given. Too many people blame their own inability to change on their parents' inability to change. They say, "A good smack never did me any harm, why should I treat my kids any differently?"

People also used to think that bathing caused disease, but we learned that was wrong eventually too.