Mac_Guffin wrote:I'm With Stupid wrote:I accept that there could be a hypothetical situation where it might be appropriate, but I can't say I've ever seen it. Like shouting at kids, it tends to be the far more common situation that the parents is angry. It might be understandable, but I don't see it as the example of good parenting that some like to claim it is.
I remember hearing a sermon at a friend's church years ago about spanking. The preacher talked about how you should and shouldn't do it, telling the parents not to do it in anger, but to calm down 1st and then spank them.
To me, that seems more sick than spanking out of anger. It seems very cold to hit a kid with no emotion... not saying that doing it out of anger is good.
It's interesting you bring that up, because I recently had a HUGE bust-up argument with my wife on that very subject.
We have never spanked our kids, but the argument arose because a friend of mine had told me that he and his wife do spank their little boy. My reaction was "oh well, all parents are different and everyone's got their own way. Not for me to judge". She OTOH was absolutely horrified, almost to the point of questioning how I could continue to be friends with these people.
She made the same point you do: that a quick slap round the ear in anger might be understandable (if wrong), but the really horrible thing is how a parent can cool down, and then spank their child in a completely calculating way. I not only disagree but actually think the direct opposite.
All the evidence I've seen about effects of punishment on kids points to two conclusions:
1. Physical punishment is not by definition different, or worse, in its effect than psychological punishment. It's perfectly possible to destroy everything that is positive in a child's psyche and ruin them for life, without laying a single finger upon them.
2. The thing that DOES determine whether punishment traumatises a child long-term, or whether it just "works" in terms of changing their behaviour and then passes into history, is whether it is presented, and understood by the child, as a component of a reasonable and coherent system of right and wrong, cause and effect.
A child may know that it's wrong to steal, and the punishment for doing so might be a week without TV, or four strokes of the cane on his hand. If he then steals something anyway, and is caught, and the parent explains that "well, you knew how it is, and you broke the rules" and administers the punishment, then there's no reason why that punishment will have any negative lasting effects upon him - whether it's the cane or the TV.
OTOH, consider the situation where the child comes home from school one day and the parent is more tired / angry / drunk / whatever then usual. The child relates something that happened in the classroom involving the disapproval of his teacher - something minor, which wouldn't normally result in any substantial punishment at all, and the parent loses his rag and lashes out at the child, giving him a good beating AND sending him to his room with no TV.
What the child learns from this is nothing to do with right and wrong, morality or cause and effect. Indeed it is destructive to his sense of cause and effect because every other time he's come home and said something like that, there's been no punishment. The only thing that the child learns from this is that his environment - including most particularly the significant adults in it - is a scary and unpredictable place over which he has no control, and which will react as it capriciously reacts regardless of his behaviour. This is wholly negative.
Now when a parent "lashes out" in anger or desperation to control a child's behaviour in the heat of the moment, it's far more likely that this will resemble the second scenario above. Not always in an extreme way, but the emotional charge behind the parent's actions means that they are not really appraising things reliably in terms of coherent moral teaching. If they remove themselves from the situation, then come back later that day to administer the punishement, then they will be in a much better position to determine whether there actually IS a punishment to reasonably be administered. If there isn't, then they can just say "oh well, maybe I overreacted, but don't do it again, huh?"
All punishment should be administered dispassionately. That's the only way to ensure that it IS actually punishment, and not something else in disguise. But paradoxically, the idea of doing it that way frightens some people because they have to then really admit the need for it, whereas when its done emotionally they can half-pretend that it's not really happening.
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To me it's the same as teaching a child that it's okay to hit someone else to get what they want.
