RE: Unschooling Blog, Vol. 15: Peaceful Parenting in Two Takes (Share yourself, and a response is guaranteed)
Great story and examples!
It's pretty funny how so many people think that not spanking leads to wild children. My three aren't spanked and are usually quite well behaved.
Now my eldest boy is naturally of a stubborn, defiant nature and we have our struggles. However, I feel sure that being heavy-handed with him would have resulted in an angry child who would have acted out much more than the average child. Spanking would have only been semi-effective until he was stronger than me (which he already is at 12-yrs-old.) Than he would have rebelled and our relationship would sour. Instead, I have shown him respect since he was small, and he in turn respects me and likely won't even go through the expected "teenage rebellion" years.
People seem to expect teenagers to be a terror -- but I don't see that as an inevitability.
Agree 100%, and it's such a breath of fresh air to be connected to people who get this!
I have heard people say stupid things, like how most of the criminals in jail were not spanked and allowed to run wild. That if their parents had spanked them, they probably wouldn't have turned to crime.
But somebody went and surveyed a bunch of prisoners once, and what their results indicated,
was that most of the prisoners had been spanked or beaten A LOT as small children,
but then when they hit teenage years and their parents couldn't control them anymore,
the parents just "gave up" and let them "run wild."
Of course they couldn't keep spanking these strong-willed and physically strong teenagers anymore -- the teens were no longer going to take it! So they rebelled in the worst ways and turned to crime.
So yeah, that is just a joke that if you don't spank and punish your children, that they will more-than-likely wind up in trouble with the law.
Right. The beatings are what cause that kind of life path to begin to take shape. It's almost like a kind of Stockholm Syndrome with many. Psychology has shown that as children, we basically view it as a kind of existential suicide to see mommy or daddy as "wrong" and hurting us, so we must create a narrative to justify it. Of course that narrative is usually "I am worthless and bad."
These kids then grow up still with the same exact primal fear and talk about how it is "necessary" to strike children. I feel sorry for them. The knee-jerk defense is pretty easy to spot. Almost always, the person vehemently defending spanking is actually defending what his parents did to him, becuase of that deep-seated crisis it would cause to not trust your caregiver.
People are good when their needs are met. The propaganda is so thick that I myself often forget this, and just slip back into the "people are naturally 'bad'" rut.
Growing up, my parents did spank occasionally but it was a rare event.
My mom had decided that there were only a few things worthy of enforcing with punishment. She remembers feeling sad for other children who got spanked over almost anything, and wasn't going to raise her children that way.
My three siblings and I all did okay for ourselves, and none of us acted out in any great way.
I suppose my own experiences growing up shaped me in a positive way that made it easy to make the next leap to no spankings at all.
You are right that people do seem to defend the way that they were raised, as if to admit anything else would make their parents wrong or even bad.
A while back, a child staying with us for a few days seemed insistent that I enforce more rules on my son and was distressed when I didn't. His mother is a good woman (not abusive) but is much more strict about rules around the house as well as getting school 'work' done, etc.
It became obvious to me that this boy felt like if my parenting was 'right' then his mom would be 'wrong' and he was very uncomfortable with that. He wanted to change my parenting (of his friend) to the same way that his mom parented him. He wanted to restrict my son's freedom in order to make him feel better about his situation. His mom agreed with me that he should have just enjoyed it while he was with us!