OT - Do you believe in physical discipline on kids?

I agree how it's not to hurt them, however it's not exactly very easy to determine what level of force will let the kid know it's done wrong, and meanwhile not hurt them at all.

99% of the time when I got a clip, it didn't really hurt but It stuck with me. I never said the main goal of physical punishment was to cause pain to the child, I think it should be done to, as you've said, let them know they've done wrong.

 

For **** sake kids and people need a good humbling every now and then!!!! The last thing we need are the saps of this world thinking you can get by being nice to every one. Some kids have to be bad to get things in life. You dont all get sunday dinner and coca ****ing cola.

 

If they misbehave a good slap does no harm

 

No, you learn **** all by getting shouted at our hit. A child needs too be told what it's done wrong and be punished in some other way, i.e. having privileges taken away. Can't see the value of hitting or shouting the child doesn't know what it's done wrong. They rarely shout as a punishment even in the army nowadays not because it's PC but because no one learns a thing.

 

Also people need to take their heads out of the sand and realise that the ''the good old days'' weren't perfect. Kids today are no worse overall than kids at any other period of time, the problems they cause however are different.

 

Chaps, obviously an emotive topic. It's a subject that rages up and down the land. Violence in any context is, quite frankly ****e and wholly wrong. We do though (in my humble opinion) need to have greater discipline with kids. Society seems to be too soft and some kids see an ASBO as a badge of courage... Not right surely? Just my humble view.

 

It's very rare that I have had to resort to physical discipline with any of my 3 children, but I do agree with it in principal as long as it is within reason.

 

A lot of kids do need more discipline than they're given by their parents today - But physically abusing them is just a lazy and backwards way of doing it.

 

Oh yeah. If we didn't have crucifixion, this country'd be in a right bloody mess! Nail 'em up, I say! Nail some sense into them!

 

Agreed.

 

You can't generalise. I hope I never have to shout or use physical punishment on my kid.

But sometimes just trying to talk and reason with a little kid isn't possible. If it's misbehaving, sometimes you need to raise your voice, then try and tell it what it did wrong. So therefore it will remember what happened, the message will stick in, and the next it thinks about doing the same thing, it will remember what it got.

It's like in school with teachers. If you've got a bunch of students talking, and the teacher tells them to be quiet because he needs to teach the lesson, the good kids will show respect for the teacher and shut up, the less respectful ones may keep talking, so in that case, the teacher should be permitted to raise his/her voice to get the kids to stop talking.

In my opinion, a teacher should be allowed to physically remove a child from the class room if he/she is not willing to cooperate. Because it seems all most teachers nowadays do is say "that is not appropriate, please stop", which will do **** all with alot of kids. If the kid is disrupting class for the rest of the students, the teacher should be allowed to get the kid out of there.

I don't think teachers should be allowed to slap kids like they used to be able to, but they should have more power than they do now.

 

As a parent, teacher and former solicitor working in child custody I've got a fair bit of experience of a range of the issues here.

How you raise your child is a very personal thing between yourself and your child, there is no "one size fits all" answer and indeed parents will often end up having to balance consistency in their rules with the different personalities and behaviour of their children. Its not easy by any means and no-one is suggesting it is.

Physical discipline as a parent: Hope i never need to use it and doubt i will but i wouldn't castigate someone who does provided they are doing what they think is in the best interests of the child. The moment it becomes any form of venting frustration it is clearly wrong. Children push you to your limits and then try and push you a bit further, as a parent it is about setting boundaries and sticking to them then backing this up with sanctions when those boundaries are crossed. It actually doesn't make a huge difference what the sanctions are, the key point is that you are demonstrating to the child that they are out of line, that behaviour wont be tolerated and needs to be anything bad enough so that the chiild wont want it to happen again (violence is one of a million different things this could be).

As a teacher neither I nor any colleague I've talked to would want to be able to hit a child. I can remove them from my lesson quite easily if required, by telling them to get out. I've never had a child refuse to leave, even the ones with terrible behaviour respond to you in how you treat them and if you set boundaries in your classroom they will generally react to these accordingly. If a pupil did refuse to leave then it goes up the line - head of faculty comes in, then deputy head, then head teacher, then police (by which stage the pupil would be in a world of trouble!!!)

 

Rep.

I do not have children, which is probably a good thing because I'm so forgetful at times any kid would grow up like Bear Grylls (without the hotels and helpful cameramen)... Yep, I can see a child with ripped clothes mounting some sort of expedition having been lost at the local DIY store, and subsequently looking around Asda for the skittles-tree to provide sustenance for the coming NE chills...

Anyway, I wouldn't hit my child (if my girlfriend ever gets drunk enough to believe for 30 seconds (oh yeah ...) that my DNA deserves replication), because that to me tells them that when they get old enough to hit me harder (which wouldn't be that many years), they are no longer punishable by authority.

As such I have devised a table of punishment.

For minor offences in public, they will receive a fixed pocket-money penalty and 3 points on their X-box license, the latter based on whether or not they can convert 5/10 penalties past me in their tiny inflatable goal-posts.
For more severe offences in public, they will have to surrender all pocket-money to a charity of my choice (Sir Bobby's), will receive 6 points on their X box licence, and if they can't put 6/10 penalties past me in their tiny inflatable goal-set, they will have to complete community service around my house for a week.
For minor domestic issues, they will again receive a fixed pocket-money penalty, and 3 points on their X-box license, but also for inconveniencing me at home when I'm resting/watching the Toon away matches, they will also have to score 4/10 thirty yard free-kicks in said inflatable goals to avoid having to come to the cricket with me.
For severe domestic issues, surrender of pocket-money to charity, 7 points on the X-box licence and community service for a month around the house (with no penalty/free-kick trial), and you better believe their going to a Test Match!!!

There, I should have a little Geordie Beckham after a couple of years.... Or a girl...

 

A little Georgina.

 

Horses for courses. Some kids don't need physical discipline and will be open to a stern talk or other kinds of punishment. Some won't. It depends on the child.

I was smacked as a kid and a whole lot more. There was nothing worse than being summoned downstairs to see the belt hanging over the dining room chair! Could I ever go that far with my own child? No but then my own child doesn't have the same devilment I had or propensity to find trouble (yet!!). I can see why I was hit and to honest looking back I'm glad I was. If you tried to talk to me or punish me other ways, I just took it and continued making bad choices. In the end they started to give me whack when I pushed my luck. It worked.

As you get older your self awareness increases and I was ripe to get into more serious trouble. My mam and dad saw this and were pretty strict. They tried to raise us all to have good moral values. All 6 have turned out to be pretty decent people, and we all required different levels of discipline. If there is one thing I learnt from my upbringing, it was that life is not so simple to follow a prescriptive path. Its not one size fits all and I think you just have to do your level best and judge each situation on its merits.

Its wrong to use the word violence for me because that is very different from physical discipline. I think if you go too far you'll just build up some pent up anger for later in life. You have to be balanced.

 

I was never smacked as a child, my parents just told me off and took my pocket money away, so I couldnt do stuff at weekend and it worked for me.
I did the same with my children and it worked but sometimes I could have have smacked them but would I feel better for doing that for me, no and I dont think any parents get pleasure out of smacking their child. It's just something they feel they must do.
It's hard being a parent and getting the balance right.

 

If you insist on posting that kind of rubbish Korton you'll be going on a longer holiday!

 

Sorry for dragging this up, but for all the 'a little smack does no harm' comments, I saw this today:

http://www.cracked.com/article_19910_5-things-you-wont-believe-are-making-you-dumber.html

No.3 on the list. Basically research that shows that children who were 'spanked' on average have a lower IQ and countries where corporal punishment is more acceptable have a lower IQ in general.

For those who can't be bothered to go on the actual site, here's an extract:

Quite interesting, even if it is only one study!

 

I don't dismiss stats as bullshit like the ignorant idiots that say "you can dun take your science and your mathematics and dun gun shove it up your ass, herp derp".

But different studies on the same topic, can say different things, and they only show results based on reported cases. There are cases that don't get reported on both sides of the table.

I really don't see how spanking your kids bum lowers it's IQ, and also I don't think it's right to group all kids who were dealt with physically in together. There's a difference between a parent once in a while, when he/she thinks is appropriate, to spank a kid, then parents who beat the living **** out of a kid.

Not many people, I reckon, would be open to admit that they were abused as a kid.

And the countries where corporal punishment is legal in general, I don't think you can use the argument to determine for definite that the act of smacking kids lowers their IQ, I think it could be used to show that because those countries have members with lower IQ's, they allow corporal punishment.

And that could be used in the case of spanking. I think it's a considerable theory that parents that are thicker wont think about a situation and just go in and smack their kid when they think it's disrespected them, instead of thinking of a proper punishment.

It's a very complex argument.

I simply have the opinion, that If a parent isn't doing it because it's convenient, but trying to raise their kid into a better human being, then it isn't abuse.

It just goes to show how hard real parenting really is.

 

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