Parent-Child Negotiations
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"Nathan A. Barclay" nbarc...@hiwaay.net
I'd like to expand a little on the issue of parents and children trying to negotiate mutually satisfactory solutions to problems. For truly fair negotiations to take place, three things must be true. First, both parties must be able to negotiate from positions of reasonable strength. Second, it must be accepted that there are some absolutes that are not part of the negotiation process. And third, the parties negotiating must not use extraneous issues to threaten each other.
In regard to the first point, the nature of the parent-child relationship is such that the parents get to decide how much negotiating power their children will have. At one extreme, if parents say, "Do this or else," they give their children no negotiating power. At the other extreme, if parents refuse to put their foot down at all, they keep no real negotiating power for themselves. So the trick is for parents to find a place in between that gives their children enough negotiating power but not too much.
In my view, the best types of negotiations are aimed at dealing with the issues the parents consider truly important while providing as much flexibility for the children as possible within that context. For example, suppose a little girl keeps running late because she can't decide what to wear to school and Mom, who is busy getting ready for work herself, keeps having to take time out of her own preparations to deal with the issue. The important thing for Mom is that the problem of running late be solved, not exactly how the problem is solved. Further, the solution doesn't necessarily have to be 100% foolproof. If Mom has to get involved and hurry her daughter up every now and then, it's probably not the end of the world.
From that understanding of the problem, the mother and daughter could get together and try to find a way to solve the problem. It doesn't matter which of them proposes the solution that they ultimately decide together would work best. What matters is that the problem be solved. And if Mom has misgivings about her daughter's preferred solution, she might accept it on only a provisional basis, with the understanding that if it doesn't work, they'll have to change to something else. With a little luck that will give the daughter some extra incentive to make her preferred solution work.
Regarding the second issue, it would be highly improper for a child who is caught shoplifting to be able to demand something from his or her parents in negotiations in exchange for not shoplifting anymore. When something is wrong, you don't do it, and you don't expect to get any special reward or compensation for not doing it. The lesson that some things in life are non-negotiable is a vital one for children to learn.
On the other hand, if parents want to label something non-negotiable, they need to be able to defend why they view it in non-negotiable in ways that have as little as possible to do with "because I said so." And if they use reasons rooted in their religion, they would be wise to also provide the strongest reasons they can that are not rooted in their religion as additional reinforcement. If children understand why their parents hold a particular belief, and if the parents' behavior is consistent with what they say, children can respect their parents for standing up for what they believe is right even if the children disagree. (That is especially true when the parents and children have a strong relationship in general.) But if parents just say, "That's non-negotiable," without providing any real explanation, the risk of anger and resentment is vastly greater.
Finally, if either side brings extraneous matters into a negotiation as a way of threatening the other, that upsets the balance in the negotiations.
Such behavior is a way of trying to bully the other side into accepting a win-lose solution, and thus violates the spirit of trying to find a solution that both sides truly consider acceptable. That also means parents who are looking for win-win solutions need to try to avoid invoking their parental authority any more than they feel like they have to.
Now, what does this have to do with the issue of punishment in general and of spanking in particular? If win-win solutions can be found within the context of these types of negotiations, it is often possible to avoid the need for threats and punishment entirely. That is especially true for children whose sense of honor is strong enough that just reminding them of what they agreed to is enough for them to comply with their part of an agreement.
On the other hand, not all children will necessarily comply with an agreement just because they agreed to it. In those cases, the possibility of punishment may be needed as an enforcement provision in agreements, especially if a child wants to be allowed to push to the outermost limits of what the parents feel like they can accept. (For example, parents might feel safe allowing a child to stretch a 9:00 bedtime a great deal, but be unwilling to accept a 9:30 bedtime unless it will be enforced pretty strictly.) If all goes well, the child's knowledge that deliberately violating the agreement will result in the punishment coupled with parental understanding toward accidental violations could still make actual punishment unnecessary. But for the possibility of punishment to mean something, parents have to be willing to punish if a child pushes too far.
Note that if a child has made an agreement and agreed to what the punishment will be if the agreement is violated, it is much harder for the child to resent being punished for violating the agreement as "unfair" and "arbitrary" than if the rule and punishment were imposed unilaterally by a parent, or especially if the child were punished without really understanding what the rule was (especially in practice) before the punishment took place. Those kinds of distinctions are extremely important in understanding how punishment affects children.
Also, consider situations where negotiations fail, either because no common ground acceptable to both the parents and the child exists or because the common ground cannot be found in the amount of time available to look for it. If parents refuse to allow the child to proceed with a solution the parents view as unacceptable, the need for threats and punishment might still be averted if the child is willing to defer to the parents and live with a solution that the child does not really consider acceptable. But if the child refuses to defer to the parents' authority and judgment out of respect, the threat of punishment (and, if necessary, the actuality of punishment) are all the parents have left to prevent the child from doing something they cannot accept in good conscience. Punishment might not provide a long-term solution, but it at least has a chance of solving the problem in the short term. And in the longer term, parents can hope that as the child gets older, he or she will come to recognize that the parents were right after all, at least enough to make a solution that both sides can agree on possible. (Or, in some cases, the problem might solve itself as the child becomes mature enough to be allowed to do things the parents did not consider it safe to allow earlier.) Such situations are not ideal, but considering that we live on Earth, not in Heaven, always having ideal solutions available would be a bit much to hope for.
As one last interesting point regarding negotiated solutions, consider the possibility of negotiating what form of punishment should be used in situations where punishment is required. From a parent's perspective, the punishment needs to be serious enough to achieve the parent's goals (which are often short-term in nature, or "serially short-term" - that is, solvable over an extended period of time through a series of short-term solutions).
In some cases, parents consider it desirable to disrupt the child's activities (for example, to keep the child away from "the wrong crowd"), but often, such disruption is considered undesirable. Parents may also feel a need to consider how punishing one child might impact others. For example, how do you ground one child from watching television without having an impact on the lives of the child's siblings? After all, the siblings might very well want to play with the child who is being punished and watch television at the same time.
From a child's perspective, the important points are how unpleasant the punishment will be and how much the punishment will interfere with the child's doing things he or she enjoys. Some children may view physical pain as radically worse than other forms of unpleasantness, but many do not.
Children may also consider how different forms of punishment would affect their friends, and the possible embarr***ment if their friends find out about their having gotten in trouble.
Of all forms of punishment, corporal punishment can concentrate a given amount of unpleasantness into the shortest amount of time. That's probably one of the reasons why some people object to it so strongly: the pain of a child crying from a spanking is a lot easier to see than the same total amount of unpleasantness spread over a week or two of being grounded. We can empathize with the pain of the spanking, but it is much harder to capture the sense of time needed to empathize with the grounding -
especially for people who haven't actually experienced being grounded for an extended period of time.
Yet ironically, depending on the personalities and the situation involved, the same concentration of unpleasantness into a short period of time that makes spanking so objectionable to some outside parties can sometimes make it a preferred form of punishment for both parents and children. It's over with quickly, and they can get on with their lives.
Which raises an interesting problem for those who support win-win solutions but oppose spanking. If parents ...
Carlson LaVonne carls...@umn.edu
Nathan, On the other hand, a two-year-old has few bargaining tools. He or she is physically tiny, compared to his/her parents. This little child is just beginning to understand case/effect, and only in immediate situations. When this little child begins to understand cause/effect, the spanked child learns to hit. The non spanked child learns other ways to handle anger.
LaVonne ...
"Nathan A. Barclay" nbarc...@hiwaay.net
Actually, there is at least one form of meaningful two-way negotiation with a two-year-old that parents can engage in: redirecting the child's attention. When a parent tries to redirect a child's attention, the parent is saying, "How about if you do this instead?" If the child rejects the parent's idea and tries to start doing something else, that is, in effect a counterproposal: "No, I don't like that idea. How about this?" Much of the communication is nonverbal, yet a form of genuine negotiation is taking place in an attempt to find a solution acceptable to both the parent and the child.
But like other forms of negotiation, that form can break down if the child refuses to be redirected and keeps going back to a behavior the parents consider non-negotiable. In theory, parents could spend the rest of the day trying to redirect the child, but that is often not workable in practice.
Which can bring us back to the problem that parents have to either tolerate unacceptable behavior or resort to some form of punishment.
As for how spanking affects children's learning to hit, it seems to me that three factors almost have to be involved. (1) How often the child is spanked or hit. (2) How well the child understands that the spanking or hitting is ***ociated with a particular behavior, and (3) how much the spanking or hitting as punishment looks like other forms of hitting.
The first of these issues is self-evident. In regard to the second, I'm no expert on two-year-olds, but I suspect that if a parent says no a couple times and tries to redirect the child's behavior a couple times, even a two-year-old can probably start to get the idea that he or she is doing something the parent doesn't like. If I'm right, that would provide an enormous head start toward making the connection that the swat that follows was a result of unacceptable behavior, not just because the parent was angry.
Regarding the third, if spankings are always on the bottom (or maybe a swat to the back of the legs for a child in diapers, as long as it's not hard enough to be dangerous), that makes spanking less of a precedent for a child's going around hitting people anywhere he or she wants to than if swats from the parent land in a wider variety of places. A ritual such as putting the child over a knee or lap first might do even more to draw a differentiation that the kind of hitting parents do when the child misbehaves is different from other kinds of hitting.
Of course even under the best of circumstances, spanking would almost certainly have some potential to help a child learn to hit. On the other hand, teaching a child not to hit is something that parents are going to face sooner or later whether they spank or not. So if parents use spanking carefully and judiciously, I'm not convinced that the difference is big enough to be worth worrying about.
Nathan
Chris cddu...@ouray.cudenver.edu
: I'd like to expand a little on the issue of parents and children trying to : negotiate mutually satisfactory solutions to problems. For truly fair : negotiations to take place, three things must be true. First, both parties : must be able to negotiate from positions of reasonable strength. Second, it : must be accepted that there are some absolutes that are not part of the : negotiation process. And third, the parties negotiating must not use : extraneous issues to threaten each other.
Hi Nathan. Welcome back. Your previous message did not propagate to my site. I found it on Google and wrote a longish response this morning before work only to lose it due to a computer glitch. Sorry, but I can't promise I will rewrite it due to the pressure I am under this semester teaching 13 credits at three different schools. I am glad you are back, though, since you are a member of an increasingly rare breed: an intelligent, articulate, nonflamey prospanker with whom one may have a courteous exchange of views. With regard to your three points, I question your ***umptions. You make mutual rulemaking between parents and children sound like cl*** struggle, like labor negotiating with management, or rival warlords carving up respective spheres of influence. In a loving relationship of any kind, both parties either win more intimacy, harmony and joy with one another, or both lose. "Strength" is not the issue here. In this kind of negotiation the aim is for everyone to win not because everyone's "strength" is "reasonable" but because it is in the common interest of everyone for there to be no losers in the negotiation.
In regard to your second point, yes there are certainly some things which aren't going to be negotiable. Safety issues in particular come to mind; also financially related issues.
Regarding your third point about parties to the negotiation "threatening" each other with extraneous issues, you are back to your view of parent/child negotiation sounding a lot more like a parlay between adversaries than a mutually rewarding process of processing away conflicts in a loving relationship. And given the fact that your point in all of this is to defend the use of physical pain on children by parents, I find your concern about "threatening" rather ironic. Punishment and threats of punishment do nothing to enhance cooperative win/win methods of discipline and do everything to undermine it and render it unworkable. You invoke the need for "consequences" if a child doesn't keep their end of a bargain. What you seem to miss it that there is a natural consequence built in to the breaking of a promise to a loved one, regardless of the ages and nature of the relationship of the interactants. One damages the harmony of ones relationship with a special and important figure in one's life, loses some of their trust and regard, and sacrifices the harmony of one's relationship with them. Children certainly do sometimes engage in behaviors which have this effect, but when they do there is always a reason. It behooves parents to uncover the reason by means of I messages, active listening etc. and deal with the underying cause rather than mindlessly punish the surface behavior.
Win/win cooperative methods of discipline are not an abstract concept not yet tried in practice, nor are they anything new. Thomas Gordon's cl***ic, "Parent Effectiveness Training," has been in print for four decades now and many thousands of families have used this sort of approach successfully.
Chris
Chris cddu...@ouray.cudenver.edu
How Children Really React to Control by Thomas Gordon, Ph.D.
When one person tries to control another, you can always expect some kind of reaction from the controllee. The use of power involves two people in a special kind of relationship - one wielding power, and the other reacting to it.
This seemingly obvious fact is not usually dealt with in the writings of the dare-to-discipline advocates. Invariably, they leave the child out of the formula, omitting any reference to how the youngster reacts to the control of his or her parents or teachers.
They insist, "Parents must set limits," but seldom say anything about how children respond to having their needs denied in this way.
"Parents should not be afraid to exercise their authority," they counsel, but rarely mention how youngsters react to authority-based coercion. By omitting the child from the interaction, the discipline advocates leave the impression that the child submits willingly and consistently to adults' power and does precisely what is demanded.
These are actual quotes from the many power-to-the-parent books I've collected along the way: "Be firm but fair." "Insist that your children obey." "Don't be afraid to express disapproval by spanking." "Discipline with love." "Demonstrate your parental right to lead." "The toddler should be taught to obey and yield to parental leadership." What these books have in common is advocacy of the use of power-based discipline with no mention of how children react to it. In other words, the dare-to-discipline advocates never present power-based discipline in full, as a cause-and-effect phenomenon, an action-and-reaction event.
This omission is important, for it implies that all children p***ively submit to adult demands, perfectly content and secure in an obedient role, first in relationships with their parents and teachers and, eventually, with all adult power-wielders they might encounter.
However, I have found not a shred of evidence to support this view. In fact, as most of us remember only too well from our childhood, we did almost anything we could to defend against power-based control. We tried to avoid it, postpone it, weaken it, avert it, escape from it. We lied, we put the blame on someone else, we tattled, hid, pleaded, begged for mercy, or promised we would never do it again.
We also experienced punitive discipline as embarr***ing, demeaning, humiliating, frightening, and painful. To be coerced into doing something against our will was a personal insult and an affront to our dignity, an act that devalued the importance of our needs.
Punitive discipline is by definition need-depriving as opposed to need-satisfying. Recall that punishment will be effective only if it is felt by the child as aversive, painful, unpleasant. When controllers employ punishment, they always intend for it to cause pain or deprivation.
It seems so obvious, then, that children don't ever want punitive discipline, contrary to what its advocates would have us believe. No child "asks for it," "feels a need for it," or is "grateful for it." And it is probably true, too, that no child ever forgets or forgives a punitive parent or teacher. This is why I find it incredible that the authors of power-to-the-parent books try to justify power-based discipline with such statements as: * "Kids not only need punishment, they want it." * "Children basically want what is coming to them, good or bad, because justice is security." * "Punishment will prove to kids that their parents love them." * "The youngster who knows he deserves a spanking appears almost relieved when it finally comes." * "Rather than be insulted by the discipline, [the child] understands its purpose and appreciates the control it gives him over his own impulses." * "Corporal punishment in the hands of a loving parent is entirely different in purpose and practice [from child abuse]....One is an act of love; the other is an act of hostility." * "Some strong-willed children absolutely demand to be spanked, and their wishes should be granted." * "Punishment will make children feel more secure in their relationship." * "Discipline makes for happy families; healthy relationships." Could these be rationalizations intended to relieve the guilt that controllers feel after coercing or committing acts of physical violence against their children? It seems possible in view of the repeated insistence that the punishing adult is really a loving adult, doing it only "for the child's own good," or as a dutiful act of "benevolent leadership." It appears that being firm with children has to be justified by saying, "Be firm but fair"; being tough is acceptable as long as it's "Tough Love"; being an autocrat is justifiable as long as you're a "benevolent autocrat"; coercing children is okay as long as you're not a "dictator"; and physically abusing children is not abuse as long as you "do it lovingly." Disciplinarians' insistence that punishment is benign and constructive might be explained by their desire that children eventually become subservient to a Supreme Being or higher authority. This can only be achieved, they believe, if children first learn to obey their parents and other adults. James Dobson (1978) stresses this point time and time again: * "While yielding to the loving leadership of their parents, children are also learning to yield to the benevolent leadership of God Himself." * "With regard to the specific discipline of the strong-willed toddler, mild spankings can begin between 15 and 18 months of age....To repeat, the toddler should be taught to obey and yield to parental leadership, but that end will not be accomplished overnight." It's the familiar story of believing that the ends justify the means. Obedience to parental authority first, and then later to some higher authority, is so strongly valued by some advocates of punitive discipline that the means they utilize to achieve that end are distorted to appear beneficial to children rather than harmful.
The hope that children eventually will submit to all authority is, I think, wishful thinking. Not all children submit when adults try to control them. In fact, children respond with a wide variety of reactions, an ***ortment of behaviors. Psychologists call these reactions "coping behaviors" or "coping mechanisms".
The Coping Mechanisms Children Use Over the years I have compiled a long list of the various coping mechanisms youngsters use when adults try to control them. This list comes primarily out of our Parent Effectiveness Training (P.E.T.) and Teacher Effectiveness Training (T.E.T.) cl***es, where we employ a simple but revealing cl***room exercise. Participants are asked to recall the specific ways they themselves coped with power-based discipline when they were youngsters. The question yields nearly identical lists in every cl***, which confirms how universal children's coping mechanisms are. The complete list is reproduced below, in no particular order. Note how varied these recurring themes are. (Can you pick out the particular coping methods you employed as a youngster?) * Resisting, defying, being negative * Rebelling, disobeying, being insubordinate, s***ing * Retaliating, striking back, counterattacking, vandalizing * Hitting, being belligerent, combative * Breaking rules and laws * Throwing temper tantrums, getting angry * Lying, deceiving, hiding the truth * Blaming others, tattling, telling on others * Bossing or bullying others * Banding together, forming alliances, organizing against the adult * Apple-polishing, buttering up, soft-soaping, bootlicking, currying favor with adults * Withdrawing, fantasizing, daydreaming * Competing, needing to win, hating to lose, needing to look good, making others look bad * Giving up, feeling defeated, loafing, goofing off * Leaving, escaping, staying away from home, running away, quitting school, cutting cl***es * Not talking, ignoring, using the silent treatment, writing the adult off, keeping one's distance * Crying, weeping; feeling depressed or hopeless * Becoming fearful, shy, timid, afraid to speak up, hesitant to try anything new Needing re***urance, seeking constant approval, feeling insecure * Getting sick, developing psychosomatic ailments * Overeating, excessive dieting * Being submissive, conforming, complying; being dutiful, docile, apple-polishing, being a goody-goody, teacher's pet * Drinking heavily, using drugs * Cheating in school, plagiarizing As you might expect, after parents and teachers in the cl*** generate their list, and realize that it was created out of their own experience, they invariably make such comments as: "Why would anyone want to use power, if these are the behaviors it produces?" "All of these coping mechanisms are behaviors that I wouldn't want to see in my children [or my students]." "I don't see in the list any good effects or positive behaviors." "If we reacted to power in those ways when we were kids, our own children certainly will, too." After this exercise, some parents and teachers undergo a 180-degree shift in their thinking. They see much more ...
Doan d...@usc.edu
From the thomas gordon's website: "Reviews of Research of the P.E.T. Course There have been two extensive reviews of P.E.T. course evaluation studies.
The first, by Ronald Levant of Boston University, reviewed 23 different studies. The author concluded that many of the studies had methodological discrepancies. Nevertheless, out of a total of 149 comparisons between P.E.T. and control groups or alternative programs, 32% favored P.E.T., 11% favored the alternative group, and 57% found no significant differences." The point here is not blindly believe to any book or philosoply but learn and filter out what is applicable to you and what is not. Hey, even Dobson recommended Thomas Gordon. :-) Doan On 8 Jun 2004, Chris wrote: ...
"Nathan A. Barclay" nbarc...@hiwaay.net
What you describe is certainly the best-case scenario for what can happen.
It reminds me a bit of when my mother and her siblings fight over a check in a restaurant - with everyone trying to insist that they be the ones who will pay. When both sides are willing to voluntarily concede enough to find a solution that works, not only is "strength" irrelevant, but what happens isn't really something I'd normally characterize as a negotiation.
But for the purposes of this newsgroup, best-case scenarios really aren't all that interesting - except, perhaps, for the value of reminding people to look for opportunities when they can be made to happen. "Carol, would you please load the dishwasher?" "Sure, Mom. I'll start on it right away." It's great when life works that smoothly, but the times when parents start thinking about using spanking are times when it doesn't.
There are times when parents and children have genuine conflicts in their needs and desires, when solutions in which both sides can achieve a complete win are impossible. Actually, your labor analogy is not entirely off target - or would not be if labor and management treated each other like family instead of like enemies. The real problem in too many labor-management negotiations, and in too many parent-child negotiations as well, is that the two sides each focus on getting as much as possible for themselves without regard to the cost to the other. Negotiations are more constructive, more productive, and more mutually beneficial if both sides keep each other's needs and desires in mind and try to find ways to meet each other's needs without an unacceptable cost to themselves. The trick in both cases is to look for a solution that, while probably not ideal from either side's perspective, is acceptable to both sides and that will give both sides as much of what they need and want as is possible considering the fact that the other side has competing needs and desires.
The reason why I view the balance of power as important is to help make sure that both sides will negotiate in good faith when their needs and desires compete. A good compromise is one in which each side gets as much of what they want as possible, and in which both sides give up a reasonably equal amount in return for making the compromise work. And for that to happen, the balance of power has to be such that the two sides both have more to gain from negotiating in good faith than from demanding to get things mostly their way "or else." (And while it is traditionally the parents who say "or else," it is quite possible for children to do so too - especially if parents are unwilling to exercise their authority.) My "point in all of this" is a lot more complicated than you give it credit for being. Yes, I defend spanking. But I also argue that there are other tools parents can use that are better in many situations. Indeed, I'm probably actually closer to agreeing with you than I am to agreeing with a lot of people who support spanking in regard to what parenting styles work best.
So why is my energy focused toward opposing you rather than opposing them?
Because I think you, and people like you, are far more dangerous in the long term.
People like Dr. Dobson, and even those who support spanking more strongly than he does, are not trying to close off the lines of debate. They try to persuade, but they do not attempt to use the force of law to impose their preference onto those who disagree with them. Thus, in the long term, they can be dealt with in the free market of ideas. The more people succeed using parenting techniques that are at least primarily cooperative, the harder it will be to convince people that a more confrontational appraoch to parenting is good.
But when large numbers of people put on a mantle of science to make claims that go beyond what scientific methodology can justify, that seriously undermines society's ability to consider an issue objectively. Worse, if spanking would be outlawed, the debate would be all but shut down because it is hard to engage in scientific study of something that no longer exists.
(I suppose studies could be done by looking at parents who spank illegally, or by giving parents special permission to spank as part of a scientific study. But in either of those cases, the fact that the parents involved would not be normal parents operating under normal conditions would raise serious questions about the validity of the results.) If we continue to allow spanking, and non-spanking methods work best, non-spanking methods can be expected to win out over time. But if the best parenting methods, at least for some children, do involve the use of spanking, a ban on spanking could easily keep us from ever learning about them.
Anyhow, in the context of a newsgroup as polarized as this one, I can see how it can seem ironic to have a person who supports spanking in some situations but also supports parents' trying to do things that reduce (and maybe eliminate) their need to spank. But I see nothing inherently inconsistant or contradictory about such a position.
Looking into the way I view things a bit more deeply, I suppose my view might be explained as a sort of hierarchy of ways of resolving conflicts between parents and children. (I haven't really thought of it this way before, so this is as much an exercise in organizing my own thoughts as it is an explanation.) At the top of the hierarchy are mutually desirable solutions - solutions that both sides genuinely like. Next are solutions that involve voluntary concessions, where one or both sides have to give up a little but don't really mind giving it up. Third on the hierarchy are negotiated solutions in which each side agrees to make concessions in exchange for the other side's making concessions. Next would be the "choose from these options" approach, in which the parent defines what options are available for the child to choose from. And finally, the least desirable type of solution is something imposed unilaterally by the parents.
At the first two stages of the hierarchy, punishment is completely unnecessary. If the child wants to do something that the parents consider acceptable, or is voluntarily willing to stay within the limits of what the parents consider acceptable, there is no need for punishment.
With negotiated settlements, the child does have to give up something he or she didn't want to, so whether or not a possibility of punishment is needed depends on whether or not the child is willing to abide by the agreement without that possibility. Also, if the child abides by the agreement strictly on his or her own, or if just reminding the child of the agreement and of why keeping the agreement is important is enough, there is no need to bring up the issue of punishment. But if the child is not willing to abide by the agreement voluntarily, punishment may be necessary.
With the lowest two levels of the hierarchy, the child is being forced to accept something without his or her consent, or with only a very limited form of consent. That gives the child a bit less of a stake in making things work without the threat of punishment, and thus increases the risk that threats or actual punishment will be needed.
The way I look at it, it is best for parents (and children) to look for solutions as high in that hierarchy as is practical, but when they have to settle for something lower in the hierarchy, punishment may be necessary.
So on the one hand, I support ideas that help parents avoid the need to spank (or punish in other ways). While on the other hand, I think there are times when punishment is necessary, and I view spanking as a form of punishment that has advantages in some types of situations (at least depending on the personalities of the people involved).
I would also note that there is one other thing about my hierarchy that makes the issues involved a whole lot more complicated: time. Solutions imposed unilaterally by parents are the least desirable on a conceptual level, but they are also the quickest. To some extent, it can actually make sense for parents to unilaterally tell their children what to do because the value added in a solution higher in the hierarchy would not be worth the time required to find it. And there are times when external time constraints make finding a workable solution "now" a lot more important than finding a perfect solution that is "too late." On the other hand, there are also things parents can do to mitigate the time issue. If parents can see an issue coming in advance, they can start the process of looking for a good solution with the child before they start running out ...
Doan d...@usc.edu
Let me ask you, LaVonne. You were spanked as a child, right? Did you learn to hit? Using that logic, if you take toys away from your child, the child will learn to rob and steal??? :-) Doan ...
"Nathan A. Barclay" nbarc...@hiwaay.net
There is a difference between a "punitive" parent or teacher and one who occasionally makes reasonable use of punishment. One of my best friends in elementary school was my fourth grade teacher (who I first became friends with when I was in second grade and stayed friends with until she left the school sometime when I was in junior high). Teachers in my school did spank occasionally, and one time she paddled me on the hand (her normal method of using corporal punishment - this was in the mid 1970's, by the way). I was embarr***ed to get in trouble with her, and I was afraid my getting in trouble like that might hurt the way she felt about me, but I don't remember ever holding it against her. And as I said, we remained friends long after I left her cl***.
From my experience (and I think anecdotal evidence I've seen from others tends to back me up), what is really important is how the use of authority fits into the overall relationship. If an adult exercises authority in a way that exhibits a lack of concern for a child's needs or desires, the child probably will react to punishment from that person in much the way Dr.
Gordon describes. If an adult normally cares about what a child needs and wants and generally exercises authority only for reasons that the child can respect (if not necessarily always agree with), occasional instances of punishment are far less likely to cause any significant harm to the relationship.
I'm certainly not trying to say that Dr. Gordon is entirely wrong, because I'm sure the attitudes he's criticizing here do lead a lot of parents into the kind of highly authoritarian mindsets that are most likely to cause children to react negatively - and, perhaps more importantly, lead parents away from more positive ways of addressing problems. But I do think he's overstating the case, and thus throwing the baby out with the bathwater where some types of situations are concerned.
<snip> I won't quote the list, but there is something not included on the list that causes me to view the exercise as highly deceptive. That omission is BEHAVING. When an exercise focuses exclusively on negative reactions to authority and completely ignores the possibility that children might exhibit the desired reaction, the exercise will almost inevitably skew people's thinking.
I agree that children sometimes react to power-based discipline in undesirable ways. That is one of the reasons why I consider the kinds of methods Dr. Gordon promotes better - as long as they work.
"Nathan A. Barclay" nbarc...@hiwaay.net
<snip> The more I think about this exercise, the more it looks like something deliberately contrived to generate a particular emotional reaction. An objective analysis would try to pin down how control by adults is likely to affect individual children. This exercise, instead, creates an amalgam of negative effects across all the people in the group, a combination that will almost certainly be significantly longer and uglier than a typical child is likely to exhibit. Worse, a person might add something to the list because it happened once or twice, but have others end up thinking it happened on a much more regular basis.
I'm not saying that efforts to control children through force don't have negative consequences, or that parents should adopt a dismissive attitude toward the risk of such consequences. But it is important not to blow the risks out of proportion either. If parents want to do a risk/benefit analysis regarding whether the risk involved in exerting their authority in certain types of situations is likely to be greater or less than the benefits, they need an accurate appraisal of the risks, not an exaggerated one.
Nathan
pohakuyakok ...@subdimension.com (Kane)
Actually, for a logic impaired person you do pretty well at times.
So tell me, are there do people that steal? Where did they actually learn to?
From whom did you learn to lie to yourself about your motives?
The pretense you are neutral and simply want people to choose for themselves is patently false to any reader that cares to google a bit of your posting archives. At some point, as a child, some adult very likely said one thing to you but did another. Your posts are ripe with it.
But, by golly, boy genius, in this, you are correct.....that is ONE of the ways a child IS taught to steal and rob if it is used as a punishment, rather than simply teaching how to use his toys (without using them to hit for instance) and how to put them away.
The entire punishment model if fraught with just such risk of teaching a lesson you don't KNOW you are teaching, that you will blame the chid for later, and swear that the only way to deal with it is to punish...and the child will fight that because YOU TAUGHT HIM ONE THING AND NOW ARE TRYING TO UNTEACH IT....hence, you, and folks with your faulty logic will have to be more severe..........OR You can start waking up now and thinking some of this through, and figuring out that YOU teach your child everything they know, sans instinct, about how to operate in the world, and ALL of the social skills.
***ume that when a child "misbehaves" either you have taught them to do that behavior (and you probably won't even remember doing it) and patiently explain you have something NEW to teach them.....completely avoiding the control battles.
Doan, you are always, as a bright intelligent person, just one step away from the answers, just as you did with this one, but it's old story...
I bet you I can state one step away from but you cannot touch me.
Of course there is a door between us.
All YOU have to do to touch me, that is learn and wake up, is open the damn door, instead of playing games that keeps the door shut to you.
If you cracked some books on learning theory and worked to put away your biases about the need for force to make people do things....you might begin to understand why so many of us make the claims we do here that YOU think are impossible, apparently.
I'm very serious. As for the question to LaVonne. My guess is ALL those who were spanked as children, and punished much, had to mature to the point, and often with great pain and struggle, cast off that early experience and get to REAL logic, and recognize they had been conditioned, not lovingly taught.
It's not easy. It takes courage. Sometimes it takes risk. It feels like one has no place to stand at times.
Like, if I can't punish what CAN I do?
Best wishes, Kane non-negotiable, they ...
pohakuyakok ...@subdimension.com (Kane)
Even Dobson can't spend all his time torturing children and be believable enough to seel books. He has his public and his publisher to consider. {;-> Do you really think that people who debate you here just blindly, out of some Disney "Zippidy Do Dah" syrupy, emotional, thoughtless grab at a picnic of life chose this or other non punitive parenting methods?
It took me years to even hear of it, and I struggled to stay away from punishment with my own children...lacking a repertoire. It taught me a great deal about patience....but PET turned the corner for me. For the first time there were the very tools I had been looking for. I read it standing at a supermarket book stand cover to cover...it was that striking...but then one has to be looking.
And I put PET, Thomas Gordan, and his trainers to the test, not on children, but on adults first, and allowed the methods to be used on me by other parents learning.
The results you see above in that survey are remarkable. In a population that is 90% spanked, if you are to be believed, THAT MANY got it?
Damn, man. It took far more than that to get people to believe the world was round, even with the circumnavigation of the globe.
Spanking is GONE GONE GONE, if that many are getting it. Wave goodbye.
And I'm quit curious what a "comparison" is. Who did the comparing?
People that had attended and applied a number of programs and alternatives? Or a panel of "experts?" I suspect that, just by the language of the claim (look familiar to you at all, Doan?) that this is a weasel research.
But I still like that that percentage got it, even with the deck stacked, very likely, by the research, and the fact that 90% of the population are spanked, and probably 99.99999% were punished fairly regularly.
You have succeeded in brightening my day.
Wanna talk about my citing of Singapore police claims about youth crime in the past few weeks? Or didn't you lie? Could it simply have been a mistake.
Unlike you, I don't need the ego boost of calling others liars when they have NOT attempted to deceive.
Did you make a mistake, or did you attempt to deceive?
Kane ...
pohakuyakok ...@subdimension.com (Kane)
On Tue, 8 Jun 2004 10:41:06 -0500, "Nathan A. Barclay" You are correct. That IS the point. To explore the actual experiences of people, not create, as you seem to be doing below, move away from the real and into the theoretical.
To teach someone about how others experience things it is useful to point out their own experiences that may be similar.
Again, a jump away from the point of training people to use and develop their capacity for empathy. PET is based on empathy as ONE of its principles. There are others of course.
You seem to be missing something. The exercise was with a room full of people, so in fact one would have a rich producting of of just what you ask for. Usually such exercises result in long lists of wall posted newsprint display of the group's responses.
And one would then know how individual people in this group were effected by adult controls.
It IS ugly. That IS the point. And of course the many will have more kinds of experiences and reactions. That isn't a fault, it's an eye-opener. One finds out rather quickly that not only are there many effects, but that there are some one an personally identify with.
What would be the problem? It isn't a frequency issue. The purpose is to identify different effects by adult control over children.
I'm not sure then what your point would be. The exercise is a cl*** room exercise. Cl***rooms are for learning. Information is needed to learn.
It isn't a listing of risks. It's a listing of effects.
Gordon wasn't promoting, in this exercise, a risk analysis of punishment. Just a review of the fact there is some negative effect.
In fact it IS up to the participant to judge the risk/benefit themselves and reject or accept.
The problem in this society is that the risk/benefit of punishment is rarely even looked at, or if done, because of long taught, conditioned, societal values, the risk will be rated low and the benefits relatively high for punishment.
The unchallenged belief in punishment as a way of controlling relationships has consequences we see around us all the time. Divorce rates, school dropout rates, crime rates, failures in international diplomacy, job failures.
When human interactions fail to produce wanted results one can pretty well count on one of the parties at least, coming from a punishment model.
Kane
"R. Steve Walz" rste...@armory.com
All this means is the for most purposes, programs similar to this are simularly effective, so you're lying like the shit you always are.
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No, you vicious shit, again what you're trying to p*** off is the individualized permission to "hey, if you think for a moment that PET doesn't work "for you" just shuck it and start hitting again!", which is nothing more than your usual excuse for your violent anti-child perversion!!
Steve ...
"R. Steve Walz" rste...@armory.com
Nope. Wrong is wrong. It is wrong to punish a child for anything that is not criminal, that would be his right to do is he were an adult, namely any circumstance in which you want to control a child's actions.
But punishment is alright to use in ONE and ONLY ONE circumstance, where a child is being criminal to other children or to adults without them first having been and done so to him. This is rare, and even so comes from some kind of emotional abuse and is the child's personal compensation for it. Whether it is bullying or destructive behavior, it has to be stopped because it cannot be allowed to succeed in a civilied society. Even then, note that we do not even punish adults corporally for this, instead we isolate and restrict them in jails and prisons, and we do not inflict bodily pain calling it "cruel and unusual".
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Nonsense, that was your self-deception, you actually repressed your hatred of her action out of fear and it migrated to elsewhere in your psyche to live again as your sick desire to torture children's hands.
It is the very reason that you are right here right now quite guiltily and neurotically trying to defend yourself from the poster's obvious attack on your sick little perversion.
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This is illicit in reasoned exchange, anecdote, yours or others, are irrelevant and undocumented.
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Nonsense, wrong ***aults on children, if rare, simply become more shocking and formative to the child. If not rare, they merely serve to engrain the compensatory behaviors that those first shocking occasions first gave rise to.
Steve
"R. Steve Walz" rste...@armory.com
Quite right, to generate an awareness of the results of one's actions in another person, something that is systematically avoided and even denied by the opposing philosophies. We ARE, after all, interested in the actual cause and effect upon children's minds and behaviors!!
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It is disingenuous and has abusive motives to even try to find some group of children for which abusive punishment might be suitable, and it does nothing but point up the desperate neurotic origin of your sick little perversion. Child torturing has never been effective, all it does is act as a compensation for your own early abuse.
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Nonsense, these are what is felt, not necessarily "exhibited". YOU don't like the anti-behaviorist emphasis on invisible internal processes, you would like to claim the human mind is some "black box", one that cannot BE understood, when each of us is totally aware of what everything another does to us and how it affects us, IF WE ADMIT and accept it to awareness instead of repressing it and substituting your "anti-self" abusive philosophy for it. Yes, behaviorism is nothing more than a mean-spirited and itself a neurotic symptom-ridden illness that rejects feeling response and the sanctity of the self.
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You're merely afraid of being taken to task for ALL your crimes, like a criminal in the dock.
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In other words you want to establish permissive excuses for crimes against children so that your own crimes can be excused, and even so that you can avail yourself of them when again when you need your next "fix" of compensatory viciousness for your neurosis that was caused by YOUR OWN abuse as a child.
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"Exerting 'their' authority", nooooooooooo.
You misunderstand, this whole exercise is intended to show you that authority is NOT yours, that the entire notion of parental "authority" is entirely ILLEGITIMATE, and that use of it always comes to NO GOOD.
We realize that your loss of authority will be discomforting to you, because of your desperate need to feel power after having been so abused and your power so stolen from you as a child, but allowing you to p*** on this violence to yet another generation would be a very wrong thing to do.
Instead we have to stop the abuse of this generation, even if it deprives you former victims of your compensatory outlet, because THAT IS HOW THE SICKNESS IS TRANSMITTED generation to generation!
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Nonsense, you're fishing for an excuse to abuse.
Steve
"Nathan A. Barclay" nbarc...@hiwaay.net
I view empathay as both extremely valuable and potentially dangerous.
Without empathy, true objectivity is impossible because a person doesn't really understand the consequences of an action if he can't empathize with those who will be affected by those consequences. But when empathy is overly focused on one particular aspect of a situation, causing other aspects of the situation to be ignored or given less weight than they deserve, that excessive focus can be extremely dangerous.
Yes, it is valuable for parents to empathize with how their children are likely to feel about ***ertion of parental authority, and to understand how their children might react. But parents also have to take a larger and longer view, to consider (and empathize with) the consequences if they fail to exert their authority. What will it do to the child's future if they do not intervene? What dangers will the child's behavior present to the child or to others? How would their child's behavior affect other children, both now and in the future? And, for that matter, how would their child's behavior affect them (the parents)?
As I said, parents need to empathize. But if they get so caught up in empathizing with one aspect of the overall situation that they ignore other aspects, they are likely to make worse choices than they would if they empathize but also look at the overall picture objectively. I view empathy as a part of objectivity, not a replacement for it.
If the exercise is conducted in such a way that each person's list is seen separately, that would indeed portray what reactions individual children went through, although the question of how often the various reactions occurred would remain. And if that is the way the exercise is conducted in the cl***es, then the problem of not providing an idea of how many different reactions individual children tend to go through would not apply in that context.
<snip> I ***ume you're aware that people with agendas frequently manipulate their choice of what information to present and how to present it in order to make their viewpoint look as strong as possible. My concern is that Dr. Gordon seems to be doing that here, calling attention to what can go wrong without encouraging people to examine the entire context. To the extent that he includes the possibility of children's reacting by behaving at all, he portrays it in a negative light ("Being submissive, conforming, complying; being dutiful, docile, apple-polishing, being a goody-goody, teacher's pet"). Further, he encourages people to focus on how many of the coping behaviors they exhibited, not on how common or serious they were (especially in contrast with the total length of childhood). So the exercise seems aimed more at causing people to form a negative opinion of the use of authority than at causing them to objectively evaluate how the risks and benefits of using authority balance against each other.
<snip> I'm inclined to strongly agree that society (or at least a very large part of it) tends to underestimate the risks and overestimate the effectiveness.
But I think Dr. Gordon's article errs in the opposite direction.
This accusation has some validity, but it ignores other, more important causes.
It seems to me that the biggest factor in the divorce rate is that we as a society have largely replaced, "for better, or for worse... til death do you part" with "until you get tired of that person or find someone you'd rather be with." Yes, situations where spouses' desire to punish each other drives them farther apart are a contributing factor. But I think lack of commitment - both on a personal level and as part of the legal concept of what marriage is - is the deeper problem. (And I would point out that society's belief in punishment is probably weaker now than it was before the divorce rate started skyrocketing, not stronger.) With dropout rates, I think the biggest problem is a lack of choice in our education system. When families have little or no choice regarding what kind of school a child will go to, and what is available is not a good fit for the child, that creates serious problems. Of course if the child reacts to those problems by getting bored or frustrated and misbehaving, and is in turn punished for that misbehavior, that makes the situation even worse.
But if families could (and would) choose schools that were a better fit for their children, and if children who are considering dropping out had the option of changing to a type of school that fit their needs and desires better instead, that would deal with the problem a whole lot closer to its source.
The people most likely to be criminals are those who suffered abusive treatment as children (and by "abusive," I refer to more than just what legally qualifies as abuse). When parents yell or punish because they are angry rather than because they make a calm, rational decision that a child's behavior warrants a particular punishment, the damage can be enormous. And if parents take out anger or frustration they get from elsewhere on their children, the situation is even worse. Portraying the crime rate as a result of excessive belief in punishment when the things criminals went through as children are so disproportionately likely to involve a lot more than just punishment is highly misleading.
I'm not trying to say that "the unchallenged belief in punishment" doesn't cause problems in all of these areas. A lot of people do seriously overestimate how much punishment can accomplish and underestimate the importance of other things. But I think you're painting a highly misleading picture when you blame belief in punishment for issues that have other important causes and contributing factors.
"Nathan A. Barclay" nbarc...@hiwaay.net
I won't quote your whole message, but I find your faith in your own infallibility both obnoxious and insulting - especially when you try to tell me I'm wrong about my own life just because my reactions don't fit your prejudice. That reflects a degree of prejudice that would probably make a brick wall easier to have an intelligent debate with. I doubt that you would be any more likely than a wall to even consider changing your mind, and at least a wall wouldn't insult me along the way.
"Nathan A. Barclay" nbarc...@hiwaay.net
I think I'll respond to this point after all, if only for the benefit of anyone else who might be interested in the issue.
Adults face consequences for far more than just criminal offenses. For example, an adult who is obnoxious to his boss or is unwilling to do his job can generally expect to get fired. That, in turn, can result being unable to buy food, pay the rent, and so forth - especially if a person keeps being obnoxious or lazy and getting fired.
The idea of firing children from their "job" of being their parents' children because they behave obnoxiously, or because they refuse to do a reasonable share of work around the house, or some such would be completely impractical - not to mention reprehensible in the eyes of most civilized people. Therefore, parents are given authority to punish children in other ways that are far less damaging than throwing the children out on the street would be.
In other cases, actions that parents punish children for involve a danger to the child. I suppose one could argue that if a five-year-old girl wants to go wandering through a dangerous part of town alone at night, it is her life at stake and thus should be her choice. But most people take the view that a five-year-old girl doesn't understand the risks well enough to be ready to make that choice for herself. Therefore, we give parents authority to make and enforce rules to protect their children's safety.
Do some parents abuse their power? Yes. Do some parents do too much threatening and not enough discussing and explaining and looking for compromises and alternatives? Yes.
But by and large, the system works. And throwing it out before we're positive that we have something that will work better in the real world, with real parents and real children, would be foolish. To the best of my knowledge, even societies that seek to abolish corporal punishment invariably allow other forms of punishment.
Nathan
Chris cddu...@ouray.cudenver.edu
: But by and large, the system works. And throwing it out before we're : positive that we have something that will work better in the real world, : with real parents and real children, would be foolish. Once again, Nathan, you appear to be talking about win/win cooperative nonpunitive discipline as if it were some sort of new untested concept rather than a set of approaches to dealing with conflict in the parent/child relationship developed decades ago and used successfully in thousands of families.
Chris
Chris cddu...@ouray.cudenver.edu
[snip] : But by and large, the system works. I beg to differ. Punishment is the most heavily overrated child discipline technique. I posted an article by Gordon the other day about workshops he has led, inviting participants to list the ways they reacted to punitive authoritarian control as children. Virtually none of the reactions were desirable. Which of the reactions listed did you engage in as a child, Nathan? Note that I don't ask if you engaged in some of them because I know you did - we all did.
By and large, a system with this many side effects, and with some such side effects on the list manifesting themselves in every child raised under it, doesn't "work" very well at all.
Chris
Doan d...@usc.edu
And the shit is coming out of your mouth again! :-) Nope! I just don't blindly believe the "experts" nor do I believe that INFANTICIDE is ok! But I do believe and have proof that your mouth is FULL OF SHIT! ;-) Doan
Doan d...@usc.edu
On 9 Jun 2004, Chris wrote: Ah! I just love the logic. :-) Isn't this the same argument that you don't like about spanking? Afterall, spanking has been used for thousands of years and BILLIONS of families.
Doan
"R. Steve Walz" rste...@armory.com
Empathy is irrelevant except that it might cause people to be fairly given their freedom, such as children.
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Nonsense, either the child harms others criminally, as in the case of an adult criminal, or else they do what is within their right, just as an adult might. If they are within their rights as an adult, then you have NO right to interfere! The first thing a productive person's actions MUST be is THEIR OWN and VOLUNTARY, or you have produced a time-bomb that will turn on you and the rest of society!! As long as a child remains within their rights, you have NO right to interfere!
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It's NOT either your place OR your right, to interfere with the lives of children if they do not want you to, unless the child has become criminal toward others and committed crimes that adults would be punished for. NOT EVEN IF YOU'RE THEIR PARENT!!!!
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Kids who are well-treated do actually happen to really like, love, and appreciate the help of the people who treat them well, their teachers and others, just as lond as they are not coerced!
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That *IS* the effect of the ***umption of illicit authority, such as that used against children which would NOT and could NOT be used in the same manner upon adults without a revolution!!
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There is no such balance, coercing others always results in evil, because you cannot show me a way in which you can interefere in my life and coerce me that I will not wish quite naturally to kill you for, and if it continued, I would indeed kill you quite dead!!!
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No, he finally says it all and gets it right! People cannot be coerced and bullied as children or else their chief motiavation toward all authority when they are grown will be to wish to destroy it, even if it is duly and democratically constituted.
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Nope, it doesn't. You have a sick neurotic need to find some, any justification for hitting people smaller than you if they don't obey you, and that is nothing but a coward's diseased mental condition!!
It means you're insecure and immature and can't mind your own ****ing business and that you'd best off find a better "hobby" than ****ing with people that way!!
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There's absolutely NO reason for ANYONE to live with someone they can't love any longer than they can stand to. Nobody but insane rapists, delusional stalkers, family annihilators, and wife and child batterers and child mnolestors think otherwise. That kind of thinking is a mental illness!
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People started divorcing the people whose guts they hated as soon as it became legally and socially acceptible to do so in their social circle, and some of it is only just now happening. The trends for divorce, and as well for marriage in these age groups where the divorce rate first skyrocketed shows they are now receding and leaving behind new marriages of friendship in their wake, replacing the old power-oriented bully-victim marriages of the 40's and 50's!! It wasn't a "liberal" or a "permissive" upbringing, because those who brought them up *WERE* rightists, and WERE the very ones getting divorces, and NOT their much more liberal kids!
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If you want good schools, make yours better!
You don't even have any RIGHT to a school that is better than your society provides! SO PROVIDE, YOU STINGY RIGHTIST FREAK!!
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No it isn't, EVERY book on criminology for the last HUNDRED YEARS has said that inmate/patient case studies show that ALL criminality can be traced to child abuse AT OR BELOW the level of illegality!!
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Punishment for ANYTHING BUT absolute criminality NEVER accomplishes ANY GOOD, so stop trying to justify it to your sick self!! And even so, we don't even hit imprisoned criminals!!
Steve
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