I was spanked as a child. Not frequently (maybe 5 times over 15 years), but enough that I knew pain was a possible punishment. Me and my brother were very "active" kids (apparently, people called us "the demolition team") so I guess it wasn't easy for our parents to control us; however, the more frequent punishment was "kneeling looking at the wall" - that one was very effective, as it calmed us down and discouraged similar behavior in the future. But, without the fear of pain, I don't think we would see our parents as authoritative figures.
My brothers and I were also spanked a fair amount as kids (my parents were sorta fundies back then, but they got better). It worked alright to help enforce some discipline. I certainly don't bear them any ill will for it.
But with my kids, I never did that. First it seemed the literature was against it. But I wasn't very confident in that by itself. Punishment data could be too dependent on other factors. Like reports of having a lot of books in the house being a good thing -- it's more an indicator of what kind of family you are in the first place.
The reason I cannot spank my kids is that I cannot find a rationally justifiable reason to, ethically. How can i answer if my kids say "Michael, why are you allowed to hit us?" I'm assaulting because I've physical superiority and legal protection! That does not sound defensible, even if the ends is that it'll make them a better person (which isn't clear).
In general, I've treated them as the autonomous beings they are. I enforce some things against their will (e.g. try to limit shit food and shit TV). But there, the reason is because they lack the understanding to make good decisions. But violating them physically - using direct pain as a response to a non-physical threat - seems to have no logical path allowing it.
But hitting your child is not just legal, it's encouraged by many. People will spare no effort rationalizing justifications for it.
To see how preposterous this is, use the reversal test.[1] If hitting children was unheard of, do you think society would move toward doing it? We've eliminated corporal punishment in almost every other domain. Drill sergeants can't hit soldiers. Even hitting prisoners is a violation of the 8th Amendment. Hitting children is historical cruft that needs to be eliminated.
Edit: You removed the line saying you would hit your children. Well, at least I've quoted it.
These comparisons with adults are intellectually dishonest. What would you do if two kids were fighting? Treat them as adults, throw them into jail for 5-10 years? Or would you use some shorter-term form of punishment?
> Edit: You removed the line saying you would hit your children. Well, at least I've quoted it.
Yes, I wanted to A/B test which paragraph was causing the down-votes.
First, assault & battery are misdemeanors. They are punishable by up to a year in prison, and maximum sentences are rare.
Second, violence is not acceptable as punishment, but it is acceptable (often necessary) in defense of self and others. If people are fighting, it's fine to break them up. That said, I doubt a larger adult needs to resort to blows to stop two kids fighting.
Third, there are plenty of punishments that don't involve hitting. It's common to restrict access to TV or games. If all else fails, there's the dreaded, "No phone for a week."
> You assume that physical violnce is effective. Research shows otherwise.
Did you read the article? Research shows that corporal punishment can be effective, if done in the right way (i.e. don'y hit your kids when they are angry).
> Physical violence is used by bad perents who don't know effective methods of discipline.
We disagree with the definition of bad parent, apparently. I think my parents were very good. Of course, as I said initially, they very rarely resorted to physical punishment,
but me and my brother knew that the threat was credible. Of course, I don't think any of their friends would agree with them, but then, none of them had comparably active and difficult children.
“Domestic corporal punishment” has been completely illegal in Sweden since 1979. It is upheld and anyone caught doing it risks having their children removed, and if you are seen doing it in public, expect several people to react and/or report you immediately. (I.e. it’s not one of those laws which is frequently ignored – it is an established social norm.)
I would say that the population of Sweden has not suffered demonstrably from this. Make of this fact what you will.
I highly doubt it if the children are simply being yanked out of their homes simply for being spanked. That's an abhorent practice, and everything I've heard about Sweden's practice leads me to believe it is abhorrent (it holds 3 times as many foster children than germany with a significantly smaller population).
The abuses that can go on in the foster system are horrendous. The abuse rates are exceptionally high and Sweden is known as the country in Europe where the number of kids in foster care is excessively high and has resulted in a system with limited oversight.
Sorry, but you're naive if you think good is the universal result of this. I have friends who were beaten until hospitalization in foster care only to be handed back, and that's not even talking about the sexual abuse rates prevelant in the systems and every statistic I've seen suggest Sweden is no better and could in fact be worse.
I have a family member who has foster kids, and the stories they have are terrible. All of them were bounced around, all had been beaten at some point by one of their various care takers.
Sorry, but you sound like you've burried your heads in the sand and think you've actually fixed a problem. Didn't your government recently have to pay out to foster children because of the overagressiveness of the social services in taking kids out of their homes.
If the parents continually and habitually spank their children, then yes, they will be removed. But you must remember that this is a society in which this is abnormal behavior; it is not your society. Please do not assume that your UK experience of social acceptance of this practice (or, for that matter, foster care and families) translate to Sweden.
Also, if we are talking about a one-time incident, that’s a different matter – I said parents risk losing the kids, no more.
Except there was the Italian politician a couple years ago who was arrested because he dragged his kid back into a restaurant by his collar. Social Services tried to take his kid away until it came out who he was.
I'm not assuming my experience with the UK system is indicative of the Swedish one, but statistics don't lie and the abuses in foster care are at similar rates in the major European countries and all of the anglosphere with varying rates of acceptance of corporal punishment.
I know a study in 2010 put the session abuse rate against males in the Swedish system at 42%, which again is against males who are at low risk of sexual abuse.
Seriously, you might want to look into your own system before you tout it as an example to the world, because its an example of what not to do.
Again, unless Swedes are mass murdering sociopaths there is no reason for it to have 3 times as many foster children than Germany. That's a gross amount of children your system has exposed to sexual abuse.
As you seem to have a lot of insight into this topic: What do you think are the reasons for high abuse rates in foster families? I would think that the hugh number of resonable nice people interested in adoptin children in combination with the possibility to screen them would lead to an above-average care-quality in foster families. Why not? I could imagine that people apply for the wrong (financial) reasons (easy to fix), children that are difficult to deal with because of their history or a lack of social bond between the children and their parents (both hard to fix). Any insights on this issue?
From what I've seen the biggest issue is that people do it for the money, which I think is likely the primary cause for physical abuse in the system.
I think sexual abuse in the system comes from the targeting of at risk youths, which is why Sweden disturbs me so much. Departmental reviews in England & Wales and Scotland report around 20% allegations of sexual abuse in foster homes, so Sweden having 42% suggest a severe lack of auditing of their carers for histories of abuse.
I think compounding issues are 50% of kids have a serious medical condition, 20% have mental health issues. So the stressors are significantly higher on carers, which in turn is why foster parents are paid so along with child care benefits generally a parent can be home to take care of the children.
The abolition of the orphanage system inundated the foster system, so we went from 1 person caring for 5+ kids to 1 or 2 caring for 1 kid. I don't think the orphanage system was necessarily better, but it would be much easier to eliminate abuses.
Honestly I think putting abusers through court ordered anger management and parenting classes would be far better than putting kids in foster care, because the fact is adoption rates decline with age and far too many kids graduate the system, because teenagers simply don't get adopted.
I think modernising the orphanage system would alleviate some of this issue. If teenagers aren't being adopted take the practical approach where they can be in an orphanage, make friends and have a social worker who's invested in their progress, which would mean the foster system would need lower financial incentives and thereby you would get more kind-hearted people and less people wanting the money.
It's a supply and demand issue essentially, and subsidizing demand always inevitably leads to problems.
It's one of the large pains in our European system (or at least in Germany), that indeed we have no good process to give children from abusive families a better life. Still, corporal punishment is frowned upon in Germany (and illegal) and I see no negative effects. In my parents' generation, it was normal behavior for boys to beat each other up from time to time. That is no longer the case, we live in a society that is mostly free of violence. I like that.
The UK system was similar. It alternated between being ineffective and overzealous. Either kids were left with abusers until something horrendous happened, or kids were too willingly taken from homes and put into the foster system where inevitably worse things happened.
My friend had been put into foster care because of "suspicions of abuse", she'd had frequent broken bones, etc, but most had occurred outside of her fathers care (one was from falling out a tree), so when he slapped her in public she got taken away, because they alleged her record was all him without actually asking anyone else about it.
When in foster care she was frequently beaten bloody. She went to hospital once and got told she was being sent back to the foster carers while they looked into transferring her - she didn't want to be transferred she wanted to go home where she was safe.
Ultimately she ran away and started living with friends, and when social services caught wind everyone started covering her.
At 15 she intentionally got pregnant, because she knew she could get given a council apartment at 16 and be freed from the system. She considered herself lucky because no one tried to rape her.
It's anecdotal, but the abuse rates in foster care is insanely high. The risk has to be weighed heavily against the reward.
From everything I've heard Sweden's model is the most overzealous in europe, the governments had to compensate many of the kids taken by the system. I'm also curious of the rates of abuse in Sweden's system, because if its on par with other western countries the sexual abuse rates on females will be around 30%. I honestly think every woman would prefer to be spanked by their parent rather than be put at an unacceptable high risk of rape. And again, I've heard nothing on Sweden's foster system being an improvement over any other European country.
> It is upheld and anyone caught doing it risks having their children removed, and if you are seen doing it in public, expect several people to react and/or report you immediately.
Did the law prevent the children to be spanked, or just made it a taboo topic and pushed all corporal punishment in the realm of the private home? I wonder if there have been any studies made about the actual amount of corporal punishment today (an article [1] from 2009 says that 10% of children are spanked).
I can think of three things which could possibly combine to form the 10%:
1. Outliers. People whose family culture has not changed since the 1800's and still practice it. These are no doubt uncommon statistical outliers, but they surely do exist.
2. People who do think it is wrong, but have low self-control and/or substance abuse problems, which makes them do things they are later ashamed of.
3. Immigrants. Immigrants from other places with other cultures can hardly be expected to adopt Swedish culture on this issue overnight – these things most likely take generations to be fully ingrained.
So yes, it is a “taboo” – it isn’t accepted at all.
School nurses and daycare personnel are trained to keep a lookout for any signs or stories from children, so anyone who does it will have to do it with the premeditated aim of doing it without anyone finding out, or else someone will find out. As I said, it is an ingrained social norm, not simply a thing which one does not talk about.
I would only add that the change in social norm can be seen already from 1958 when all school corporal punishment were banned. Seems rather reasonable that it took then two generations for family culture to not only change, but make it illegal as well.
Same in Germany, if a kid goes to a doctor with bruises or other physical damage the kid has to explain to the doctor what happened and the parents will be told to not interfere
My wife was arriving at our house. She parked on the street because the driveway was full. Our two-year-old daughter went running out to meet Mommy. Then a car came flying around the corner (since we lived at the top of a T intersection, that means that the car was right there.) We both yelled at our daughter to stop. She did, and the car went past.
Two houses later, the car ran over a cat. I went up to see if there was anything I could do. There wasn't, but I got to see what the underside of a cat's head looks like after a car has run over the top side.
I will do almost anything to have that not happen to my daughter's head.
But the problem is, my two-year-old daughter can't understand what 3000 pounds of car at 30 MPH are going to do to her. It's totally outside of her comprehension. Yes, we can tell her that playing in the road hurts, but there's no way she can really get it.
But she can learn that, when Mommy or Daddy tell me to stop and I don't, it hurts every single time. (The consistency is important. Most of the time, it doesn't matter at all if she doesn't stop when I tell her, it merely annoys me. But once in a while, it really matters. It may even mean life or death. And I can't tell which ones it will be in advance.)
You could say, "You don't have to do that. Just fence the front yard." And, sure that would work - for that issue. But then there's chemicals. "Well, install child locks on the cabinets." Sure, we did that. But there's still going to be that one time that you had it out on the counter and the phone rang...
Now, can this be overdone? Absolutely. Should reason replace it as early as possible? Definitely. But when my children were young, I spanked them to teach them that disobedience hurts. I did this, not because I hated them, but because I loved them and wanted to be able to protect them against a world that has more dangers than they knew - dangers that could hurt a lot more than a spanking.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 63.1 ms ] threadBut with my kids, I never did that. First it seemed the literature was against it. But I wasn't very confident in that by itself. Punishment data could be too dependent on other factors. Like reports of having a lot of books in the house being a good thing -- it's more an indicator of what kind of family you are in the first place.
The reason I cannot spank my kids is that I cannot find a rationally justifiable reason to, ethically. How can i answer if my kids say "Michael, why are you allowed to hit us?" I'm assaulting because I've physical superiority and legal protection! That does not sound defensible, even if the ends is that it'll make them a better person (which isn't clear).
In general, I've treated them as the autonomous beings they are. I enforce some things against their will (e.g. try to limit shit food and shit TV). But there, the reason is because they lack the understanding to make good decisions. But violating them physically - using direct pain as a response to a non-physical threat - seems to have no logical path allowing it.
If you hit an adult, it's assault.
If you hit a dog, it's animal abuse.
If you hit your spouse, it's domestic violence.
But hitting your child is not just legal, it's encouraged by many. People will spare no effort rationalizing justifications for it.
To see how preposterous this is, use the reversal test.[1] If hitting children was unheard of, do you think society would move toward doing it? We've eliminated corporal punishment in almost every other domain. Drill sergeants can't hit soldiers. Even hitting prisoners is a violation of the 8th Amendment. Hitting children is historical cruft that needs to be eliminated.
Edit: You removed the line saying you would hit your children. Well, at least I've quoted it.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversal_test
> Edit: You removed the line saying you would hit your children. Well, at least I've quoted it.
Yes, I wanted to A/B test which paragraph was causing the down-votes.
Second, violence is not acceptable as punishment, but it is acceptable (often necessary) in defense of self and others. If people are fighting, it's fine to break them up. That said, I doubt a larger adult needs to resort to blows to stop two kids fighting.
Third, there are plenty of punishments that don't involve hitting. It's common to restrict access to TV or games. If all else fails, there's the dreaded, "No phone for a week."
Except, of course, if you're limiting the TV anyways, and you don't allow kids to have (smart-)phones.
In general, I agree, there are other kinds of punishment, but they might sometimes not be effective. Then what?
And if you try beating your child and it doesn't work, what then?
Physical violence is used by bad perents who don't know effective methods of discipline.
Did you read the article? Research shows that corporal punishment can be effective, if done in the right way (i.e. don'y hit your kids when they are angry).
> Physical violence is used by bad perents who don't know effective methods of discipline.
We disagree with the definition of bad parent, apparently. I think my parents were very good. Of course, as I said initially, they very rarely resorted to physical punishment, but me and my brother knew that the threat was credible. Of course, I don't think any of their friends would agree with them, but then, none of them had comparably active and difficult children.
I would say that the population of Sweden has not suffered demonstrably from this. Make of this fact what you will.
The abuses that can go on in the foster system are horrendous. The abuse rates are exceptionally high and Sweden is known as the country in Europe where the number of kids in foster care is excessively high and has resulted in a system with limited oversight.
Sorry, but you're naive if you think good is the universal result of this. I have friends who were beaten until hospitalization in foster care only to be handed back, and that's not even talking about the sexual abuse rates prevelant in the systems and every statistic I've seen suggest Sweden is no better and could in fact be worse.
I have a family member who has foster kids, and the stories they have are terrible. All of them were bounced around, all had been beaten at some point by one of their various care takers.
Sorry, but you sound like you've burried your heads in the sand and think you've actually fixed a problem. Didn't your government recently have to pay out to foster children because of the overagressiveness of the social services in taking kids out of their homes.
Also, if we are talking about a one-time incident, that’s a different matter – I said parents risk losing the kids, no more.
I'm not assuming my experience with the UK system is indicative of the Swedish one, but statistics don't lie and the abuses in foster care are at similar rates in the major European countries and all of the anglosphere with varying rates of acceptance of corporal punishment.
I know a study in 2010 put the session abuse rate against males in the Swedish system at 42%, which again is against males who are at low risk of sexual abuse.
Seriously, you might want to look into your own system before you tout it as an example to the world, because its an example of what not to do.
Again, unless Swedes are mass murdering sociopaths there is no reason for it to have 3 times as many foster children than Germany. That's a gross amount of children your system has exposed to sexual abuse.
I think sexual abuse in the system comes from the targeting of at risk youths, which is why Sweden disturbs me so much. Departmental reviews in England & Wales and Scotland report around 20% allegations of sexual abuse in foster homes, so Sweden having 42% suggest a severe lack of auditing of their carers for histories of abuse.
I think compounding issues are 50% of kids have a serious medical condition, 20% have mental health issues. So the stressors are significantly higher on carers, which in turn is why foster parents are paid so along with child care benefits generally a parent can be home to take care of the children.
The abolition of the orphanage system inundated the foster system, so we went from 1 person caring for 5+ kids to 1 or 2 caring for 1 kid. I don't think the orphanage system was necessarily better, but it would be much easier to eliminate abuses.
Honestly I think putting abusers through court ordered anger management and parenting classes would be far better than putting kids in foster care, because the fact is adoption rates decline with age and far too many kids graduate the system, because teenagers simply don't get adopted.
I think modernising the orphanage system would alleviate some of this issue. If teenagers aren't being adopted take the practical approach where they can be in an orphanage, make friends and have a social worker who's invested in their progress, which would mean the foster system would need lower financial incentives and thereby you would get more kind-hearted people and less people wanting the money.
It's a supply and demand issue essentially, and subsidizing demand always inevitably leads to problems.
My friend had been put into foster care because of "suspicions of abuse", she'd had frequent broken bones, etc, but most had occurred outside of her fathers care (one was from falling out a tree), so when he slapped her in public she got taken away, because they alleged her record was all him without actually asking anyone else about it.
When in foster care she was frequently beaten bloody. She went to hospital once and got told she was being sent back to the foster carers while they looked into transferring her - she didn't want to be transferred she wanted to go home where she was safe.
Ultimately she ran away and started living with friends, and when social services caught wind everyone started covering her.
At 15 she intentionally got pregnant, because she knew she could get given a council apartment at 16 and be freed from the system. She considered herself lucky because no one tried to rape her.
It's anecdotal, but the abuse rates in foster care is insanely high. The risk has to be weighed heavily against the reward.
From everything I've heard Sweden's model is the most overzealous in europe, the governments had to compensate many of the kids taken by the system. I'm also curious of the rates of abuse in Sweden's system, because if its on par with other western countries the sexual abuse rates on females will be around 30%. I honestly think every woman would prefer to be spanked by their parent rather than be put at an unacceptable high risk of rape. And again, I've heard nothing on Sweden's foster system being an improvement over any other European country.
Did the law prevent the children to be spanked, or just made it a taboo topic and pushed all corporal punishment in the realm of the private home? I wonder if there have been any studies made about the actual amount of corporal punishment today (an article [1] from 2009 says that 10% of children are spanked).
[1]: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2009/1005/p06s10-woeu....
1. Outliers. People whose family culture has not changed since the 1800's and still practice it. These are no doubt uncommon statistical outliers, but they surely do exist.
2. People who do think it is wrong, but have low self-control and/or substance abuse problems, which makes them do things they are later ashamed of.
3. Immigrants. Immigrants from other places with other cultures can hardly be expected to adopt Swedish culture on this issue overnight – these things most likely take generations to be fully ingrained.
So yes, it is a “taboo” – it isn’t accepted at all.
School nurses and daycare personnel are trained to keep a lookout for any signs or stories from children, so anyone who does it will have to do it with the premeditated aim of doing it without anyone finding out, or else someone will find out. As I said, it is an ingrained social norm, not simply a thing which one does not talk about.
Two houses later, the car ran over a cat. I went up to see if there was anything I could do. There wasn't, but I got to see what the underside of a cat's head looks like after a car has run over the top side.
I will do almost anything to have that not happen to my daughter's head.
But the problem is, my two-year-old daughter can't understand what 3000 pounds of car at 30 MPH are going to do to her. It's totally outside of her comprehension. Yes, we can tell her that playing in the road hurts, but there's no way she can really get it.
But she can learn that, when Mommy or Daddy tell me to stop and I don't, it hurts every single time. (The consistency is important. Most of the time, it doesn't matter at all if she doesn't stop when I tell her, it merely annoys me. But once in a while, it really matters. It may even mean life or death. And I can't tell which ones it will be in advance.)
You could say, "You don't have to do that. Just fence the front yard." And, sure that would work - for that issue. But then there's chemicals. "Well, install child locks on the cabinets." Sure, we did that. But there's still going to be that one time that you had it out on the counter and the phone rang...
Now, can this be overdone? Absolutely. Should reason replace it as early as possible? Definitely. But when my children were young, I spanked them to teach them that disobedience hurts. I did this, not because I hated them, but because I loved them and wanted to be able to protect them against a world that has more dangers than they knew - dangers that could hurt a lot more than a spanking.