Formless wrote:Yes, their ultimate goal is to raise a healthy, well adjusted child. But their subgoal is to cause pain in the hopes of making them obedient. Notice the word substitution. I don't think someone who is obedient to authority merely out of fear is a healthy, well adjusted person. Their subgoal contradicts their ultimate purpose, and they do not understand this fact.
First, why does it follow that inducing a child to be obedient to authority through fear leads to the
adult being obedient to authority through fear? Second, I don't know that spanking necessarily creates obedience to authority out of fear. I know it didn't for me, and I was spanked relatively frequently as a child. I was never afraid of my parents. (The anecdote, being an anecdote, is illustration, not support.)
I see what you are saying, but knowing the mechanisms involved and the known pattern of abuse victims becoming abusers themselves (your own wife did say she has to fight down the urge to parent as her parents did- after all, who are you most likely to learn parenting skills from if not your own parents?) I don't see why its easier to assume that the examples of people who turned out okay were well adjusted because of the abuse and not in spite of it.
I don't know how you could determine between well-adjustment because of abuse, well-adjustment in spite of abuse, and well-adjustment from some confounding factor that is irrelevant to abuse. You might conduct a study and draw tentative conclusions, but there are so many factors and variables at play that it seems like it would be very difficult to come to any reasonably certain conclusion.
And as far as continuing patterns of abuse - couldn't you say the same about the children of good parents becoming good parents themselves just by following what's normal for them? That doesn't seem to be a particular defining mark of abuse, just some property of human minds that applies to abuse.
Some level of corporal punishment may in fact be acceptable. But whipping or beating a kid with a piece of plumbing? I would think the fact that that can kill makes it self evident that that is way over the line, even setting aside psychology.
Yeah, no disagreement here.
A Government founded upon justice, and recognizing the equal rights of all men; claiming higher authority for existence, or sanction for its laws, that nature, reason, and the regularly ascertained will of the people; steadily refusing to put its sword and purse in the service of any religious creed or family is a standing offense to most of the Governments of the world, and to some narrow and bigoted people among ourselves.
F. Douglass
The Pearls recommend pulling a nursing infant's hair (p.7), and describe tripping their non-swimming toddler so she falls into deep water (p.67). They recommend ignoring an infant's bumped head when he falls to the floor, and ignoring skinned knees (p.86). They also say "if your child is roughed-up by peers, rejoice." (p.81) And on p.103 the Pearls say if children lose their shoes, "let them go without until they (the children) can make the money to buy more."
