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Mad Poster
#76 Old 13th Nov 2014 at 10:34 PM
simmer22 and suicidiaparadisia, when you have a household, everyone does some. If the person whose job is to do dishes (and he picked that job) doesn't do them, then no one gets to eat. Including the type II diabetic. Now, I'll grant that we're a non-modern family with ten members and three generations (except for missing electricity and modern medicine, we'd do okay 200 years ago), but the kids get assigned chores based on capability and age and, if possible, preferences. (The younger kids don't get much choice because honestly, they can't do very many things yet. The big kids get a lot more.) So the solution of letting him only do dishes for himself and then cook for himself wouldn't work. I know my kids, all six of them, pretty well. I homeschool. The dynamics are profoundly different from a two or three member family where the child or children attend public school and all adults work full time outside the home, and that's okay. Incidentally, if someone else has to do his chores because he didn't, he doesn't get spanked, he gets to eat unseasoned vegetables, lentils, and rice. It works quite well after about three days or so: adequate nutrition, but when he's sitting there staring at a plate of lentils and rice at breakfast, it's very motivational. It's extra work for me--I'm the main cook, but I'm also the mom, so that's how it goes.
Mistermook, remember that eighty percent or more of arguing on the internet is for the edification of those who are silently reading. Those of us who are set enough in our opinions to post aren't likely to change our minds because someone else posted.
It amuses me how differently we all live, yet we enjoy the same game. And now, someone should go see if the hens and pullets have laid anything--they're just finishing molting or first starting laying--because frozen eggs crack and have to be used right away.

Pics from my game: Sunbee's Simblr Sunbee's Livejournal
"English is a marvelous edged weapon if you know how to wield it." C.J. Cherryh
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Alchemist
#77 Old 15th Nov 2014 at 3:50 PM Last edited by SuicidiaParasidia : 22nd Nov 2014 at 1:17 PM.
Quote: Originally posted by Sunbee
simmer22 and suicidiaparadisia, when you have a household, everyone does some. If the person whose job is to do dishes (and he picked that job) doesn't do them, then no one gets to eat. Including the type II diabetic. Now, I'll grant that we're a non-modern family with ten members and three generations (except for missing electricity and modern medicine, we'd do okay 200 years ago), but the kids get assigned chores based on capability and age and, if possible, preferences. (The younger kids don't get much choice because honestly, they can't do very many things yet. The big kids get a lot more.) So the solution of letting him only do dishes for himself and then cook for himself wouldn't work.


Good thing that isn't at all what I said, then, isn't it. What I said was that he would not get to eat until he did all of the dishes, meaning, I would clean whatever was necessary to provide for myself/others, but would not cook for him until he's done the rest. He wouldn't be made to cook for himself, just clean the dishes as he's asked. He wouldn't be able to use any dishes, either, as I would only be cleaning enough for my and other's* use until he's cleaned them all. Other people would be eating, but not him. That is the purpose and design of the solution.
Granted, I would also never have that many kids. I know what the limits of my capability to manage and sanity are.

*Initially I had been replying to the scenario as if there was only 1 child in the household, admittedly. You didn't add the rest until this reply, just now.

"The more you know, the sadder you get."~ Stephen Colbert
"I'm not going to censor myself to comfort your ignorance." ~ Jon Stewart
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Forum Resident
#78 Old 22nd Nov 2014 at 8:07 PM
I could hardly consider a slap on the ass on the same level as a punch to the face, so I'm going to say no.

The simmer formerly known as Averex
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Mad Poster
#79 Old 22nd Nov 2014 at 11:27 PM
A question for the people who view spanking as an acceptable disciplinary method - what about if your child was misbehaving and a teacher or relative spanked your child? Would you be okay with that?
Theorist
#80 Old 23rd Nov 2014 at 2:01 AM
Again, is it acceptable for every relative or teacher to bath your child? Take them across state lines without your express consent? Get them medical treatment?

You're presuming that a parent isn't already a privileged agent who routinely acts in the stead of the child because they're the child's guardian. Other relatives, teachers, and people off the street? They're not the same legal entity. There a thousand different ways a parent makes decisions on the behalf of a child every waking moment, whether they have the child's consent or approval. They don't have to ask permission because permission is presumed, because generally there has to be a demonstration of explicitly detailed criminal activities, a change of legal guardianship, or the child's graduation to adulthood to revoke that privilege.

They say there are no stupid questions, but it's a terribly uneducated one. You might as well ask why, if you're allowed to wash your ass, why strangers aren't allowed to while you sleep.
Mad Poster
#81 Old 23rd Nov 2014 at 4:06 AM
Your examples aren't very good. Don't see how spanking a child is in any way equivalent to bathing a child since it does not involve nudity and, at least at school, there are no bath facilities. Taking a child across state lines or anywhere without parental permission is called kidnapping - that's a crime. Since spanking is legal and is such a valuable disciplinary tool, why should teachers not have access to it? For those kids for whom non-corporal punishments don't work and who just refuse to listen - instead teachers are expected to keep order verbally, poor things. /sarcasm
Theorist
#82 Old 23rd Nov 2014 at 5:18 AM
My examples are exact. I'll try to break it down into smaller parts.

You fling yourself at the nudity as if nudity were the legal issue, but it's really about the strange legal landscape of incompetency and, to phrase it inexactly but more or less properly, "possession" that's inherent in guardianship versus a responsible agent like a teacher. You can give your kids a bath for pretty much the same reason you're allowed to give yourself a bath, legally speaking. You act in their stead. Teachers aren't guardians. They're given limited agency in the stead of guardians, they're responsible for distinct periods of time with clear delineations of authority: For instance, they are responsible for teaching science, but not religion. They are responsible for feeding children safe food for lunch, but not dinner. A parent taking a child across state lines isn't kidnapping. Why? Because they're acting in their stead, as legally responsible authorities that are fully allowed to take children wherever they like (with some fringe distinctions.) I can't make you go away with me to Montana. A teacher can't make a child go away to Montana. Clearly, the legal principle is different for teachers and strangers, for adults and children, for guardians and parents versus evil clowns escaped from the circus. What teachers might be asked to do versus what they're intrinsically allowed to do is clearly not in any way the same principles that hold sway for parents and guardians then. Close relatives? The same...even noncustodial parents, or parents who've had certain authorities specifically removed? Different.

So again, it's an uneducated question. It presumes authorities exist that simply do not, under a presumed legal framework that is suggested to be similar but is not. The only way a teacher could possess such an authority would be if they were legally granted it by the guardian...but I'll go ahead and squash that, since the parental rights themselves (like any rights) are granted by the state, which does have an interest in protecting children even if I disagree with their presumed quality of interest when it comes to removing parental rights except in extreme cases. Except in rather outlier cases, like perhaps a boarding school or something, granting that sort of access to parental authority would seem to me to be a fairly large hole to drive through in the entire argument for authority in the first place. Like granting police officers the authority to perform executions and perform on the spot trials, so to speak... Presumably with actual parents there's an expectation of a commitment to act in a child's best interest, more or less granted by tradition or genetics or culture or something. most parents do seem to actually care for their kids whether they're perfectly excellent at demonstration or not. Now, I realize that teachers have some interest in children, but I can't imagine that it's a parental sort of interest. Given that teachers and students can, upon majority and absence of authority do things like get married and have kids together is a pretty thorough debunking to me that it's clearly not a parental interest or even a close relation sort of interest, legally speaking. But you're describing granting a parental authority, and clearly, if only from this thread alone, a controversial one with some clear potentials for abuse. Just like bathing your kids, or transporting them against their will (and no, it's not kidnapping to transport a child against their will, it's kidnapping to transport a child against the will of their guardian.)

A child is not a full person. Not in a legal sense. They are human shaped, but they are not in possession of the full breadth of human rights you or I enjoy. Instead they enjoy a sort of legal limbo where they start out as something almost like a possession and slowly grow into more self-authority, on a scale entirely not laid out in explicit terms by the courts, until they reach their majority. But it's important to understand that they start from as that strange "almost possession" as possessions of their parents, and other people and organizations, no matter how much time they spend with the child or how responsible they are, don't start from the same legal frame of authority. And yes, it's all kind of uncomfortable and not entirely a good fit, which is yet another reason why the notion of absolutes dictated by the State is kind of bullshit. Governments can't quite ever figure out what kids are legally. You've got our esteemed naysayers from Europe making declarations that suggest that they think that children are full people - except that the implications of that are children who can vote (or you're denying them the right to vote based on their age, not competency like in the USA) and suddenly you're not able to take a better job in the next state over because you're suddenly not able to make decisions for children they don't agree with, the same as you would not be allowed to for any adult. It's worth noting that this legal notion is entirely new, not battle tested with several hundred years of Common Law court battles. What the Germans, for instance, are doing with guardianship is an experiment. There's no clear reasoning behind their legal presentation, it just is. Frankly, I think it's nuts and probably grandstanding rather than practical governance.

Being allowed to spank your child isn't the same as beating your child. Harm is a fairly amorphous sort of term anyways, but given that parents are fully responsible for children (and in a way that's unique and an entirely different sort of authority than other responsible agents in a child's life) I think it's clear that in the main, like it or not, preferable or imperfect, the State's case must in general find in favor of that authority except in fairly explicit, well-defined and documentable cases if for no other reason than the State, having revoked that privilege, must also fully replace it. And the State sucks at playing mommy and daddy. That's true for over here, it's true for where you live, and it's true for everywhere anyone lives. "Good" orphanages and fosterings are the exception, not the rule. Everywhere. So basically when you're declaring something a crime that revokes parental authority, you've got to step up and recognize that you're suggesting your shitty state system has to be better than what you're "protecting" the child from. Sometimes that's demonstrably and uncontroversially true, but I think it's ludicrous to lay that sort of thing like a bow shot across every potential slap on the ass someone gives their child.

Have I said legally speaking enough in this post? I think so. It's important though, because whether or not spanking is good or bad is different from whether or not it's right to classify it in the same legal terms as a "beating." As I've said before in this thread, I'm not "pro" spanking. I'm just entirely not in favor of saying it's a crime, because it's not and it should not be. What people are allowed to do and what's perfectly in their best interests are often fairly different things, just like the needs of different children are. What's not different? Governments make shitty parents. That's pretty much universal, and I've even been fortunate to know a fair amount of "good" foster families. But you know they're the "good ones" because the bad ones aren't just a little bad, when a government gets parenting wrong it's... almost inconceivable how bad it can be. Promoting that as a general rule for a swat on the butt is actually offensive to me, because it reeks of naive idealism and blind faith in government without any actual exposure to the potential or existing flaws in the sort of system you're implicitly promoting.
Mad Poster
#83 Old 23rd Nov 2014 at 5:21 AM
Perhaps slightly unrelated, but I found this today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1Y0cuufVGI
It's a video about how giving kids fewer rules actually turned into something positive at a school. Probably won't work in the US, due to people being prone to suing schools east and west, but still a nice idea. Kids are mollycoddled nowadays, and they've got too many rules to follow, so they're not allowed to stretch their physical or mental limits. The school actually got some very positive results. 'No' rules in the playground actually led to calmer kids more interested in learning, there's less bullying, and fewer kids get hurt in the playground.

Anyway I'm pretty sure that spanking is all about the parents' attitude. If spanking is not a part of the toolbox, then there are always ways around it. A lot of parents manage their kids fine without ever having to spank them. Most teachers with the right attitude also manage whole classrooms without any problems, without ever feeling they need to spank any of the kids. I've had several confident and strong-minded teachers who were also really nice, and none of the kids dared to cause trouble because they respected the teacher too much to even try. Other teachers were too unsure of themselves, and the kids felt that they could do almost anything they wanted. The same goes with parents.

Call it what you want, and part it up in degrees by all means, but using any degree of force to hit a kid as a diciplinary tool or otherwise is still the same as beating a defenceless little human being. If beating an adult is supposed to be illegal, then why should it be legal to beat a defenceless kid? Might make sense to some people, but it certainly does not make sense to me. Some kids might end up not having any problems later on, but other kids will, and this isn't something you can foresee when you give the kid that first blow. However loving and caring you are as a parent in any other situation, the fact that someone feel the need to justify beating/slapping/spanking/whatever their own kid -sets off blaring warning signals in my head, at least.

Spanking kids tend to lead to the kid being afraid of the spanking, and more often than not they'll not see it in accordance with the actual situation that led to the spanking, at least not in the right way. They'll be afraid of getting spanked, instead of understanding that what they did in a particular situation was a bad thing to do, and why it was bad. Kids don't easily see the big picture, particularly when they're young. What happened two minutes ago is perhaps already flown away when they get their punishment by spanking.

I've always thought that spanking is more of a last resource anger management for the parent than a proper diciplinary tool. If we can't even find non-violent ways to raise our own kids, no wonder we can't achieve world peace.
Mad Poster
#84 Old 24th Nov 2014 at 1:48 AM
Quote: Originally posted by Mistermook
My examples are exact. I'll try to break it down into smaller parts.

You fling yourself at the nudity as if nudity were the legal issue, but it's really about the strange legal landscape of incompetency and, to phrase it inexactly but more or less properly, "possession" that's inherent in guardianship versus a responsible agent like a teacher. You can give your kids a bath for pretty much the same reason you're allowed to give yourself a bath, legally speaking. You act in their stead. Teachers aren't guardians. They're given limited agency in the stead of guardians, they're responsible for distinct periods of time with clear delineations of authority: For instance, they are responsible for teaching science, but not religion. They are responsible for feeding children safe food for lunch, but not dinner. A parent taking a child across state lines isn't kidnapping. Why? Because they're acting in their stead, as legally responsible authorities that are fully allowed to take children wherever they like (with some fringe distinctions.) I can't make you go away with me to Montana. A teacher can't make a child go away to Montana. Clearly, the legal principle is different for teachers and strangers, for adults and children, for guardians and parents versus evil clowns escaped from the circus. What teachers might be asked to do versus what they're intrinsically allowed to do is clearly not in any way the same principles that hold sway for parents and guardians then. Close relatives? The same...even noncustodial parents, or parents who've had certain authorities specifically removed? Different.

So again, it's an uneducated question. It presumes authorities exist that simply do not, under a presumed legal framework that is suggested to be similar but is not. The only way a teacher could possess such an authority would be if they were legally granted it by the guardian...but I'll go ahead and squash that, since the parental rights themselves (like any rights) are granted by the state, which does have an interest in protecting children even if I disagree with their presumed quality of interest when it comes to removing parental rights except in extreme cases. Except in rather outlier cases, like perhaps a boarding school or something, granting that sort of access to parental authority would seem to me to be a fairly large hole to drive through in the entire argument for authority in the first place. Like granting police officers the authority to perform executions and perform on the spot trials, so to speak... Presumably with actual parents there's an expectation of a commitment to act in a child's best interest, more or less granted by tradition or genetics or culture or something. most parents do seem to actually care for their kids whether they're perfectly excellent at demonstration or not. Now, I realize that teachers have some interest in children, but I can't imagine that it's a parental sort of interest. Given that teachers and students can, upon majority and absence of authority do things like get married and have kids together is a pretty thorough debunking to me that it's clearly not a parental interest or even a close relation sort of interest, legally speaking. But you're describing granting a parental authority, and clearly, if only from this thread alone, a controversial one with some clear potentials for abuse. Just like bathing your kids, or transporting them against their will (and no, it's not kidnapping to transport a child against their will, it's kidnapping to transport a child against the will of their guardian.)

A child is not a full person. Not in a legal sense. They are human shaped, but they are not in possession of the full breadth of human rights you or I enjoy. Instead they enjoy a sort of legal limbo where they start out as something almost like a possession and slowly grow into more self-authority, on a scale entirely not laid out in explicit terms by the courts, until they reach their majority. But it's important to understand that they start from as that strange "almost possession" as possessions of their parents, and other people and organizations, no matter how much time they spend with the child or how responsible they are, don't start from the same legal frame of authority. And yes, it's all kind of uncomfortable and not entirely a good fit, which is yet another reason why the notion of absolutes dictated by the State is kind of bullshit. Governments can't quite ever figure out what kids are legally. You've got our esteemed naysayers from Europe making declarations that suggest that they think that children are full people - except that the implications of that are children who can vote (or you're denying them the right to vote based on their age, not competency like in the USA) and suddenly you're not able to take a better job in the next state over because you're suddenly not able to make decisions for children they don't agree with, the same as you would not be allowed to for any adult. It's worth noting that this legal notion is entirely new, not battle tested with several hundred years of Common Law court battles. What the Germans, for instance, are doing with guardianship is an experiment. There's no clear reasoning behind their legal presentation, it just is. Frankly, I think it's nuts and probably grandstanding rather than practical governance.

Being allowed to spank your child isn't the same as beating your child. Harm is a fairly amorphous sort of term anyways, but given that parents are fully responsible for children (and in a way that's unique and an entirely different sort of authority than other responsible agents in a child's life) I think it's clear that in the main, like it or not, preferable or imperfect, the State's case must in general find in favor of that authority except in fairly explicit, well-defined and documentable cases if for no other reason than the State, having revoked that privilege, must also fully replace it. And the State sucks at playing mommy and daddy. That's true for over here, it's true for where you live, and it's true for everywhere anyone lives. "Good" orphanages and fosterings are the exception, not the rule. Everywhere. So basically when you're declaring something a crime that revokes parental authority, you've got to step up and recognize that you're suggesting your shitty state system has to be better than what you're "protecting" the child from. Sometimes that's demonstrably and uncontroversially true, but I think it's ludicrous to lay that sort of thing like a bow shot across every potential slap on the ass someone gives their child.

Have I said legally speaking enough in this post? I think so. It's important though, because whether or not spanking is good or bad is different from whether or not it's right to classify it in the same legal terms as a "beating." As I've said before in this thread, I'm not "pro" spanking. I'm just entirely not in favor of saying it's a crime, because it's not and it should not be. What people are allowed to do and what's perfectly in their best interests are often fairly different things, just like the needs of different children are. What's not different? Governments make shitty parents. That's pretty much universal, and I've even been fortunate to know a fair amount of "good" foster families. But you know they're the "good ones" because the bad ones aren't just a little bad, when a government gets parenting wrong it's... almost inconceivable how bad it can be. Promoting that as a general rule for a swat on the butt is actually offensive to me, because it reeks of naive idealism and blind faith in government without any actual exposure to the potential or existing flaws in the sort of system you're implicitly promoting.


I don't think I ever said that spanking should be made illegal, but maybe I did somewhere. What I question is its efficacy and value. And I'm aware that it's legal in most places. And I just found out that corporal punishment in schools is legal in 19 states - not sure though how it works.
Tend to agree that spanking shouldn't be made illegal as such a law probably wouldn't help children much and might be used to target minorities
Theorist
#85 Old 24th Nov 2014 at 8:36 PM
Quote: Originally posted by RoseCity
I don't think I ever said that spanking should be made illegal, but maybe I did somewhere.

Regardless of your personal specifics, it's been noted by others that it is illegal in some nations and that's been represented as a preferable state of affairs than a somewhat more lenient interpretation of what constitutes a "beating." But indeed, the OP's language itself and everyone insistence on colloquially bringing the battery of adults into the equation seems to indicate that they've somehow imagined children to have a legal status that is not purely factual. Society really doesn't have an problem with adults beating the shit out of each other except as it pertains to order in my opinion - whether it's particularly civilized or not, until fairly recently there was a clear understanding that one man could knock another man absolutely senseless with no real remedy except knocking him senseless back or a civil claim (because civil claims can be brought for nearly anything, and really have a lot more to do with the social standing and finances of the people involved than justice a lot of the time.) As long as "reasonable people" generally understood he "had it coming" or no "permanent" harm was done, I suppose it was more or less safer and more socially endorsed than other normal options.

And I'm not informing this as support for that, but as a way of indicating that Common Law really, really does push evaluations by the mythical "reasonable person" more than they do absolutes. What constitutes a spanking and what constitutes child abuse has certainly changed over the years, and in case anyone's missing the implication, I'm suggesting that part of the rationale for that might be that the alternates I've mentioned in the hands of the State for child-raising have improved by some measures (or perhaps we simply imagine them to be improved, as a matter of ego.)

Quote: Originally posted by RoseCity
What I question is its efficacy and value.

I think it's absolutely right to question it's efficiency and value. My general opposition is the notion that A) non-parents or the state somehow know what's best for every child and B) by drawing a bright criminal response against a parent there's a implication of such, and as you've said the potential for abuse seems absolutely staggering. I've already heard molestation charges in divorce hearings that seem to amount to little more than a parent giving a child a bath now, adding "spanking" to criminal behavior seems to potentially lead to charges for pushing children out the door to school or even playing sports with them. I'm not happy with the system we've got not, but I don't think the remedy is lowering the bars that already exist. What needs to happen is for child endangerment services to be fully funded and better trained, fostering systems better regulated and with better oversight, better training for parenthood in general, and probably most importantly and most overlooked, better general wealth equality and economy. People who are compensated well at their jobs, don't work excessive hours, and have stable economic situations are better parents because they have the time and inclination to be so.
 
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