I'm happy I live in a civilized country

[frualeydis]

I just wrote a long response to a person in a discussion in a friend's journal, and LJ ate it. This person was criticizing/ridiculing a couple who believed "that only verbal reprimands should be used on their children" and I wrote that quite a few people believe that hitting children is wrong. That even if it doesn't give lasting physical damage the fact that the one person the child trusts utterly willfully hurts it will cause emotional damage. Children can't rationalize why mum and dad, who they love and who they believed loved them, suddenly would want to hurt them. It is a breeding ground for low self esteem, insecurity and issues with trust. Also, children who are abused very easily pass this pattern on to their own kids.
I wonder how people can think it's wrong if a man beats his wife, but okay if a parent beats his child.

I'm happy I live in a civilized country where the beating of children is forbidden by law. It doesn't mean that it doesn't happen, but there is much less general acceptance of violence against children and statistics indicate that it is more rare since the law was made in the 70s.

ETA clothsprogs' comment made me realise one thing. I, the extremely scared of conflicts person, actually feel secure enough among my friends on LJ to write something that I know is controversial. Yay!

Comments

[clothsprogs.livejournal.com]

I was spanked as achild too.

I didn't like it, but it was a necessary part of teaching me where the boundaries were.

I was as stubbourn as a child as I am as an adult. Verbal reprimands and/or loss of privilege punishments for bad behaviour did not always work, something more was needed, on occasion, to get the message across that there are unplesent consequences to unaceptable behaviour - a spanking/smack served that purpose.

I dislike my father and have nothing to do with him (both of my sisters and myself disowned him a number of years ago) but that has nothing to do with the fact that he smacked us as children. Our mother smacked us too and we all loved and liked her.

I do not like, nor love my father, but he and my mother saw to it that we were (mostly) well behaved, especially outside of immediate family situations - which is more than a lot of parents did or do - and if it took the occasional smack to do that, I don't have a problem with it.

I cannot remember a single time when I was spanked without deserving it. I certainly didn't always see it see it that way at the time, but then hindsight is usually wonderfully clear.

There were times when I knew I had pushed too far and that a spanking was inevitable (by which point it was usually too late to prevent it - the time I bit another child, I had an entire afternoon of repentent worrying in whihc to reflect the folley of my actions. I had done physical and emotional harm to another, nothing short of a spanking was going to be sufficinet to punish me for that one... with hindsight, I think my father went easy on me due to the length of time I'd been "stewing in my own juice" over my crime), and as I got older I learned to anticipate the situations of sufficient magnitude of badness that would probably lead to my getting spanked - and so avoid them. In this way, they were an increadibly effective deterrent and teaching aid.

Teddy