I wonder if a nice beating would have done you any good. I have one anecdotal story.
My older brother was uncontrollable at the age of 9. He threw a rock at my even older brother straight at his head. Nobody could tell him what to do. Once he run away from home on a bus heading to a big city. Had he not been spotted by some friends of the family we may never had seen him again.
When they returned him my grandfather advised my mom, who has a strong temper, not to scold him. So she did not. From there after he became even more uncontrollable. And now he would threaten my mother that he would run away if he didn't get his way.
Seeing the truth in his eyes my mom realized that one of this days he was going to run away and this time it might be for good. So this is what my mother decided to do as a last resort:
She tied him up from the feet to a branch of a tree. Basically he was hanging upside down. My mother told him that since he was going to run away she'd rather kill him so that at least that way she would know where he was. I believe at this moment my mom took out a belt, she might've hit him once or twice with it, and asked him if he was going to run away. My brother, as you can imagine, was terrified and crying and telling my mom that he would never do it again.
Outcome: The problem was fixed. He became more subdued and never threatened to run away.
Now my brother is a grown man, in his 40's. He has a family, a house and is a productive man of society. Overall he turned out pretty good.
Mind you that it wasn't like my mom would abuse her children with beatings every other day. But you could definitely expect a beating if you really misbehaved. Not once did I get a beating nor do I remember any of my sisters getting a beating. Just trying to establish that she was not an abusive mother.
All of this happened south of the USA border.
That said, I'm fucking horrified by your story. If your brother is a productive man of society, then your mother got lucky. But for every productive man of society, we have a hundred fathers who beat their children senselessly because "that's how I was raised."
Violence begets violence. Abuse begets abuse. Nothing about proper, strict discipline requires behaviour that would, under other circumstances, get you locked up.
That said, I think it's for the best that physical abuse is criminalized, because I don't think human beings can be trusted to use it judiciously. Like you pointed out, when accepted, it is used inappropriately and destructively much more often than it is used appropriately (hey, just like guns.) However, one consequence of giving up corporal punishment is that some (very small) subset of kids will be deprived of punishment that could have set them on a better course, and in the end society will resort to violence to control them, violence carried out lawfully via the justice system.
What? I beg to differ. Unless hunting, competition and self defense are inappropriate uses of guns; then guns are used (or non-used)appropriately and non-destructively far more than they are used inappropriately.
I agree corporal punishment is cruelty. But some minimal beating must be allowed to put things in order. My mom is a teacher, and back here in the past and to some extent now. Beating kids in school in India was the norm. She tells me many parents would come ask the teachers to not beat their kids, some would come and ask teachers to be ask strict as they can.
Its all in the ideology. But my mom says, on an average my mom says a kid who has been corrected by beating has gone to do a lot well than the ones that hasn't.
Haven't you heard of the proverb- "Spare the stick and spoil the child"
Some times you have to get strict.
I'm not 100% sure how I feel about it but it does seem to me that different kids react to different kinds of treatment. Hitting one kid may really be unnecessary and even harm them mentally. Other kids seems like absolutely nothing works on them except physical spanking. Maybe that is due to the way their parents are raising them? I'm not sure.
I remember in school a few bullies who got their ass kicked by another student and that problem was instantly solved. So it does seem like it works sometimes. But I hate to think we're just perpetuating a violent nature .
That proverb is misapplied. When you look at the original Hebrew in context the stick was a guiding stick not a beating stick. A guiding stick is one used for gentle nudges to keep someone on the right path. Basically the proverb is saying: An unguided child is a spoiled child.
Today is is often interpreted: An unbeaten child is a spoiled child. However, this is not the original intent of the passage at all!
I don't have a biblical commentary on me but if you want to check I suggest the Anchor Bible series which generally provide high quality modern scholarship with extensive bibliographies.
IMHO, this(revised definition) is a catchup which the clergy (of various religions) play every now and then. Sometimes to meet the new discovery in science, or other times to meet the current human right guidelines.
[1] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spare_the_rod_and_spoil_the_ch...
Finally, KJV is simply not a very accurate interpretation of the texts it draws from. Nor does it take into account more ancient texts which are now available to interpreters and translators. Moreover, translation (while interpretation) does not provide context which is why I pointed you to a reliable commentary series which will provide up to date scholarship on the matter.
I am not saying my interpretation is right but I am saying you will need to do a bit better than just referencing a wiktionary article on the etymology.
Apropo:
תהילים פרק כג' פסוק 4 גַּם כִּי-אֵלֵךְ בְּגֵיא צַלְמָוֶת לֹא-אִירָא רָע כִּי-אַתָּה עִמָּדִי שִׁבְטְךָ וּמִשְׁעַנְתֶּךָ הֵמָּה יְנַחֲמֻנִי
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me; {N} Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me.
Busy trying not to pay child support and fighting her in court for custody of the children.
http://anarchistsoccermom.blogspot.com/2012/07/news-from-war...
I am not advocating beating your kids, but if they are hell bent on testing the limits I think you have to show them that there is definitely a line that can not be crossed.
But it is only a tool. You have to be consistent, and you have to be clear, and you have to be generally supportive. You can't expect of them things they can't do. All of that is probably more important than corporal punishment.
"I wonder if a nice beating would have done you any good." This was a response to a description of severe acting out by a child. A child threatening to kill herself or her parents is not an indication of sound mental health. Hitting them will make it worse.
Sufficiently dysfunctional behavior defines what it means to have a psychological problem.
As an example, if someone (for whatever reason) wants to kill his neighbour and take his goods/wife/house/whatever, then we'll force him not to do it, up to and including lethal force by lots of armed uniformed men.
Continuing with the example, if a "kid" realistically threatens to perform criminal acts - such as shooting someone, robbing someone, raping someone - then submission is not optional, it's mandatory and it SHOULD be an absolute goal. The only question is how to make that submission happen in a humane manner - if the expected result is violence and a long prison term or death, then many means of forcing submission, such as threatening physical punishment or forced medication may seem quite reasonable.
And once a person is an adult, physical abuse (police beatings, confinement with criminals, disgusting (http://www.npr.org/programs/wesat/features/2002/apr/loaf/)) is the normal way rebellion is treated. And it seems to work. Most people avoid harming their neighbors and pay their taxes.
What other goal would there be? The idea of corporal punishment is that child fears getting hit enough that they will stop acting on the motives they have which conflict with those of the parents. In other words, they will submit to the motives of the parents.
Common sense aside, the fact that beating doesn't produce good outcomes for children is common knowledge in highly educated societies.
The American Academy of Pediatrics says:
"First, establish a positive, supporting and loving relationship with your child. Without this foundation, your child has no reason, other than fear, to demonstrate good behavior. [...] If you feel discipline is necessary, the AAP recommends that you do not spank or use other physical punishments. That only teaches aggressive behavior, and becomes ineffective if used often."
The goal for the drastic measures my mom took was to not loose her child. That he stopped being such a big brat was a bonus. He was still strong tempered, but at least he would no longer test my mother. And the threat of a beating kept the rest of us in line. We knew not to test her. All of my brothers and sisters grew up to be decent human beings.
In case you are wondering, my brother never beats his kids, is enough for them to see him mad when they misbehave for them to fall in line.
I concede, had he had a mental disorder it would probably not have worked. In this case though, I'm not sure the OP really had a mental disorder which is why I suggested the beating. Some kids will go to great lengths to manipulate you as much as they can.
Anyway, this is just an anecdote so take it as such.
- Beating does a worse job of correcting behavioral problems than more humane methods
- Beating contributes negatively to how your children feel, in general
Again, this doesn't mean that beating makes you sick, or that it never corrects a specific behavior. Only that it's not a good idea, and, however mildly on a case-by-case basis, it probably means you're mistreating your kids.
I wouldn't suggest it to anyone regardless of whether or not you consider violently threatening to kill yourself and your parents, to the point that they are afraid for their lives, to be evidence of mental health issues.
Their audience here is a general one, especially parents. They are not using "only" to make some kind of absolute claim about human nature. The point is that it's commonly accepted (and supported by research) that hitting your children is unhelpful to them and doesn't work well.
Can you back up your claim that beatings produce poor outcomes for children in "highly educated societies?" Or that 'less educated societies" are inferior because they don't have qualms about spanking their kids when they misbehave?
Corporal punishment is more common in less affluent/educated societies than it is in wealthy/well-educated ones. This is common knowledge. I never said anything about inferiority. It's not about judging anyone, it's about contradicting bad advice.
I've always figured that Corporal punishment is like banging rocks together to make fire. sure it _can_ be done, our ancestors used it effectively and it can be useful as a last resort; but a lighter or matchsticks are significantly more effective.
In my experience, those who argue strongly in favor of beating children do so not because they know better but because that technique is all they know. essentially: "but if i don't beat him how will I get him to behave??"
My point is that who is the AAP to say how best to raise children? I seriously doubt the validity of any study that claims to be conclusive on how to raise children, and would make a bet that any research they did was localized to the US. Anecdotally, several of my friends were beaten as children and turned out fine. All this proves is that sometimes physical punishment works and sometimes it doesn't. But the same goes for "establishing a loving relationship with your child;" since you can hardly do that when they're threatening to stab you with a knife.
> is rather telling evidence that our forebears
> found it to be the most effective way to bring
> children in line
- Slavery / Indentured Service as a means of generating wealth.
- Punishing women for sexuality (because all women were temptresses, and a man couldn't be blamed for infidelity, rape, etc).
- Torture against criminals / political prisoners.
- Religious wars.
I don't think that "our forebears did it, so there must be something to it," is a generally effective argument.
Are these societies the same societies where shoot outs happen at schools? Because I wouldn't be surprised if that is the case.
Physical abuse is one thing. Disciplining is another.
'You won't get to play your video game' is not even a punishment. If you are thinking you can discipline your kid by these make believe tricks, All the best.
When we talk of beating a kid, we are not talking about smashing him/her to pulp. The idea to ensure the kid is stopped when he/she is at the beginning of doing something wrong[Like stopping him when he first steals from/bullies/hits other kids]. If you let your kid grow up, carry guns and fire at people something is seriously wrong with your upbringing. And frankly speaking you can't wash your hands off by putting it on mental disease.
These are not cases of mental disease, these are just unruly kids, who fear nothing[After all why should they, when their own parents can't do anything about their behavior who else will?].
These kids need to be taught how it is in the real world, and if they can't do it the easy way some minimal beating must be allowed. I would prefer that rather than watch some one grow and fire bullets at others.
This has nothing to do with submission but with self-control - a rare quality which kids have to master. The so-called "timeouts" and disciplinary measures by our American friends don't work - resulting in children which cause so much more suffering for everybody - they don't work because the parents just do not establish a sense of authority and strict rules. Forget physical punishment for a moment but at home the parents and in school the teachers have to be able to establish their authority. I have seen so many parents, themselves using mental pharmaceutica who let their kids get away with things that were purely evil. At the same time I feel the sub-human stimulation (TV, games, etc.) many kids are flooded with over decades is considered less (negatively) habit forming than the application of simple repetitive acts of cultured manners, polite expressions and self-restraint.
My mother-in-law has bipolar, and is in the hospital pretty much every spring. She has the benefit of being in Australia, where the health care system is leaps and bounds better than what we have in America, at least. I also have a friend who's worked in the mental ward of two hospitals.
Sure, when you're young, it's fun to go down the DSM and think about how some of the symptoms of schizoid personality disorder feel like they kind of apply to you, and there are so many self-diagnosed aspies on the internet, but this leads to anecdotal trivialization of serious mental illness.
Go volunteer in your local mental ward. Spend a few long months with diagnosed, treated (as well as they can be) mentally ill people. It'll change your perspective on so many things, from tragedies like this to views on trends in modern humor.
Almost as dismissive as summing up his post as, "I was like that, but fixed myself with Linkin Park."
I remember reading portions of a book on autism. (And before you ask, that was a real diagnosis from a real mental health professional.) Which had tons of statistics about people with autistic traits/on the spectrum. And I really wish I could source this, but the first chapter or such looked at what the chances of integration into society were without treatment. I think the number was either 1% or 10%. Either way the odds were stacked against you.
And so the thing that jumped out at me when I read that, was wondering what the difference is between someone who integrates, and someone who ends up in the institute. (I'm fairly sure the book was only covering HFA or Asperger's.) And the answer is: I've got no idea. "Wake up one day and 'cure yourself'." as the parent notes, probably isn't a repeatable strategy.
The point I take away is not the instantaneous nature of his insight but _what_ he realized: that the consequences of his vices would become more and more serious, and that he didn't want to pay the price. (The discovery of empathy, I think, was a side effect. People are generally emotionally blind to the side effects of behaviors they have no intention of stopping.)
I was confronted with facing my own ADHD a few years ago, which helped me stop making choices that were more comfortable in the moment but had suboptimal long term consequences. An example would be impulsively buying something on credit to make myself feel better, one of many little things I did to dig myself into a financial hole and, if I remember correctly, a very common ADHD thing to do. By opening my mind to the possibility that I had to face my issues, it opened the door to slowly chipping away at the core issue.
One thing to keep in mind is that mental health is a hard thing to work on. It takes several weeks in the best of cases just to figure out what's going on inside your head when working with a good mental health professional, and that's assuming your trying to get better and don't have ant major hang ups about being treated. Ask a psychologist at Kaiser Permanente, an HMO based here in California, how many sessions they can spend with most mental health patients. It's a very low number, something like 6 or 8 sessions.
Not only that, but some people, such as people with schizophrenic disorders, need medicine (Specifically, pharmaceuticals.) to stay sane, literally. Part of the problem with disorders where you need to take pills are that some people don't want to take them, or the pills help them, and then they decide they're fine and stop medicating themselves. At which point they relapse into an episode.
I think we absolutely need better mental health care, and better mental health care research. We still don't know much about basic things like sleep. And yet we're being tasked with treating a growing number of people with psychiatric issues. Naturally, the result is something of a disaster.
The stigma of mental illness often leaves people to think it's just something they have to want to overcome (or that they're not mentally ill at all but just need to overcome whatever problems they have) and there are plenty of people that will be happy to help them reinforce that terribly destructive belief.
But are a couple of problems with the mirror. One is that if you truly need to change, then really SEEING yourself is a traumatic experience, and like any trauma, it requires further care to make sure that it doesn't raise issues of its own. There's no way around this: the traumatic aspect of the mirror is what makes it a powerful tool for personal change. Another problem is the nigh-infinite variety in human psychology: different people need different mirrors, and while it might be possible to classify them broadly, what works for one person still might not work for another.
Put these together, and a major problem emerges with using the mirror therapeutically: namely, doing it in a humane manner. I truly don't think it's always possible to do this humanely; the grandparent's case had him seeing the consequences of his own act of cruelty, which implies that there was collateral damage. Another such case would be the reverse: someone who, like a puppy, can learn that biting hurts only by being bitten. That's someone who needs to experience a moment of cruelty from the opposite perspective, but that requires being cruel to the person. Clearly these are not cases where the mirror is humane.
But there are still open questions. Knowing the trauma that the mirror causes, can bringing it about deliberately ever be humane, even when the subject is not committing or experiencing cruelty? In cases where it can't -which might be all cases- might it be worth doing anyway?
As soon as you make the choice to either wrestle it into submission or surrender to it, you'll probably have an easier time. In this case it seems like taking charge.
Other people have no choice but to surrender and learn to live with the consequences. Maybe for you that means not having any sharp knives, or medication you can abuse, or alcohol in the house. We all have our issues. If we can't control them, we've got to mitigate them to the best of our ability.
If you are still into improving your handwriting, buy yourself a fountain pen. It makes it a lot of fun to experiment with new characters and drastically alter your handwriting.
I've always had meh handwriting. Not horrible, but not pretty either. I've been slowly converting my scratchy characters over to smoother, more flowy characters with embelleshments, since fountain pens make it so easy to play. The process was identical to what you described. Pick a character, play with alternatives until I found one I liked, then slowly retrain myself to use it.
Coming to my case, I consider any one who boasts about great hand writing a loser.
The moment I stopped writing exams I started giving a damn about hand writing. Hand writing improvement initiatives were the biggest things I hated in school. It was a exercise in futility.
Looking back I feel like somebody was forcing a back end engineer into learning HTML.
When you are learning how to write as a small child, it's a big deal to write clearly (for obvious reason). Then you are forced to learn cursive, and its a big deal to write cursive clearly.
Then it doesn't matter anymore. Literally everyone stops caring as long as it is legible. It's a weird system. While you are learning to read and write, there is an emphasis on penmanship. But once you are literate...no one cares anymore. Most people (like myself) degenerate back to chicken scratch. Especially as typing became more prevalent. I would hazard a guess that children in the States have even worse handwriting nowadays.
I always hated high school in class essays because all I could think was that I'd be able to write 3x better/more efficiently/produce more content if I were doing it on a keyboard. Plus, it always gave me handcramps. :(
> big deal to write cursive clearly
I wonder how those kids write their signatures.
http://shrik.theswamp.in/2004/03/presentation.html
and
I dedicated a lot during my school days trying to improve my handwriting without anyone's involvement. Naturally, I'm proud of how much my handwriting has improved. Thanks for the 'loser' tag.
My older kid is 7 and learned to write last year with a fountain pen. His teacher said it prevents kids from pressing too hard on paper, and helps them develop a nicer writing.
It's gonna be super weird when we get a generation which has terrible handwriting - it'll probably be soon.
The mental challenge of deciphering whether or not you're actually serious (thereby weighting if the reality you describe could be real; significantly your change of heart; also how anti/a-social you actually were before this) is in itself quite interesting.
Personally I did a few cruel things when I was younger, but at some point realized that trying to improve the world was much harder, and thereby ended up focusing on being nice. It is also much more rewarding. I still get some guilty pleasure from tearing down people that are acting cruel; knowing that it's not a very effective way of improving things - but it can be very satisfying at times.
You feel remorse and thus aren't a psychopath.
I remember doing that.
> He’s been on a slew of antipsychotic and mood altering pharmaceuticals, a Russian novel of behavioral plans. Nothing seems to work.
I remember that.
> A few weeks ago, Michael..threatened to kill me
I did that too.
She forgot to mention the time(s) he threatened to run away. (I'd be surprised if he didn't.)
After a marathon of transfers, expulsions, and incidents, I was at the end of the line. My parents interrupted my electronic solipsism for a moment to tell me the truth. It was a long conversation, but it can be summed in a sentence.
"Son, you're out of options, if you want to have a future you need to play nice at this next school."
Maybe I'd been delivered that message in the past, if I was, I don't remember it. This time it clicked for me. I realized that I'd had my fun hurting the faculty of various schools, but if I wanted to see the day after tomorrow, I would need to stop hurting people.
Before I continue on with my story, I would like to share an anecdote about handwriting:
For the longest time my handwriting was awful. My whole life in fact. When I was learning, I had a mean, evil instructor. She would yell at me when I wrote the letters wrong, it really seemed to bother her. So I wrote the letters the wrong way on purpose, because making her mad was more important to me than drawing Latin runes. Eventually I had learned how to handwrite, entirely wrong, out of habit.
As the years passed by, the root of this badness became obscured in other peoples memory. My mom attributed it to mental illness, everyone else did too. But I knew better. I know better. A few months ago, I decided to improve my handwriting. I would pick a font and learn to write in it. There wouldn't be any tutorials of course, I'd just copy the symbols until they looked right.
At first it was just trial and error, I would try and write the symbol the way I saw it on my computer monitor. (The only one that eluded me is that weird 'a' that looks more like an '&'.) Then, once I figured out how to write the symbol, I would practice the motions over and over on paper. I eventually moved on to writing whole sentences, entirely in this new script. Then whole paragraphs. I stopped short of essays, because by then I had basically mastered the points where my current writing lacked.
Then at school I would apply it, even when it was slower than my normal note taking, I would slowly and methodically do my symbols the new way; the right way. Occasionally I would fall back into my old habits, but only for a moment. Slowly I got better, faster. Over the course of days it became a habit. Over the course of weeks it became second nature. Over the course of months it faded into the background.
Back to my story. I knew I couldn't do what I was doing anymore. So I sat myself down and listened to Linkin Park's Breaking the Habit, over and over, on repeat. The problem is that it's stupid easy to threaten to kill people. It's stupid easy to be a terrible person. I decided I didn't want to be that person anymore, partly because I couldn't be.
I got to school, and did the last overtly malicious thing I can think of. (At least, that can be characterized by my earlier behavior.) There was a boy, let's call him Jacob, Jacob had earned a reward for his good behavior. I knew this before he did, because I was in an introductory one on one with the instructor, to explain the rules. She told me to tell him she wanted to tell him something. But not to spoil it.
I went up to him and promptly relayed that he was in major trouble. He went into the head instructors office crying. I hadn't meant to do that. I figured when he heard that he had actually received an award it would lift his spirits even more. It was a pretty stupid idea.
He came out of her office drying his tears, but still sobbing a little. It hurt me to see this. He didn't deserve that, and it was all my fault. I'd ruined what should have been a happy moment in his life. Of course; the instructor had words for me, they were scalding as I remember them. But as I contemplated Jacob, they were just background noise. I cried.
And after that, things got better. I stopped lying, I stopped calling people names, or threatening to blow them up. Occasionally I would fall into my old habits, but I'd rebound. Eventually, I was so well behaved that they couldn't justify keeping me at a specialty school, I was filtered back into the public school system.
I often think about what my younger self would think of me now, I don't think he would like me very much; in fact he might even threaten to kill me. If he did, I'd probably laugh. I'd tell him the truth:
"You can kill me, but that won't solve your problems."