What form of discipline should be used at home?

[Kayla]

i am a little puzzled by excuses like 'he smacked the kid (or his wife or wahtever) because he was tired and/or under stress'

strikes me as a nonsequitor

i was the queen of meltdowns through much of my childhood and teens

yet however freaked out and tired i was it never occurred to me to hit someone - i do not see how it translates into hitting someone

[Gee]

Yes, and I was amazed that he was giving advice on breastfeeding:

Odd, a young man arguing breastfeeding with a woman who has actual experience with the subject, especially on a philosophy forum!

Wyman;

You are absolutely correct, and I can't believe that I was stupid enough to forget "experience" when discussing subjectivity with you in the Politically Correct thread. The devaluing of personal experience is probably the first and strongest clue we can get that points toward a dismissal of the subjective self.

I have noted in this forum, and others, that people are starting to use guessing, imagination, and opinion to form their premises when discussing philosophy. I can't think of a faster way to create nonsense.

Gee

[Gee]

Kayla;

I apologize for being so late addressing your post. I am getting slower. Please consider my following responses.

even parents who believe in corporal punishment themselves do not normally delegate that to babysitters

yet most babysitters manage to control kids just fine

I was the Mary Poppins of my neighborhood from the age of 14 to about 18 when I could get a better paying job. The kids all loved me and the parents were grateful to have me work for them. I was so good, that at one point I thought about training as a Nanny. And I was positive that when I became a Mother, I would also be very good at that.

I was an idiot, and would like to take this opportunity to apologize to any parents that I met, from the ages of 14 to 30, that I may have felt smugly superior to. There is no real comparison between a babysitter and a parent. It would be like comparing an employee to an owner. The employee goes to work, does a reasonably good job, and leaves with the satisfaction of knowing that they did their job well and will get paid for it at the end of the week. The owner, however, never gets to leave his job and has the responsibility to reflect back on all of his decisions and wonder which of them led to the increase in production and profit, or which of them seem to be causing the lack of sales that may cause a layoff of 300 employees. Most of these employees having families that need food, housing, and medical care.

I'll give you an example. There was a little girl, 7 years old, who did not like to pick up her toys. I was told about this and warned that I might have to pick up her toys. The parents wanted the floor area clear before bedtime so no one would stumble over things in the dark. It was a reasonable request.

But after trying everything I could think of, this intelligent, charming, but stubborn child refused to budge. So I made a game of it, and we both picked up the toys, which worked twice. Then her brother and sister wanted to know why I did not also play the game with them. This was a problem because I could not afford the time to play with three different children in three different rooms, and still have time for my other responsibilities. It could also create new problems for the parents.

After some consideration, I realized that the child was using bad behavior to get attention. Whether her Mom picked up the toys, or I made it a game, or she got a spanking, it was all attention, which she seemed to crave. I was not about to abet attention-seeking bad behavior, so I needed to find a way to make her do her work without getting attention, and without martyring herself with something like a spanking -- which is another form of attention. So the next night, I explained that because she had the right to play with her toys, she had the responsibility to pick them up, which she was old enough to understand. When she refused, I stood behind her, took her wrists, and physically bent down with her to pick up a toy and walk it to the toy box. We continued in this manner until her toys were picked up.

She did not like it, but also had no reason to cry because I was not hurting her, as it was more a battle of wills. After that night, she picked up her toys when asked, probably realizing that she would have to pick them up anyway, and it was less awkward without me attached. (chuckle) I informed her parents of my strategy and resolved to give the child more attention when her behavior was positive. Problem solved -- for the babysitter.

But was the problem solved? Or did she just use another venue to acquire attention? We became very close, but eventually I moved on, so I will never know, and it is not my problem. It is her parent's problem. Like the owner above, the parents will have to try to second guess the cause to see if it is something that can resolve itself, or if it requires intervention and what kind of intervention. Is the child just a needy person, as some seem to be? Is it because she is a middle child, as many middle children have attention problems? Is she just stubborn? Was there some circumstance that caused this attention seeking? An answer needs to be found before she takes negative attention seeking into her teens.

I know a young woman who lost her baby last year. The boy was almost four years old, but never learned to speak or crawl or feed himself. He had at least 10 surgical procedures done on him, the first when he was born, and went to the emergency room almost monthly all of his short life. It is easy to see that the entire family revolved around him for those for years. Now that he has passed, there will be problems with her 10 and 13 year olds. They have spent half of their lives in the shadow of a very sick sibling, and there will be anger and fear and resentment, and also relief.

I advised the Mother to first forgive herself, and forgive her children for the behavior that they will exhibit while they work out their emotions, and forgive her baby for being sick and for dying. Then take life one day at a time and try to remember how to laugh. Parenting is not easy.

Gee

[Gee]

i am a little puzzled by excuses like 'he smacked the kid (or his wife or wahtever) because he was tired and/or under stress'

strikes me as a nonsequitor

Well you may be puzzled, but I am confused. What "excuses" are you talking about? Who is the "he" who smacked what "kid"? Are you making shit up?

i was the queen of meltdowns through much of my childhood and teens

yet however freaked out and tired i was it never occurred to me to hit someone - i do not see how it translates into hitting someone

Neither do I. Are you talking about discipline or self-control?

Gee

[The Voice of Time]

Care is an orientation and not a product of emotions, emotions are deceptive and does not mean anything more than what the person interpreting it choose to make out of it.

I am going to address this statement because I believe that ignorance of emotion is one of the causes of child abuse, and that it is necessary to understand emotion in order to avoid turning discipline into abuse.

Care is most definitely a product of emotion. One can not care about something that they have no feeling for, and feeling is emotion.

Nothing stops you from it.

You also seem to have failed in understanding the point that you will never be able to know if a person truly cares by looking at their emotions, as their emotions might lead to the most vicious of actions. For instance, somebody who "cares" for their child might kill their child if the child is in danger of facing pain, even without asking the child. This because you've defined "care" as bound in emotions, just because the person "thinks" that they have feelings of care they automatically reason that they care. The list of similar less extreme cases could be made really long (the example in fact is taken from Der Untergang (the dramatization of the last days of Hitler and those around him) where a mother feed her children cyanide capsules believing they're better dead than captured alive by the Russians... in the video the children try to resist, though who knows how far they managed to brain-wash their children in that bunker).

It's a doomed path to think that emotions blended into a definition of "care" could ever represent the necessities that follows with "caring". When you allow "care" to be washed into such vaguely meaningful words as "emotion" or "feeling" you have a totally uncontrolled and unreliable outcome that would ruin the foundation of almost every everyday use of the word "care" should it be held as society's definition.

Instead, when we talk of care, we talk about behavior that fulfills and supports people's lives. We care financially, we care for their emotions, and we care for their well-being. These makes sense to call "care", neither of which requires any direct emotional attachment (that said, human beings rely on emotion for reason and living, so purified of emotion are none of our actions. Suffice to say we talk here about dominating qualities, and not about traces of qualities). We do these things because we might love the idea of helping, we might feel obligations, or we are given obligation by others we deem to have sufficient authority for us to respond to it. We are acting with the specimen at hand as instruments towards our goals, goals which can be pure and good. Emotions are neither pure nor good but by accident, they are nothing but chaos until you tame them with reason and let reason dominate.

There have been and today there are plenty of societies that would claim they care about their children, and they do by the emotional definition because the children are objects of their emotional attachments. But the children are still instruments for ideas that have nothing to do with the real well-being of their children and all to do with senseless ideas of "shoulds". If this type of "care" was allowed to be called care it would be incomparable to those who truly "cares" and gives for true necessity, and yet because "emotional attachment" becomes the identity for "care", perversions are allowed to enter the same category of meaning... and that's intolerable and makes no sense.

If I tell a person I care for them, I want them to know more than that I happen to have feelings or emotions about them. I want them to know I try to make their life a better one. A strikingly different kind of meaning.

[Gee]

Voice of Time;

You have produced a well-considered post with valid points, which deserves an equally sincere answer. But if we are to continue this discussion of emotion, we should probably start a new thread as we are bound to go off topic. Although I can respect your position below, I can not agree with your conclusions.

If I tell a person I care for them, I want them to know more than that I happen to have feelings or emotions about them. I want them to know I try to make their life a better one. A strikingly different kind of meaning.

The above quote was your conclusion in your post, but I moved it to the top to make my point, as it reflects your thinking throughout your post. It is true that there are two distinctly different meanings for the word "care". A nurse, who cares for her patients, requires no emotional attachment to those patients such as she would have with her family. In fact, emotional entanglements are discouraged in the nurse-patient relationship.

Nonetheless, both types of caring evolve from feeling and emotion. With her family, the caring stems from love and a need to protect and nurture. With her patients, the caring stems from a desire to do good, to be morally correct, and to satisfy her pride and feeling of self-worth in a job well done. Morality, pride, and self-worth are all rooted deeply in emotion.

Consider that a chair does not care if you sit in it, or use it for kindling. It does not sweetly hold your backside because it cares about you. Only life can care, because only life can feel and have emotion.

You also seem to have failed in understanding the point that you will never be able to know if a person truly cares by looking at their emotions, as their emotions might lead to the most vicious of actions.

You seem to have created a false dichotomy regarding feelings. Do you see caring as good and emotion as bad? Because I have seen people who want to punch somebody's lights out, and can assure you that they "cared" very much about whether or not they would get to.

There is a reason why people say that love and hate are two sides of the same coin. One can not hate unless they loved first. It is not possible.

For instance, somebody who "cares" for their child might kill their child if the child is in danger of facing pain, even without asking the child. This because you've defined "care" as bound in emotions, just because the person "thinks" that they have feelings of care they automatically reason that they care.

No. You have it backward. My main area of study is consciousness, and emotion is part of our consciousness, so I study it. I have been all over four or five forums and was surprised to learn that almost no one is talking about emotion, but what is worse is that they do not understand emotion. People seem to think that emotion is a by-product of thought and the brain, when the reverse is more likely true. Emotion is more real than thought ever thought to be, as thought is dependent upon emotion. Emotion is not dependent upon thought to exist.

Consider e-motion: Emotion is the movement, the action, the happening that causes everything else, and I suspect that feeling and emotion actually are consciousness -- thought is the by-product.

The list of similar less extreme cases could be made really long (the example in fact is taken from Der Untergang (the dramatization of the last days of Hitler and those around him) where a mother feed her children cyanide capsules believing they're better dead than captured alive by the Russians... in the video the children try to resist, though who knows how far they managed to brain-wash their children in that bunker).

Here you are again confusing the issue and blaming emotion for actions produced by thought. It is true that emotion, fear, is what precipitated this action, but it was thought that chose the path. It would be better to question why they thought that killing the children was the only viable solution. Consider that these particular people were instrumental in the murder of millions of Jews, many of them children, so they were inured to the idea of this type of action.

Then add a little 'old wisdom' to your considerations:
"The liar never believes anyone;
The thief locks his doors;
The murder fears for his life."
We tend to believe that other people think like we do. Psychology calls this 'projecting' as we will project our drives, ambitions, values, morals, etc., on the people around us, and assume that they will act in the same way that we would. It is easy to see, considering the above, how the people in that bunker came to their conclusions.

Back to the topic at hand. Projecting is also a problem when disciplining a child and can corrupt the discipline. For example: I knew a man, who was a younger son, and always felt that his older sibling bullied him, until one day he grew taller than his older sibling.

This man grew up and had two sons. Whenever the boys got into some altercation, their father would be hard on the older son (the bully) and more lenient with the younger son (the victim). Then the father would tell (the bully) that he should be careful because the younger son might just grow bigger and beat his ass one day. The father was clearly projecting his own emotions on his sons, but he couldn't see it.

I knew the family well, and can assure you that both boys were reasonably good, but they were boys. (chuckle) The older son was in reality very protective of his brother, sometimes even taking the younger son's punishment, and not a bully at all; but the younger son was a bit of a snot. Would they have turned out this way regardless, or was it because of Dad's bias?

When the older son grows up and marries, if he has two sons, will he also project his emotions? If he does, he may be too lenient on an older son, thinking him a protector, when in fact he is abetting a bully. It could happen.

Emotions are neither pure nor good but by accident, they are nothing but chaos until you tame them with reason and let reason dominate.

One can not tame something that they do not know exists. It is important to understand emotion and to understand the self, especially when disciplining. Discipline of any kind needs to be matched to the deed and the child, not to misunderstood emotion from the parent.

Gee

[cladking]

No. You have it backward. My main area of study is consciousness, and emotion is part of our consciousness, so I study it. I have been all over four or five forums and was surprised to learn that almost no one is talking about emotion, but what is worse is that they do not understand emotion. People seem to think that emotion is a by-product of thought and the brain, when the reverse is more likely true. Emotion is more real than thought ever thought to be, as thought is dependent upon emotion. Emotion is not dependent upon thought to exist.

More and more I'm seeing the validity of your arguments and especially those concerning consciousness. It is not only helping me to understand the reality of ancient language but the motivation and mode of thought of people now.

...Just wanted to say thanks.

[Kayla]

I was the Mary Poppins of my neighborhood from the age of 14 to about 18 when I could get a better paying job. The kids all loved me and the parents were grateful to have me work for them. I was so good, that at one point I thought about training as a Nanny. And I was positive that when I became a Mother, I would also be very good at that.

so far our experiences are similar. but arguing from ones own experience is dangerous - as one's experience is unique and often no general conclusions can be drawn from it.

I am a parent now - but to an adopted child. i never had to deal with a cranky or sick toddler as a parent for example.

but so far being a parent has not lead to me substantially changing my views from before i was a parent

i understand a little better the frustration and the fatigue involved - but that is far from saying i changed my mind about how many parents express that frustration and fatigue

There is no real comparison between a babysitter and a parent. It would be like comparing an employee to an owner. The employee goes to work, does a reasonably good job, and leaves with the satisfaction of knowing that they did their job well and will get paid for it at the end of the week. The owner, however, never gets to leave his job and has the responsibility

percussive maintenance works (or rather does not work) equally for employees and owners. being an employee and an owner are not the same but the two things are not completely different.

in some cases i explained to my clients how i was able to put their hellions to bed and get all the homework on time - and then they were able to reproduce the results - just as an employer may be in a position to show the owner a thing or two

and in some cases what i did could not be done by parents - the kids saw me as an occasional playmate and friend - so things were easy - and that is not a role that parents can fully assume

She did not like it, but also had no reason to cry because I was not hurting her, as it was more a battle of wills.

it has always puzzled me how many adults do not realize that in a battle of wits, a child is no match to them

with my daughter i remember one night where i shut the tv off because it was past her bed time and she got up and turned it back on and so forth. this went on for an hour or more. it was frustrating. it was an hour in purgatory. I came close to crying. and then she just fell asleep.

sometimes it might seem that children have infinite energy - but they do not.

Parenting is not easy.

i dont think anyone ever suggested it was. and being a parent i knew that it was not going to be easy and the difference between intelectual knowledge of that and actually dealing with it came as a bit of a shock.

but however frustrating it can be i never had the urge to hit my daughter - or to spank her for those who insist that spanking is not hitting.

[Ansiktsburk]

I would say that there is a class issue with the question that the thread puts. Not only for this issue, other 60's inventions also stem from, what I see, as a class matter.

In a home where there is no trace of upper or upper middle class dating generations back (like mine) the main issue is, or at least was, to survive, in some sense. And to survive you work. And the people that work are the adults. The adults are important, and children is potential survivors. So the working parents have priority.

In upper class surroundings, the good life is the main issue (which might mean to dress in ragged clothes and try to survive on the countryside, if you like that). And much of the issue in the families is to give the children a sense of possiblility. Undoubtly, this has some very positive effects, neither Einstein nor Newton came from working class homes. But anyhow, the focus is much more on the kids.

And it seems, at least in my northern europe whereabouts, that the upper class ways got kind of comme-il-faut for the society in general, when the upper class went "political" back in '68.

I have never beat my kids, I don't find it effective. It's also against the law here, and has been for a very long time(connected to the '68). But. I have some kind of respect for the world my mother and father grew up in. Back then, kids got beaten up, both for corrective reasons, but also, for the benefit of the grown-ups, to get some peace and quiet. And in my opinion, too much pressure is put on parenthood for middle class people. They are supposed to give the upbringing that was granted by the upper class kids back in the mid-20 century, whos parents did not have the working hours of the current salary takers. I cannot really say I'm shocked by people who slap their kids in order to make them shut up so they can have a bit of peace and quiet after a long days work.

[Philosophy Explorer]

Hi Ansiktsburk,

You said:

"I have never beat my kids, I don't find it effective."

Since you've never beaten your children, how do you know it's not effective?

PhilX

[The Voice of Time]

Hi Ansiktsburk,

You said:

"I have never beat my kids, I don't find it effective."

Since you've never beaten your children, how do you know it's not effective?

PhilX

I've never shot a person in the head with a revolver... I think I'll skip trying.

The promise of damage outweighs the desire to try.

[Philosophy Explorer]

Hi Ansiktsburk,

You said:

"I have never beat my kids, I don't find it effective."

Since you've never beaten your children, how do you know it's not effective?

PhilX

I've never shot a person in the head with a revolver... I think I'll skip trying.

The promise of damage outweighs the desire to try.

Not what I meant. How is this discipline? (still awaiting a response from Ansiktsburk)

PhilX

[The Voice of Time]

Not what I meant. How is this discipline? (still awaiting a response from Ansiktsburk)

PhilX

"The promise of damage outweighs the desire to try."

If your hypothesis is that it's functional, and you happen to be wrong, you'll be double wrong.

And that counts for both examples, discipline as well as murder for fun.

Why give either physical or psychological violence the initial credibility when the promise of wrong is such bad?

[Philosophy Explorer]

Not what I meant. How is this discipline? (still awaiting a response from Ansiktsburk)

PhilX

"The promise of damage outweighs the desire to try."

If your hypothesis is that it's functional, and you happen to be wrong, you'll be double wrong.

And that counts for both examples, discipline as well as murder for fun.

Why give either physical or psychological violence the initial credibility when the promise of wrong is such bad?

Is this a form of discipline that is used at home (normally speaking)? Have you ever tried this yourself or known someone to try this?

PhilX

[The Voice of Time]

Is this a form of discipline that is used at home (normally speaking)?

What on Earth are you talking about? Did you even read what I wrote?