Of course the comments are full of people justifying hitting a 2 year old? As if hitting someone to teach them not to hit is in any way logical? I’m a firm parent who holds boundaries with my toddler, but it’s my job to teach him how to live in this world, and the idea that I need to inflict pain to do so is asinine.
"But I do see him as, if not evil and backward, then certainly cruel and disingenuous, because he hits his toddlers. "
1 You are, of course, entitled to your view but I would urge you to be more tolerant and understanding of other people's situations and outlook on life which will be different to yours.
2 "he hits his toddlers' makes it sound like he does it routinely every day; he said he does not rather only when he deems it necessary.
3 I did not get a good impression of him but you need to butt out of other parents' parenting style; at least until their action is proven beyond reasonable doubt to be grossly unreasonable.
Many people think that today's broad 'soft' upbringing for children is a big part of the mess that our young people and children are in, with huge mental health issues.
The wildly popular and completely unproven gentle parenting method is preferred by the social media parenting influencer crowd. A few psychologists & therapists have authored books about the dangers of time outs (unproven) and claim every minor misstep as a parent will cause irreparable trauma and damage requiring decades of therapy. In this climate of “words are violence”, you’d have to be crazy to think a conversation about hitting your kids is possible.
Strongly disagree, we are entitled to have opinions on people’s parenting styles when they put themselves forward as a parenting example. Her last paragraph resonated with me, I do resent my parents for hitting me, and parenting from a place of fear. It’s just not necessary.
Did he put himself forward as a parenting example? Maybe. However you seem to have had a harder life than just an odd smack for poor behaviour.
My son said his classmates at school discussed parental smacks and those who had been smacked all thought it had been justified and was not unreasonable.
2 year olds can’t discuss that and think rationally about being smacked. That’s the point, it’s the most important person in the world to them, causing them pain, when their brains are still trying to learn impulse control, language etc.
"ignoring inconvenient successes like, say, Sweden." I don't think that Stephen Lyle has been to or read much about Sweden. The socialists have ruined it and it is only now that that is becoming fully obvious.
“But everyone else sees it for what it is: a grown-up physically assaulting a toddler.” Wow that is some serious absolutism. Can physical discipline never be done in love? Can it never be beneficial to a child? Can it never wake a child up from his own self centeredness and bullying of others? My mom used to say “this hurts me more than it does you “ and as much as I hated hearing that as a child I think that describes the spirit in which physical punishment could be appropriate
When I was about ten I was making a request of my mother and she wasn't giving in. I remember getting frustrated. She said something like, "I said no, that's it." And, like the cocky little fool that I was, I repeated her words back to her in a mocking tone. Before I got the last word out, she smacked me right across the face. I remember sitting there motionless, mouth agape. Like, dang, mama's got reflexes and, dang, that hurt. Anyway, my mother was a saint. I'm not exaggerating either. I think, with a little effort, she could be a candidate for canonization. She quietly lived a life of service while, with my father, raising six kids. She also had a preternatural talent for getting to the point with only the necessary amount of exertion. Sometimes that exertion was in the form of a swift blow to the face of her unruly baby boy who, you can be sure, had it coming. That, ya'll, is good, unambiguous parenting.
Re "Art vs the Artist": Would the letter writer use Guernica as evidence of Picasso's violent temperament? Is it a stretch to consider that the artist is making a different point?
For reasons I won't get into, I swore I would never lay a hand on my children. Then I had a son who was the size of a six-year-old by the time he was three. And he was STRONG. Though we had never laid a hand on him, he took to punching me when he got upset. We agonized over whether or not to spank him.
Then a horseman correctly framed the issue. "The young ones in the herd reach a point where they start challenging the pecking order. Your son is challenging the pecking order. Show him you're in charge, and he will stop. They don't feel safe in their world if they don't know for certain that you're in charge."
After a bit more agonizing and several punches from our son, we decided we just weren't putting up with that crap. The next morning, our son got upset and punched me. I calmly sat down, turned him over my knee, and gave him three firm swats on the butt. He was surprised, to say the least. Later that day, he punched me in front of his father, and his father swiftly did what I had done. My son never punched me again. He also turned out a fine, upstanding man who would never hit a woman or hurt a child.
While I would definitely say use it sparingly, a calm and firm spanking (not a beating) has its place.
I find it interesting that your argument, and the one used by the pronatalist couple in the article (they used tigers) relies on the behaviour of animals to inform your own behaviour. I would be wary of using the parenting methods of animals to decide how to parent a human child. Kangaroo mothers will abandon their joeys if a predator is chasing them. When stressed, many species will eat their young (think cats, rats, rabbits). I wouldn’t take advice from animals about how to parent.
Humans are animals and through history, have also been known to abandon children, in a life-and-death situation where the parent is unlikely to survive otherwise.
I would like to pushback on Hadley Freeman. As someone who was spanked growing up, used spanking with my own children BUT who, if I had it to do over again, WOULD use it a LOT less, I’m still calling BS on on the whole framing (and FRAMING it, indeed, is!) of this issue.
First of all, just stop with the whole “hitting” language. Corporal punishment will always take on an abusive tone when your only word is “hitting” and it’s reductive with the complicated subject of child rearing. And, furthermore, just about anything when used in its extremes can be come abusive.
Obviously, there are more “nurturing” ways to motivate children to make good choices than spanking (or “bopping” or I would use the term “popping” on the hand) but I would assert very few parents with 3-4 children under 5 (as was totally the norm before abt 15 minutes ago) find those sustainable when a young child is needing a quick about-face in a potentially dangerous situation.
In other words, it can surely be argued spanking was overused in the past, but to ALWAYS cast it in an abusive light is unhistorical and unscientific. You cannot reason with an 12month- 3 year old, but they totally get an attention-grabbing-but-brief painful consequence and can associate it with that behavior or action. While I agree the “bend over and take X number of licks” needs to become obsolete, the almost-instant negative consequence for a little one is a healthy AND a helpful parenting tool. Also, there is much more evidence that over-sexualization (which our little ones experience on the daily through TV, on magazines everywhere and even in school) has more to do with trauma and criminal outcomes than any links to spanking!
I know it’s anecdotal, but I ask: with the stigmatization and decline of using spanking as a form of discipline, have our young people gotten more disciplined, more respectful, more mentally healthy? There IS healthy fear; there IS healthy shame; there IS a healthy understanding of “no pain, no gain” applied to our psychology in addition to our physical fitness. I would never presume to hint that only one factor contributes or to push for spanking making a big comeback (esp since virtuous self-control is in such decline!), but it’s worth asking what philosophical changes in our cultural psyche have affected the floundering state in which so many of our young people are today? I believe no fear of negative consequences is a huge contributor. They are unmoored and adrift!
So we are supposed to take advice on our children from the APA? We can’t spank them but conducting medical experiments on them is okay. I’m rather done with experts. Just do what you think is best for your kids, is not unnatural for you and forget the Monday-Morning Quarterbacks that weren’t on the field and don’t know the players.
THIS! Until children reach the developmental age when they can be reasoned with, attempting to reason with them about their bad behavior is a fruitless exercise.
There are some children who do understand and respect the word "no!" I get the impression that parents who are anti-spanking probably have been blessed with children who do. But a great many children do NOT.
I don't think it's anecdotal to point to the fact that more and more children in the last two or three generations are increasingly out of control compared to generations upon generations of children in the past who experienced corporal punishment.
Agree with you entirely. My generation of millennial parents are so influenced by the gentle parenting trend (which prioritizes talking through "Big Feelings" with your incomprehending 2 year old and "natural consequences"), and it has a lot of parents in a tizzy about mild corporal punishment, terrified it will traumatize their children, etc. And I think it's doing a disservice to an entire generation of kids.
You are being to kind to Hadley. There is nothing wrong with light corporal punishment. In fact it is sometimes the only way to get through to a young child who is seriously misbehaving. How else can you manage a child who will not stay in timeout, will not listen, and is trying to cause more trouble? You must physically stop the child.
And, there is nothing "bullying" about it. This is where people like Hadley seem wilfully blind. A bully uses his power to gain at the expense of others. A good father uses his power to restrain and teach his child. It isn't fun to discipline a child. But you do it because you love your child and you know that it is best for him to learn to stop doing the bad thing he is doing. And, when it's over and he apologizes, you forgive him and hug him. In this way, he learns about the proper and just use of power. A just father uses the power differential to restrain bad behavior and to protect others. He doesn't use it for his own personal gain. Children understand this and that it is a totally different thing than a bully. It is amazing that someone like Hadley is incapable of understanding it.
I never once felt that I was being "bullied" or "abused" when my mom took a flyswatter to the back of my thighs when I exhibited unacceptable behavior (which did not happen very often). I didn't LIKE it. I didn't WANT it. But I knew absolutely that I DESERVED it.
I have a suspicion that many anti-spanking people fundamentally believe that they themselves have never once *deserved* to be punished for anything. If you think you are always in the right, of course you're going to believe that any punishment is only being done to bully or abuse you.
You know, Celia, I think about this a lot: my M.O. in life, when something goes wrong, is “Oh, dear! What did I do??” (MOST of the time…and usually upon reflection, bc I’m definitely susceptible to the blame game too😬) I give my parents credit for instilling the idea that consequences are usually of our own deserving, at least at some level.
Anyway, we could go on and on and I don’t want to take credit away from parenting that does incorporate some sensitivity and affirmation that I know we lacked, but I stand by my soapbox that until we apply the “no pain, no gain” principle to our social-emotional development, we’re going to continue to reap the kinds of unhappy, disgruntled, aimless young people making so much noise in the news. (The ones working hard making something of themselves for the ACTUAL good of mankind have internalized the traditional lessons of their own agency!)
Thank you for speaking up! I agree, and I think that Hadley Freeman probably meets her own "two truths" definition of a bully: "they are powerful people who pick on the vulnerable, and… [they] always insist they’re not hurting their victims."
I have my own anecdote. I was on a long cross-continental flight, with a nice grand-motherly woman sitting next to me and a screaming child (two-ish) behind us. It was a very very very long flight. When we finally landed, I turned to the woman next to me and said, sotto voce, "I think that child needs a nap." She smiled sweetly at me and replied, "What that child needs is a slap on the ass."
Out of 177 countries ranked in the 2022 Economic Freedom Index (WSJ and Heritage Foundation), the Scandinavian countries ranked 9th, 10th, 11th, 13th and 14th - all well ahead of the US at 25th.
Argentina was 144th. Milei knows he has a lot of work to do.
I think Stephen Lyle is confusing a solid safety net with socialism. Lots of people do.
The bottom five countries in this index were Zimbabwe, Sudan, Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea. Would it be controversial to say those countries are not exactly successes?
@johanknorberg warns America, “Don’t get cocky.”
Look at his country, Sweden - politicians passed socialist policies.
“It almost killed the Swedish economy.”
Link here.
https://x.com/johnstossel/status/1783912173447872996?s=46
Socialism is DESTROYING canada as we speak.
Of course the comments are full of people justifying hitting a 2 year old? As if hitting someone to teach them not to hit is in any way logical? I’m a firm parent who holds boundaries with my toddler, but it’s my job to teach him how to live in this world, and the idea that I need to inflict pain to do so is asinine.
"But I do see him as, if not evil and backward, then certainly cruel and disingenuous, because he hits his toddlers. "
1 You are, of course, entitled to your view but I would urge you to be more tolerant and understanding of other people's situations and outlook on life which will be different to yours.
2 "he hits his toddlers' makes it sound like he does it routinely every day; he said he does not rather only when he deems it necessary.
3 I did not get a good impression of him but you need to butt out of other parents' parenting style; at least until their action is proven beyond reasonable doubt to be grossly unreasonable.
Many people think that today's broad 'soft' upbringing for children is a big part of the mess that our young people and children are in, with huge mental health issues.
The wildly popular and completely unproven gentle parenting method is preferred by the social media parenting influencer crowd. A few psychologists & therapists have authored books about the dangers of time outs (unproven) and claim every minor misstep as a parent will cause irreparable trauma and damage requiring decades of therapy. In this climate of “words are violence”, you’d have to be crazy to think a conversation about hitting your kids is possible.
Strongly disagree, we are entitled to have opinions on people’s parenting styles when they put themselves forward as a parenting example. Her last paragraph resonated with me, I do resent my parents for hitting me, and parenting from a place of fear. It’s just not necessary.
Did he put himself forward as a parenting example? Maybe. However you seem to have had a harder life than just an odd smack for poor behaviour.
My son said his classmates at school discussed parental smacks and those who had been smacked all thought it had been justified and was not unreasonable.
2 year olds can’t discuss that and think rationally about being smacked. That’s the point, it’s the most important person in the world to them, causing them pain, when their brains are still trying to learn impulse control, language etc.
"ignoring inconvenient successes like, say, Sweden." I don't think that Stephen Lyle has been to or read much about Sweden. The socialists have ruined it and it is only now that that is becoming fully obvious.
💯. It’s also destroying canada.
https://x.com/johnstossel/status/1783912173447872996?s=46
All of these people are wrong. Haha.
Stephen sounds like an idiot.
“But everyone else sees it for what it is: a grown-up physically assaulting a toddler.” Wow that is some serious absolutism. Can physical discipline never be done in love? Can it never be beneficial to a child? Can it never wake a child up from his own self centeredness and bullying of others? My mom used to say “this hurts me more than it does you “ and as much as I hated hearing that as a child I think that describes the spirit in which physical punishment could be appropriate
When I was about ten I was making a request of my mother and she wasn't giving in. I remember getting frustrated. She said something like, "I said no, that's it." And, like the cocky little fool that I was, I repeated her words back to her in a mocking tone. Before I got the last word out, she smacked me right across the face. I remember sitting there motionless, mouth agape. Like, dang, mama's got reflexes and, dang, that hurt. Anyway, my mother was a saint. I'm not exaggerating either. I think, with a little effort, she could be a candidate for canonization. She quietly lived a life of service while, with my father, raising six kids. She also had a preternatural talent for getting to the point with only the necessary amount of exertion. Sometimes that exertion was in the form of a swift blow to the face of her unruly baby boy who, you can be sure, had it coming. That, ya'll, is good, unambiguous parenting.
I'm firmly in the "don't tell other people how they should raise their kids" camp.
Re "Art vs the Artist": Would the letter writer use Guernica as evidence of Picasso's violent temperament? Is it a stretch to consider that the artist is making a different point?
For reasons I won't get into, I swore I would never lay a hand on my children. Then I had a son who was the size of a six-year-old by the time he was three. And he was STRONG. Though we had never laid a hand on him, he took to punching me when he got upset. We agonized over whether or not to spank him.
Then a horseman correctly framed the issue. "The young ones in the herd reach a point where they start challenging the pecking order. Your son is challenging the pecking order. Show him you're in charge, and he will stop. They don't feel safe in their world if they don't know for certain that you're in charge."
After a bit more agonizing and several punches from our son, we decided we just weren't putting up with that crap. The next morning, our son got upset and punched me. I calmly sat down, turned him over my knee, and gave him three firm swats on the butt. He was surprised, to say the least. Later that day, he punched me in front of his father, and his father swiftly did what I had done. My son never punched me again. He also turned out a fine, upstanding man who would never hit a woman or hurt a child.
While I would definitely say use it sparingly, a calm and firm spanking (not a beating) has its place.
I find it interesting that your argument, and the one used by the pronatalist couple in the article (they used tigers) relies on the behaviour of animals to inform your own behaviour. I would be wary of using the parenting methods of animals to decide how to parent a human child. Kangaroo mothers will abandon their joeys if a predator is chasing them. When stressed, many species will eat their young (think cats, rats, rabbits). I wouldn’t take advice from animals about how to parent.
Humans are animals and through history, have also been known to abandon children, in a life-and-death situation where the parent is unlikely to survive otherwise.
I would like to pushback on Hadley Freeman. As someone who was spanked growing up, used spanking with my own children BUT who, if I had it to do over again, WOULD use it a LOT less, I’m still calling BS on on the whole framing (and FRAMING it, indeed, is!) of this issue.
First of all, just stop with the whole “hitting” language. Corporal punishment will always take on an abusive tone when your only word is “hitting” and it’s reductive with the complicated subject of child rearing. And, furthermore, just about anything when used in its extremes can be come abusive.
Obviously, there are more “nurturing” ways to motivate children to make good choices than spanking (or “bopping” or I would use the term “popping” on the hand) but I would assert very few parents with 3-4 children under 5 (as was totally the norm before abt 15 minutes ago) find those sustainable when a young child is needing a quick about-face in a potentially dangerous situation.
In other words, it can surely be argued spanking was overused in the past, but to ALWAYS cast it in an abusive light is unhistorical and unscientific. You cannot reason with an 12month- 3 year old, but they totally get an attention-grabbing-but-brief painful consequence and can associate it with that behavior or action. While I agree the “bend over and take X number of licks” needs to become obsolete, the almost-instant negative consequence for a little one is a healthy AND a helpful parenting tool. Also, there is much more evidence that over-sexualization (which our little ones experience on the daily through TV, on magazines everywhere and even in school) has more to do with trauma and criminal outcomes than any links to spanking!
I know it’s anecdotal, but I ask: with the stigmatization and decline of using spanking as a form of discipline, have our young people gotten more disciplined, more respectful, more mentally healthy? There IS healthy fear; there IS healthy shame; there IS a healthy understanding of “no pain, no gain” applied to our psychology in addition to our physical fitness. I would never presume to hint that only one factor contributes or to push for spanking making a big comeback (esp since virtuous self-control is in such decline!), but it’s worth asking what philosophical changes in our cultural psyche have affected the floundering state in which so many of our young people are today? I believe no fear of negative consequences is a huge contributor. They are unmoored and adrift!
So we are supposed to take advice on our children from the APA? We can’t spank them but conducting medical experiments on them is okay. I’m rather done with experts. Just do what you think is best for your kids, is not unnatural for you and forget the Monday-Morning Quarterbacks that weren’t on the field and don’t know the players.
THIS! Until children reach the developmental age when they can be reasoned with, attempting to reason with them about their bad behavior is a fruitless exercise.
There are some children who do understand and respect the word "no!" I get the impression that parents who are anti-spanking probably have been blessed with children who do. But a great many children do NOT.
I don't think it's anecdotal to point to the fact that more and more children in the last two or three generations are increasingly out of control compared to generations upon generations of children in the past who experienced corporal punishment.
Agree with you entirely. My generation of millennial parents are so influenced by the gentle parenting trend (which prioritizes talking through "Big Feelings" with your incomprehending 2 year old and "natural consequences"), and it has a lot of parents in a tizzy about mild corporal punishment, terrified it will traumatize their children, etc. And I think it's doing a disservice to an entire generation of kids.
You are being to kind to Hadley. There is nothing wrong with light corporal punishment. In fact it is sometimes the only way to get through to a young child who is seriously misbehaving. How else can you manage a child who will not stay in timeout, will not listen, and is trying to cause more trouble? You must physically stop the child.
And, there is nothing "bullying" about it. This is where people like Hadley seem wilfully blind. A bully uses his power to gain at the expense of others. A good father uses his power to restrain and teach his child. It isn't fun to discipline a child. But you do it because you love your child and you know that it is best for him to learn to stop doing the bad thing he is doing. And, when it's over and he apologizes, you forgive him and hug him. In this way, he learns about the proper and just use of power. A just father uses the power differential to restrain bad behavior and to protect others. He doesn't use it for his own personal gain. Children understand this and that it is a totally different thing than a bully. It is amazing that someone like Hadley is incapable of understanding it.
Amen!
I never once felt that I was being "bullied" or "abused" when my mom took a flyswatter to the back of my thighs when I exhibited unacceptable behavior (which did not happen very often). I didn't LIKE it. I didn't WANT it. But I knew absolutely that I DESERVED it.
I have a suspicion that many anti-spanking people fundamentally believe that they themselves have never once *deserved* to be punished for anything. If you think you are always in the right, of course you're going to believe that any punishment is only being done to bully or abuse you.
You know, Celia, I think about this a lot: my M.O. in life, when something goes wrong, is “Oh, dear! What did I do??” (MOST of the time…and usually upon reflection, bc I’m definitely susceptible to the blame game too😬) I give my parents credit for instilling the idea that consequences are usually of our own deserving, at least at some level.
Anyway, we could go on and on and I don’t want to take credit away from parenting that does incorporate some sensitivity and affirmation that I know we lacked, but I stand by my soapbox that until we apply the “no pain, no gain” principle to our social-emotional development, we’re going to continue to reap the kinds of unhappy, disgruntled, aimless young people making so much noise in the news. (The ones working hard making something of themselves for the ACTUAL good of mankind have internalized the traditional lessons of their own agency!)
Thank you for speaking up! I agree, and I think that Hadley Freeman probably meets her own "two truths" definition of a bully: "they are powerful people who pick on the vulnerable, and… [they] always insist they’re not hurting their victims."
I have my own anecdote. I was on a long cross-continental flight, with a nice grand-motherly woman sitting next to me and a screaming child (two-ish) behind us. It was a very very very long flight. When we finally landed, I turned to the woman next to me and said, sotto voce, "I think that child needs a nap." She smiled sweetly at me and replied, "What that child needs is a slap on the ass."
Love it!
So, these are the kinds of comments TFP *actually* wants to see: two out of three from Leftist commenters.
Referencing John Oliver as a source of anything other than stupidity is himself an idiot.
He did reveal himself with that one, didn't he?
Agreed. Once I saw the author linked to him that was it for me.
What about bopping kids with a balloon? A tap with a chopstick? Spray with water?
Out of 177 countries ranked in the 2022 Economic Freedom Index (WSJ and Heritage Foundation), the Scandinavian countries ranked 9th, 10th, 11th, 13th and 14th - all well ahead of the US at 25th.
Argentina was 144th. Milei knows he has a lot of work to do.
I think Stephen Lyle is confusing a solid safety net with socialism. Lots of people do.
The bottom five countries in this index were Zimbabwe, Sudan, Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea. Would it be controversial to say those countries are not exactly successes?
That was my first thought too…Sweden is not a socialist country and if you think it is, you haven’t done your research. Well said.