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Should parents be more permissive with misbehaving children?

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Below are some stories from Australia about the trend towards more permissive parenting.

An article from the Australian Courier-Mail on permissiveness at school.

Excerpt:

Brock Duchnicz will start year 5 at a new school this year unable to spell simple words like at, in or on.

In two years he has missed 63 days – almost 13 weeks – of school for offences such as swearing, class disruption and pushing chairs over.

His mother Sarndra said EQ’s policy of blocking her son from the classroom was not working.

Ms Duchnicz said teachers were not equipped to deal with children like Brock and called on the Government to introduce specialised behaviour management training for all teachers.

“I feel as though these kids are just pushed to the back of the classroom in the too hard basket,” she said.

“There are so many more children coming up the line like this and if they (teachers) are not equipped they need more understanding and time put into them.”

[…]Brock was recently diagnosed with ADHD but Ms Duchnicz stopped his Ritalin medication because it had no effect. She plans to have him reassessed.

Why does everything have to be the fault of society, or the fault of chemical imbalances? Why can’t people just be careful about making sure that their spouse is committed to raising the children to have certain moral values?

An article from Australian Herald Sun about discipline.

Excerpt:

A Melbourne expert says naughty corners and time out in bedrooms are inappropriate because they shame and humiliate.

The same goes for smacking, which education and parenting consultant Kathy Walker says makes children feel resentful.

[…]”Labels such as ‘bad’ or ‘naughty’ shame and humiliate children,” she said. “Even when this strategy is framed as a request for children to ‘sit and think about what they have done and then apologise’, it is inappropriate. A child’s bedroom should be a safe happy place of relaxation.”

Instead Ms Walker, who thinks smacking is unnecessary and ineffective, advocates “chilling out” where a child sits quietly “away from the scene of the crime” to calm down.

She said some parents spent too much time and energy forcing young children to say please, thank you and sorry, when their own behaviour was more important.

Why is it that so many people so uncomfortable with moral standards, moral judgments, and rewards and punishments? Can we expect to produce moral children when we banish morality from their development and focus on self-esteem and tolerance of bad behavior?

An article from the Australian Herald Sun on bullying.

Excerpt:

BULLIES would escape punishment under a new Victorian plan to reduce schoolyard intimidation.

Teachers have backed the idea but parents have raised concerns, saying bullies should face the consequences of their actions.

The Swedish-devised “method of shared concern” aims to “empower” bullies to change their behaviour.

[…]Rather than being accused, suspected bullies are merely spoken to and encouraged to think of ways to help a bullied student cope.

The hope is that an aggressor will be turned into a sympathetic ally.

“The approach is solution-focused,” a new government-commissioned report says.

“The emphasis is about bringing about desirable changes in participants rather than finding who’s to blame and applying sanctions.”

Victorian Education Union president Mary Bluett said the no-blame plan was in general a good “initial approach”, but the burden would rest on school staff.

It demonstrated why all schools needed trained counsellors, she said.

Why should adopt a policy based on “hope”? The article cites no research. Why believe that this permissive policy is good for children?

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Doug Groothuis explains the correspondence theory of truth

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Check out this short paper on truth and postmodernism by Christian philosopher Douglas Groothuis.

Excerpt:

The correspondence view of truth, held by the vast majority of philosophers and theologians throughout history, holds that any declarative statement is true if and only if it corresponds to or agrees with factual reality, with the way things are. The statement, “The desk in my study is brown,” is true only if there is, in fact, a brown desk in my study. If indeed there is a brown desk in my study, then the statement, “there is no brown desk in my study,” is false because it fails to correspond to any objective state of affairs.

The titanic statement, “Jesus is Lord of the universe,” is either true or false. It is not both true and false; it is not neither true nor false. This statement either honors reality or it does not; it mirrors the facts or it does not. The Christian claims that this statement is true apart from anyone’s opinion (see Romans 3:4). In other words, it has a mind-independent reality. Minds may recognize this truth, but minds do not create this truth. This is because truth is a quality of some statements and not of others. It is not a matter of subjective feeling, majority vote or cultural fashion. The statement, “The world is spherical,” was true even when the vast majority of earthlings took their habitat to be flat.

The correspondence view of truth entails that declarative statements are subject to various kinds of verification and falsification. This concerns the area of epistemology, or the study of how we acquire and defend knowledge claims. [2] A statement can be proven false if it can be shown to disagree with objective reality. The photographs from outer space depicting the earth as a blue orb (along with prior evidence) falsified flat-earth claims. Certainly, not all falsification is as straightforward as this; but if statements are true or false by virtue of their relationship to what they attempt to describe, this makes possible the marshaling of evidence for their veracity or falsity. [3]

Therefore, Christians — who historically have affirmed the correspondence view of truth — hold that there are good historical reasons to believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead in space-time history, thus vindicating His divine authority (see Romans 1:4; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11). [4] The Apostle Paul adamantly affirms this view: “And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead” (1 Corinthians 15:14-15). Without the correspondence view of truth, these resounding affirmations ring hollow. Christianity cannot live and thrive without it.

This is a great article from a very smart guy who has written extensively about truth and postmodernism. Doug also has a blog, in case you want to pay him a visit.