Tag Archives: Smacking

Commentary

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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New study shows that children who are spanked are more successful

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Story here in the UK Telegraph. (H/T Andrew)

Excerpt:

A study found that youngsters smacked up to the age of six did better at school and were more optimistic about their lives than those never hit by their parents.

They were also more likely to undertake voluntary work and keener to attend university, experts discovered.

The research, conducted in the United States, is likely to anger children’s rights campaigners who have unsuccessfully fought to ban smacking in Britain.

[…]Those who had been smacked up to the age of six performed better in almost all the positive categories and no worse in the negatives than those never punished physically.

Teenagers who had been hit by their parents from age seven to 11 were also found to be more successful at school than those not smacked but fared less well on some negative measures, such as getting involved in more fights.

However, youngsters who claimed they were still being smacked scored worse than every other group across all the categories.

Prof Gunnoe found little difference in the results between sexes and different racial groups.

I find it interesting that the recent anti-smacking law in New Zealand was championed by Labor Party prime minister Helen Clark and Green Party MP Sue Bradford. These two are members of the secular left in New Zealand.

Spanking is opposed by the secular left because they oppose all moral judgments, personal responsibility, and accountability. They seem to have a hostility to any objective moral standard that defines good and evil, but instead embrace moral relativism. They want to be allowed to do anything they feel like doing, regardless of the harm and costs incurred, and to get off Scot-free in the end.

The following video explains the worldview of the secular left better than anything I’ve seen. They think that wars are caused by disagreements, so the best way to prevent wars is to support what is traditionally regarded as evil, and to denigrate what is traditionally regarded as good. When all distinctions between good and evil have been abolished, they think that the world will be a better place.

That is why they do not want parents teaching their children any standard of conduct. They view this as a setback to their goal of destroying all moral distinctions.

I do agree with the thrust of the article that spanking should cease as soon as the child is able to make connections between behaviors and rewards rationally.

Commentary

Understanding the effects of moral relativism on New Zealand schools

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Previously, I had discussed why atheism is not able to ground the minimal requirements for rational moral behavior.

Now let’s see  an example of  the effects of not being able to make moral judgments about good and evil.

An example from the education system

I was reading over on the MandM blog, which is based in New Zealand and I found a post about the bullying problems that their 14-year-old son was having in his school. Schools are notorious breeding grounds for moral relativism – that is where young minds are brainwashed with “values clarification” programs. Students learn to make up their own values based on personal preferences.

Here is what happened to their son Christian:

Christian began attending Liston at the start of 2008 as a Year 9 student. Since that time he has been repeatedly bullied by other students. This bullying included being called names, threatened, being taunted about his medical condition (he has Aspergers Syndrome – see the attachment “medical condition”); he has been shoved, choked, hit, punched, knocked over, kicked, had his pants pulled down and has been dragged across the concrete while a student filmed him on his cell phone. During class, he has had objects thrown at him, he has been hit, punched, kicked, he has been knocked out of his desk, has had people steal his belongings, call him names and taunt him about his condition.

And this is what the teachers did:

Frequently the response of the teachers in these classes to these incidents has not been adequate, often it has been [to have] him moved instead of the bully.

To our knowledge, no student has been stood down, reported to the board of trustees or even had their parents phoned over the assaults and harassment they have committed against our son in his year and a half at Liston, including the repeat offenders.

And here’s what it means:

It seemed to us (aside from the repeat offenders) that as each bully was dealt with another one popped up to take his place. This suggested to us that a culture of bullying had developed within the school; that to the other students, bullying didn’t come with serious consequences: your parents didn’t get told, you were not at risk of being stood down and the teachers didn’t really view it as anything serious anyway when it happened in the classroom.

This is the problem with the moral relativism, which has become dominant as Christianity has retreated. It is irrational for an atheist to stand up to evil and injustice if it involves possible unpleasantness for them. The moral relativist, believes that there is no distinction between the victim and the bully – and this prevents the relativist from standing up to the bully and stopping their bullying.

You can see an example of this moral relativism going on right now with Obama and the Iranian dictators.

New Zealand’s anti-smacking law

It has been argued by family-values advocates that children need to form their conscience and moral sense by relating to their parents, especially their mother, at a very early age. Anxiety and aggression in children increases as the family is weakened or broken up by things like day care and no-fault divorce.

The disintegration of the family is aided by many progressive policies enacted by the political left. The left is wedded to moral relativism, because the left is secular. And they even desire to force moral relativism on families. What that means to parents is that the state can criminalize moral judgments with hate crime laws, restrictions on speech and even restrictions on parenting.

In New Zealand, the country is actually having a referendum about their “anti-smacking” law. The current law is that parents are prohibited from physically disciplining their children. I would think that this law would exacerbate the bullying problem in the schools. [Note: I fixed this paragraph to reflect the fact that the law is already in place, and the referendum is non-binding!]

UPDATE: I noticed a post about how Christians are allowed to make moral judgments, including judgments against bullies, also on MandM.