5 years of your posts makes for a fairly decent picture of just what you're about.
Five years of reading in things into my posts that weren't there, apparently. Let's take a look at your assumptions of my view on your examle:
Allow me to give you an example. One of the guys I work with would charitably be described as "simple folk". He's most certainly not enlightened and couldn't find an ivory tower with a tourguide. In your world, he needs your help because clearly he's too stupid to make his own decisions. He needs your guidance because, being enlightened and supremely educated, you simply know better.
According to you I don't think this guy is capable of taking care of himself. You think I know better than him how to live his life. And that without me making his decisions for him he's doomed. You assume this is a conclusion I'll come to after having seen a description that comes down to "he's simple". From those three words you think I'll have him all figured out, knowing exactly what he wants way better than he does himself.
Five years of posting history and you still haven't realized I'm not
that stupid.
Take mind that you're talking to a guy who hates drugs, thinks no one should ever do drugs and who wants to legalize drugs out of desire not to dismiss the expeiences and choices of those who decide to do drugs.
But let's review your most stellar achievement, where you proved beyond a doubt that you're more than willing to make snap judgments on situations of which you know absolutely nothing, based solely on your supposedly enlightened thinking and the arrogant belief that somehow you know best for others.
Since you apparently didn't read my last post to the end I'll quote myself from there:
Not knowing every detail about it isn't the same as knowing nothing about it. I know roughly what the problem with her reasoning is, but if I am to seriously argue against it I don't want to be roughly right.
Remember telling me that I was a bad parent? Remember even going so far as to say that my children would be permanently damaged due to my parenting?
So that's where the shoe's clamping? That's not really the way I remember it though. The way I remember it is that I claimed spanking is harmful to children and that most of the research on the matter backs me up on that claim. What followed was that you went from 0 to 100 in about a second flat. With that in mind I found (and still find) it understandable that you failed to see that I never actually called anyone in general or you in particular a bad parent. Anger does that to us - suddenly everything seems like an assault on our person.
First of all, I take care not to judge pepole. I do judge behavior, but I avoid judging pepole. So even if it were to be so that you beat your kids senseless with a baseball bat on a regular basis I wouldn't call you a bad parent - I'd merely call the beating bad parenting. This, I've found, helps keeping away prejudice. Because a label usually says a lot more than it's supposed to. Take alcoholism: I've read about how one of the most common things say when they ask about joining AA is whether they really need to go to the meetings. Because they know they have problems, but they're not
real alcoholics. Oh no, they've got a family and a job and they pay their bills and generally hold their lives together quite decently. Alcoholics aren't like that, ergo they're not alcoholics.
Which brings me to my next point, which is that there are a lot of aspects to parenting. You need to provide them with food and clothing, you need to provide a safe environment for them to live in, you need to help them learn how the world works, you need to teach them how to deal with other pepole and so on. You don't have to get every single one of these aspects perfectly right to raise a well-adjusted kid. Doing so help, but get most of it right and your kid will probably end up mostly fine.
The research on corporal punishment of children doesn't claim that it will turn every single child that's subjected to it into a wreck. What it does claim is that it risks leading to increased anxiety and increased aggression. And that it risks leading to the kids losing respect for the parents, and thus leads to them being less inclined to listen to them.
Subjecting your children to this risk might lead to negative long term effects. Then again, maybe it doesn't. Maybe the rest of your parenting is good enough that these negative long term effects are healed, and that the corporal punishment therefore didn't really matter. There haven't really been any studies that have shown benefits of corporal punishment though, so harmful or not, the risk is unnecessary.
But your not a bad parent because you've subjected your children to unnecessary risks. You're merely not a perfect parent (and that's not very insulting, since perfect parents don't exist). Pointing out that there are things in your parenting you could have done better isn't saying you've done a poor job either, it's merely saying you could have done a better job (I'd even say it's saying you could,
in theory, have done a better job).
Besides, the point of these claims isn't to make judgements on an individual level, because commenting on individuals are highly uncertain. Instead, it's about commenting on groups of pepole, where the differences between individuals gravitate towards an average. It might be so that your kids actually benefitted a little from you using corporal punishment. But statistics show that most parents won't be able to use it, and there's no real way of knowing if you're one of the parents who can (all parents who use corporal punishment think they're one of those who can balance it properly, most are wrong).
Oh, and on parenting Ubs: Most so called academic experts would totally disagree with how I raised my totally well adjusted, hard working, never been in trouble kids. If you don't believe me, ask several people here who regularly play online with my son!!
Like I said, making calls when it comes to individuals is difficult - lots of external factors need to be taken into the calculation. Maybe you were lucky enough to only get dandelion children who could go through your strict parenting without taking too much harm, maybe academic experts would see a lot less wrong with your child raising than you give them credit for.
It's hard to tell. Especially since I know hardly anything about your kids and hardly anything about your parenting.
But it's easy to pat yourself on the back for doing a good job when you don't know how your children would have turned out had you listened to the advice those academic experts.
Übereil
