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Spanking and Monsters
Omar067
Veteran
I'm here today because I want to get Buddhist opinions on spankings. Now, I'm a 15 year old kid and I can honestly say that I dislike spankings and, where I come from, spanking is largely practiced. I personally think spanking is one of the things that has messed the world up so much. All it does is teach that pain and fear is how to solve problems. I know people who spank others and they say there are so anti bullying, but they can't see that spanking creates bullying. They don't know that it creates monsters. I just want some Buddhist opinions on these words.
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Comments
Sounds like you already know it falls under the violence catagory.
Not loving way of handling things, I agree with you.
spanking would not have been Buddha's first choice to dealing with children.
That being said, when all of us, including parents, make mistakes, the
effects are numerous and everyone will have opinions on your mistakes
and everyone else's.
Store how this particular issue effects you inside, and make the
intention not to spank your own children,
since your experience tells you it creates negativity.
And sometimes I threaten to disable the wireless internet connection too; normally when it's getting in the way of homework. But I've never smacked; I've never ruled smacking out; but I've just never felt that there was a situation that warranted it.
Why smack when there's so many other punishments and rewards that can be used to encourage certain types of behaviours?
It all depends on the approach, I think. Some people just make really mean and angry parents, and kids will be afraid if this is the case. Otherwise they'll just be afraid of doing wrong, without real fear of their parents.
One of my kids has had some significant behavioral issues. But instead of looking at it as a view of "my kid is out of control and I need to get him back in control!" I treated him with compassion and put myself in his shoes to try to understand where he was coming from. He wasn't behaving because he was a bad kid who needed a slap to bring him under control. He was a little boy who was suffering greatly because of the death of his dad and needed understanding and love, not punishment. This is true of many situations, but parents just largely want to control their children, not understand them.
There is never a reason you need to resort to hitting to teach a child a lesson. If you feel you must hit them to teach them a lesson, then clearly you have done a poor job in teaching them that lesson on a level they can understand.
Anything can be taken to extremes, and it's the extremes we need to avoid while still recognizing that different methods work for different people (or children). We're all different after all, so drawing absolute lines is an exercise in futility. People who don't need or want to spank their kids, that's how they raise their kids. People who do, that's how they raise their kids... as long as it's not abuse. If anyone says spanking is always abuse, I think they are nuts and don't know what they're talking about. Pain is a teacher, while abuse is abuse. Sometimes only getting burned will turn our minds away from harmful activities (and that really is the crux of it, we love our children so we'll do what's necessary to protect them).
I would not say that pain is harmful. Too much pain can cause psychological issues, or if we ignore the pain we can cause harm to ourselves (we're not going to keep our hand in the fire), but pain itself is *not* "harm". It's telling us something. Abuse is something else.
I don't think spanking is always the answer. As I said in my very first post, we should try other things first. If those other things don't work, however, it's better to spank (when warranted and not abusively) than to leave a child "untrained" and likely to recommit the harmful/wrong acts again. That is the point where my compassion would override my aversion to physical violence. People get too upset about pain, they'll even get upset about being slapped by a Zen master though he/she does it for the most compassionate reason.
Pain is only really bad when it's abusive; when the parent doesn't know what they're doing. It comes down to how you view pain. If you equate "pain" with "harm", that's pretty much it for you!
In your initial post you said "I personally think spanking is one of the things that has messed the world up so much.", and the way I see it is close to the opposite. Can either of us really say for sure? I find it compelling that until very recent times, spanking was always a normal thing, and the world wasn't so bad... that is, kids weren't so bad/undisciplined. It's easier to draw the opposite conclusion from the one you have, and that's not saying that it's all about spanking or not spanking. Single working parents that can't spend time with their kids and other factors are all a part of our current predicament I think.
That's the one thing I'd close with, that there are always more ways to see things. We mostly stick to what we like, and automatically classify what we don't like as being wrong. It's difficult for us to lay our likes and dislikes aside and try to see a larger picture, which is why there's so much racism and religious intolerance and everything else.
I totally agree all kids are different, and I'm not saying no parent should ever spank any child ever. I can say spanking was not the best option for me, and it's not for my kids, either. Most people (I'd say 100% but I try to leave room for outliers I'm not thinking of) spank without mindfulness. They spank because it's a snap reaction. Kid comes out and slaps mom on the leg, mom reaches back and slaps kid. Most of the time this is small children, too, who are not even capable of understanding right and wrong. These aren't parents who are Ward Cleaver types who say like on tv "Timmy, you did a wrong thing, and I'm going to have to spank you for it now. I love you, son." That is not how anyone I know spanks their children.
My main problem with it, is that most people who spank start spanking when kids are at a very young age, too young to understand what the parents want them to understand. It is not the fault of kids not being disciplined that is causing so many troubles, but a lack of mindful parenting. A lack of taking the time to consider what you are doing when you have sex with someone and bring a child into the world. A lack of caring to take the time to know who that child is and what works for that child before resorting to spanking.
I'm sure there are some parents who operate that way. But not a single of them that I know, does. They are inattentive parents who don't even seem to realize they have children, they treat them more like pets than kids, and their spanking is a snap reaction because they haven't bothered to take the time to think about how they are going to parent their children.
Whether it's spanking, yelling, grounding, time outs or whatever you use, if you have to do it many, many times for the same infraction, it's not working. If you have to spank your child 10 times for talking back to you, they aren't learning the lesson so why keep spanking? Parents don't know how to be parents. It has nothing to do with a lack of spanking and much more to do with mindfulness and the sacrifices being a parent brings. People don't want to make those sacrifices anymore.
http://cdugan0.tripod.com/SpkSlavery.html
Children not understanding, not capable of understanding, is I think the reason spanking became an acceptable practice in the first place. You don't spank them hard, and you always spank them on the butt where it doesn't cause real harm, but it would teach them in a way they could understand at a young age and that would leave an impression upon them. When they're older there are more ways to make them understand the gravity of the things they've done, and spanking shouldn't be anything remotely near "routine".
I think it's the bad apples that ruin the concept for others. The ones who don't really understand the limits and appropriate times for spanking children, and cause actual harm physically and mentally/emotionally to their children. As a child if you have horrible experiences with being spanked, you'll be very turned off from the idea of spanking entirely. I'll admit it's my not-so-bad experiences with being spanked (which include the resultant change in myself, and the parental perspective) that allow me to see the benefits of spanking, while still seeing how it can be abused, so it's a matter of experience. There's no right and wrong answer, only good and bad applications of the principle.
Buddhism says, as a precept not an absolute, to not cause harm. As I talked with Omar about earlier, if you automatically equate pain with harm, then this is the end of that thought for you. If you see both the benefit and the harm, the relative value of pain, it's something different. That's where I come from, but other people come from different experiences and will naturally disagree. That's okay!
Until they are old enough for that, then it's your job as a parent to protect them. You don't spank a 2 year old for going near the fire, you protect them from getting near it in the first place, that's your job. Expecting them to know better is just impossible. Time outs usually work quite well for children that age (I've been through 3 kids that age, and have yet to find timeouts not working for kids under 5 or 6 years old)
I personally don't want to be the one to cause pain in my child, of any sort. And I in no way can know if I'm causing them pain (other than physical) if they are too young to have really developed their emotional mind. Pain may not always be harm, it does serve a purpose after all. But for me, pain does = suffering, and I don't want to be the cause of suffering in my child's life. From their point of view, having a parent at all is enough suffering!
You protect them and watch them as best you can, but any parent knows you can't prevent every bad thing from happening to them (or every instance of them doing bad/harmful things). It's actually best to stop them from bad actions the first time they do them, to break the cycle before it begins. Children need to be guided, and we all do it differently, but we shouldn't take it to extremes... there are, quite frankly, bad parents. Spanking doesn't make a parent bad or else I'd reasonably conclude my own parents were bad, but the fact is they were excellent parents and raised well-adjusted children, and they did use spanking as appropriate.
It's crucial to start children out right from the get-go. Many people don't know what to do as new parents, and only try to correct their child's bad behavior after they're too old, which is difficult. It's like improperly training a puppy, not that a human child is the same but in the ways that the situation is similar. People go from not spanking their children at all when they're young, to spanking them too freely and forcibly when they're older, and this may in fact be the source of many over-abusive seeming parents.
I learned how one should properly use spanking from my parents, and this reminds me of the relationship between master and student in Buddhist traditions. It's just as likely that people who don't know how to use spanking properly will pass this improper methodology onto their own children, causing a vicious cycle by tradition. And so we have good application and bad application respectively. So what does this mean? That it's going to depend.
With children it doesn't have to be spanking if you're against spanking, but it can be if done with gentleness and compassion. If there's living proof that spanking can be done and not cause harm (actually cause corrective behavior), and living proof that spanking can be done wrong (causing harm instead), then we must conclude that "depending on how it's done", spanking can be either good or bad (not necessarily one or the other).
We can draw this as a reasonable conclusion, no? This is going beyond my experience or your experience and using both to see the relativity at play. If we can't agree on that point... well, that's all I've got.
Cloud, when considering all things, yes, for some kids and some families, spanking can be a good thing, obviously, because you are a good example of that
I remember being spanked once in particular. I was about 5 years old, and a friend and I walked down to a nearby river without telling anyone. Later on I got a spanking from my dad. Did I learn not to go by the river alone? Yes. But I also learned not to trust my father anymore, and I obeyed out of fear of him, that didn't resolve until I was an adult. As a grandfather now, he admits spanking wasn't the right thing to do and he'd do it differently now. My sister on the other hand was always getting spanked (and it never taught her a single lesson about following rules) and at 34 she still has a strained relationship with my father because she was a very emotionally sensitive child who had her trust violently violated (in her words) from a very young age by 2 people who were supposed to protect her, but didn't know how to manage her. So, same parents, different experience. Interestingly, I decided after that one time not to spank my kids. She doesn't have kids, but has maintained if she did, she would spank them. And she's been involved in big domestic fights with her partners at time, involving broken glasses, bruises and other such things. That she feels she's of the emotional stability to "properly" spank a child, is frightening.
All that I can say is that it seems there's a way spanking can work to advantage, and a way spanking can work to disadvantage. If I take it any further than that, into the realm of (definite) yes/no or (definite) right/wrong, then I'm choosing sides in a side-less reality. I can't very well not take my experiences into account, nor can I discount the experiences of others, and so this is where it all comes to a head.
And right back to "it depends". If anyone can show otherwise, reasonably, I'm all eyes and ears (and probably a mouth and fingers after that). With this and many things in my life, I try to walk a middle path between extremes that are themselves not "actually" how things are. Taking all things into consideration, black and white becomes grey. We like black and white, we like it to be a simple yes/no, but life isn't like that in many regards at all.
Who can say anything for sure? It's all so uncertain. What's poison to us is food to something else, and this relativity of good and bad suggests that absolute good and bad are an illusion we create. We create it, we cling to it, and then when things aren't necessarily that way... we suffer. Much of the division in the world is due to clinging to extremes, to "this is the only right way". That makes me more sad than I can put in words, not for myself but for all of us. From where else does our suffering come?
How can we know for sure? That's crucial. If we go to certainty, where certainty is not yet warranted, we've gone too far. At least that's how I look at it. I'll discuss until the sun goes down or comes up, but we have to resolve these kinds of questions if we're being realistic and reasonable. Whatever the end result is, we'll have exhausted the possibilities and will then know for sure (if we can). I think this is both scientific in method and Buddhist in method.
Your case seems rather clear-cut as "not appropriate", and that's understandable.
It's so very easy and tempting to say "just this", and not budge. I'm willing to change my views if there's sufficient reason, which is part of the reason I even care to discuss anything. I've changed a lot over the years for the better, and I don't think any change now is going to make things "worse".
I can't say that some other method wouldn't have worked for me, only that some minor temporary pain did work quite well for me. The lessons stuck with me, I knew what was wrong. What I can't say is that some other method *would* have necessarily worked as well for me. That's what I don't know. This is what we can't yet answer. People are different and situations are different, we don't all learn the same way.
When you say things like "have pain inflicted", it sounds like torture... it was nothing like that in my experience. I think it's been that way in your experience, and so there's quite a different outlook between us. I can very much feel where you're coming from, but I think your experience has been so bad that it's going to stick with you.
effective method of communication but sometimes life does throw you a spanking.
As you gain more experience and mature you'll more and more have definite views and ambitions leading to greater autonomy in your behaviour - these may or may not clash with those of your parents and your family as a whole - it is natural at first for this behaviour to be seen as extreme and as such for it to attract an extreme communication (in this case a spanking).
On the whole however, spanking will be only a part of your overall total communications with your parents - focusing on it solely and bemoaning its qualities has less of a chance of assisting a solution.
Perhaps consider some strategies:
A 'better solution' within your control is your own behaviour - consider acting within the spirit of your parents' best expectations - e.g. rather than worrying that if you dont study you will be spanked - just study - spanking is no longer an issue... see if this can be applied to other areas.
Enforce other communications with your parents - if you're able to open and maintain numerous lines of effective communication, your parents may well resort less to extreme intervention.
It's tough being a teenager - tumultuous times - hang in there.
Other things you can do: realize that your parents are likely doing the best they can. It's hard to do right by your kids, especially if you come from a place that was less than ideal when you were a child. You can try talking to them, if you feel that would be productive and tell them how you honestly feel, be prepared to go to them with ideas, real ideas, of what punishments might be appropriate. Perhaps they just have not thought of anythin else.
Practice. Meditate and build compassion for your parents and the other parents who have grown up how they did, to think spanking is the only answer. For them to not be able to come up with any other answer to raising children, they must have suffered as children as well. Perhaps the way they are doing things IS a vast improvement on what they grew up with. I know that was the case with my mom. She grew up in a horrible household, she did leagues better than her parents did, but she still didn't do perfectly by any means. Parents are just people too and most of them try to do right by their kids with whatever means they have learned. Kids can be teachers for their parents, too, maybe it is time for you to teach them. Just don't let it come across as you needing to school them. If you want to be treated as a mature, responsible person, make sure you are acting like one. (these are all things I tell my own son, who is also 15).
It's really hard being a parent. I remember being your age, and thinking my parents didn't know me, didn't get me, didn't know what it was like growing up. You don't understand what it is to raise kids, until you have them. Finally, even if you cannot talk to them, even if you have to bide your time until you can leave, you can at least live in peace knowing you know better, and that you'll do better and do differently than your parents did. Keep that in mind and practice on it so you don't lose it. It's very easy to get caught up in bad cycles of things. Perhaps you have the parents you do, so you are the stopping point in that cycle.
Your parents are human beings - they may or may not be right but they are in all likelihood attempting to give you the same or better survival chances that they have - kinship is a strong bond.
Are you sure you want more creative punishments?