Am I the only one who thinks that hitting a kid and abuse are different things? Like, if I ever had a kid, I wouldn’t spank their ass raw or something like that. But a bop on the mouth or the ear pull or a smack upside the head? Yea. Those are behavior modifiers.
Except they’re not.
The studies done by the trained psychologists in this joke show that little kids don’t associate being hit with the thing they’ve done wrong. Very small children only understand consequences that are directly caused by the thing they did. Steal a biscuit, biscuit tastes good. Then for no reason mummy hit me. Very different to stole a biscuit, now no biscuit after dinner because I stole a biscuit.
And they also show that when a child is old enough to understand why they are being hit that non-physical punishment is equally as effective and less mentally harmful in the long run.
Do you know who benefits the most from hitting as a punishment? The parent. It gives a satisfaction rush. Parents do it because it makes them feel good.
Basically kids have two stages: too young to understand why they are being hit so physical punishment is useless for anything other than teaching a child that bigger stronger people can hit you whenever they like (Which sounds like the same lesson you would learn from abuse)
And the second stage is old enough to be reasoned with so many punishment options are available and you chose physical violence because it makes *you* feel better, which is an abusive action.
The only time a person should ever use violence against another human being, of any age, is to stop that person from being violent themselves.
Hitting a stranger is a crime. Hitting someone small who relies on you for food, love, and shelter should be as well. Don’t hit your fucking kid.
If a sitting president threatens to hold government employees hostage and shut down the government for years because the other branches of government won’t give him absolute power, then he should be fucking impeached.
holy shit apparently during the filming of the 2002 spiderman movie james franco joked that tobey maguire had “frog-like features” which genuinely upset him and resulted in a rivalry between the two that still exists today i’m fucking screaming
i hope tobey maguire beats the fucking shit out of james franco with no repercussions
The frog in tom holland’s mouth is actually tobey maguire
Earlier today, I served as the “young woman’s voice” in a panel of local experts at a Girl Scouts speaking event. One question for the panel was something to the effect of, “Should parents read their daughter’s texts or monitor her online activity for bad language and inappropriate content?”
I was surprised when the first panelist answered the question as if it were about cyberbullying. The adult audience nodded sagely as she spoke about the importance of protecting children online.
I reached for the microphone next. I said, “As far as reading your child’s texts or logging into their social media profiles, I would say 99.9% of the time, do not do that.”
Looks of total shock answered me. I actually saw heads jerk back in surprise. Even some of my fellow panelists blinked.
Everyone stared as I explained that going behind a child’s back in such a way severs the bond of trust with the parent. When I said, “This is the most effective way to ensure that your child never tells you anything,” it was like I’d delivered a revelation.
It’s easy to talk about the disconnect between the old and the young, but I don’t think I’d ever been so slapped in the face by the reality of it. It was clear that for most of the parents I spoke to, the idea of such actions as a violation had never occurred to them at all.
It alarms me how quickly adults forget that children are people.
Apparently people are rediscovering this post somehow and I think that’s pretty cool! Having experienced similar violations of trust in my youth, this is an important issue to me, so I want to add my personal story:
Around age 13, I tried to express to my mother that I thought I might have clinical depression, and she snapped at me “not to joke about things like that.” I stopped telling my mother when I felt depressed.
Around age 15, I caught my mother reading my diary. She confessed that any time she saw me write in my diary, she would sneak into my room and read it, because I only wrote when I was upset. I stopped keeping a diary.
Around age 18, I had an emotional breakdown while on vacation because I didn’t want to go to college. I ended up seeing a therapist for - surprise surprise - depression.
Around age 21, I spoke on this panel with my mother in the audience, and afterwards I mentioned the diary incident to her with respect to this particular Q&A. Her eyes welled up, and she said, “You know I read those because I was worried you were depressed and going to hurt yourself, right?”
TL;DR: When you invade your child’s privacy, you communicate three things:
You do not respect their rights as an individual.
You do not trust them to navigate problems or seek help on their own.
You probably haven’t been listening to them.
Information about almost every issue that you think you have to snoop for can probably be obtained by communicating with and listening to your child.
Part of me is really excited to see that the original post got 200 notes because holy crap 200 notes, and part of me is really saddened that something so negative has resonated with so many people.
I love this post.
Too many parents wonder why their kids aren’t honest with them, and never realize their own non-receptive behavior and their failure to listen are the reasons why.
At one point or another, a child WILL keep a secret from you, but if it’s to a point where all their emotional feelings are being poured away from you as opposed to toward you, it’s probably because you haven’t been emotionally trustworthy or open.
Adultism :(
not to mention, you then take away one of your child’s coping mechanisms. if your parents read your journal, you’re never writing in it again. if your parents monitor your conversations with friends, you won’t tell them when you’re depressed anymore. if you have a therapist that reports what you say to your parents, you won’t tell that therapist anything. now all those methods of venting, feeling better, self-soothing, sorting out your issues, and feeling safe are gone.
“i want information” is not synonymous with “i want my child to talk to me.” those are two separate goals, but i think parents conflate them – i want my child to talk to me, but since they won’t, i’m stealing information from them. no. you didn’t ever want them to talk to you. you wanted information. if you wanted them to talk to you, if that was your entire end goal, you would have approached things completely differently. stealing information from a child ensures they will never talk to you again. but if all you want is information, then you can take it however you want and call it a parenting success.
if what you wanted was a child who talks to you, you would apply the same principles you do to literally any other human interaction in your life, and cultivate a relationship and trust.
I had to stifle my horror and revulsion at my last job, when a conversation about removing the door from a child’s bedroom came up, and I was only one not in favor of it.
May be worth noting I was the only millennial in a conversation that was otherwise full of baby boomers.
See, children are humans! They need their privacy.
My mom has joked about going through my phone and honestly the anxiety. I can’t imagine how someone actually going through that with their parents with EVERYTHING would feel all the time.
My parents used to go through my phone a lot (they still do but not as often) and as a result I am terrified of leaving it where I’m not. I delete this app and redownload it multiple times a day because I’m afraid I’ll catch them in a mood and they’ll take my phone for good.
Horrible day here in Wexford but not quite as bad as in AD 690 when according to the Irish Annals, ‘it rained a shower of blood and a wolf was heard speaking with a human voice’
