> But appropriately, rarely applied, I can say with certainty it worked for me.
No, you can't. Maybe it did, but you don't know how you'd acted if they'd just talked to you instead. It's easy to think we can untangle how a given event shaped us, but we really are horribly bad at it.
It ignores that people who never were spanked regularly can tell similar stories about just having been talked to (that's how I learned not to stuff wires in outlets). You can't tell if they are right about how it affected their behaviour either. In either situation we're guessing based on how it made us feel.
I don't think the very occasional spank is likely to be massively damaging, but I also don't think its necessary - I grew up around the time it was outlawed in Norway in the 80's. It was publicised enough that the one time my mother slapped me when I was a child, I threatened to call the police because I'd heard about it on the radio.
People insisted the change in the law would be a disaster and that children needed to be spanked, and it'd be all doom and gloom.
It was largely a non-event, apart from some pastor that made a big point of protesting and telling everyone how he still spanked his children.
Children still learn not to put wires in electrical outlets whether their parents spank them or not (as I'm writing this, I've had flashes of recollection of scary scenarios that feel like they may have been things I was told about as a child, but I really has no way of knowing if that's a real memory or "fabricated"). There was no massive rise in badly behaved children, or sudden surge of people electrocuting themselves. Of course, nor did it make us all magically better adjusted.
> but you don't know how you'd acted if they'd just talked to you instead.
I have an entire childhood of other experiences I could relate to you that tells me that I do, in fact, know how I would have reacted in I had just been talked to. And I am genuinely grateful for the (very few) times I was swatted, because there are things in this world that fear is the appropriate response to.
You appear to have spent your childhood in a safe country. I did not. If what I am saying sounds foreign to your mindset, consider yourself lucky, and I mean that with genuine sincerity.
>It ignores that people who never were spanked regularly can tell similar stories about just having been talked to (that's how I learned not to stuff wires in outlets).
You understand the innate survivorship bias in this example, right? Of course you can talk to the people who never poked wires in to an outlet- they're still here to talk.
Similarly, there's an innate survivorship bias in your case as well. There are people that were spanked as a kid that grew up violent, despising their parents or simply engaging in more dangerous behavior due to the breakdown of trust. I can guarantee you there are kids that decided to poke wires in an outlet solely because their parents decided to spank them.
We also know that hitting your pets does not work either, yet for some reason we seem to believe that hitting children is effective.
>There are people that were spanked as a kid that grew up violent, despising their parents or simply engaging in more dangerous behavior due to the breakdown of trust.
My point is that negative reinforcement has its place, not that it is desirable in and of itself. My parents very seldom used it, but it wasn't completely off the table, and I am confident that I benefited from that approach. That is a fundamentally different situation than one where spankings or other physical punishment are so common as to have children lose trust in their parents. I always trusted my parents.
>We also know that hitting your pets does not work either, yet for some reason we seem to believe that hitting children is effective.
Speaking of pets and pain: the hotwire that I used around the horse corral kept both my dogs and the horses safe, with only an absolute minimum of actual pain. No animal needed more than one or two incidences of contact to learn to not mess with the fence, and there was no more effective solution available. Note that this isn't hitting or striking an animal out of anger- it is a very specifically directed form of negative reinforcement to prevent otherwise dangerous behaviors from spreading. It works very well, and does not cause the affected animals any long-term trauma. The just learn to respect the wire barrier. Just like they know that it will hurt if they touch it, they also know that it won't chase or bother them if they leave it alone, and that's usually how it goes, no stress beyond the first few contacts.
> I have an entire childhood of other experiences I could relate to you that tells me that I do, in fact, know how I would have reacted in I had just been talked to. And I am genuinely grateful for the (very few) times I was swatted, because there are things in this world that fear is the appropriate response to.
Sorry, but with all due respect: You do not. You know that with the accumulated past experience you had, you acted a certain way in a different situation. You do not, for example, know if the reason you acted differently when just talked to was that you'd gotten accustomed to more serious reactions for something serious and therefore interpreted the talking to as less important and dismissed it. You make the point yourself that it was rare, and is something you tie to really important lessons, so it would make sense if you dismiss being talked to as implying something isn't that dangerous.
Of course, again, we can't know.
> You understand the innate survivorship bias in this example, right?
Yes, I do. But you do not seem to have understood that the point of giving that example was that your example is also down to survivorship bias, and to illustrate why that makes anecdotes like this (both of our anecdotes) worthless as a means of determining how well either alternative works.
My point was not to prove that "my" alternative is better, but to illustrate why personal experience is a poor basis for drawing conclusions about this (and again: yes, that applies to my experience too).
The basis of your claim appears to be "people are incredibly complicated, everything ties in to everything, therefore we can make no claims about what works and what doesn't."
To which I respond: if things were truly that un-understandable, we would have been unable as a species to have additive culture that improves over time, because what we think about how people and the world work vs. the actuality of things would be too divorced from one another.
And yet we can positively point to growth of knowledge across all human endeavors, in societies around the globe. I therefore fundamentally disagree with your proposition.
Which is ok. It's fine to agree to disagree. We could both be wrong, after all. :)
My point is that none of us can say. Any such anecdote will be affected by biases and post-rationalisations and we even have no reason to assume we remember them correctly.
On the contrary, we have very much every reason to believe things probably happened somewhat like but still different in ways to how we remember them; I have memories of events from that age that I know for a fact can't be real. Why? Because in some of them I remember myself in the third person.
The idea that we can reliably assess how a certain action affected us is a nice fantasy, but that's also all it is. Sometimes we get it right. The problem is we can't be sure when.
At 2 years old there's only one thing a parent can do to avoid a child touching a hot oven: make it physically impossible for the child to access a hot oven.
As if that is always possible. You would need to build a big enclosure padded out with cotton wool. Many dangers in the real world, you can maybe stop the kid touching an oven, but you won't be always there to stop him/her from dangerous situations.
Were your responding to 'make it physically impossible for the child to access a hot oven.'?
If yes, then you're wrong: its (99%) always possible. Just buy and install a kid's barrier and park the 2yo in his room during the cooking. Or use a cold door oven. No need for a 'big enclosure padded out with cotton wool'.
> Many dangers in the real world, you can maybe stop the kid touching an oven, but you won't be always there to stop him/her from dangerous situations.
100% agree, unfortunately. My point was that, agreeing with the parent (no pun intended), at 2yo, you don't loose sight on your child if it's environment is not 100% safe, end of the discussion.
While I agree with the comment saying the only thing you can do with a two year old is prevent them from accessing it, your 2 year olds reasoning also demonstrates why spanking them does not work reliably in that kind of instance either.
Kids that age are in some respect smarter than we often think, but in other respects they're totally helpless.
So he's understood that the oven is hot, but not that it being hot means he will hurt himself if touching it and that as a consequence he shouldn't. That's reasonable for him. He needs to make several other connections to determine it's bad: Many other things are hot, but not hot enough to be dangerous. He needs to also realise that too hot equals pain, and this means realising that touching the plate equals pain, not just hot. That's a step or two two long from starting premise to consequence for a 2 year old.
You'll see the same with kids that refuse to dress up when going out when it is cold out. It's hot inside. They've been told it's cold outside. But they also need to realise that this means they will be cold if they go out without dressing up even if it's hot inside.
Sometimes what works with very young children is to help them connect those dots. With my son I'd open the door, step out, so he can feel he's cold, and then tell him we needed to put warm clothes on to stay warm. Or you can be explicit in explanation: "we need to put clothes on so we stay warm when we go out" instead of "we need to put clothes on because it's cold outside".
For things that can be painful, try expressing that: that the oven will hurt. That it is hot, that's a separate thing (for now).
With a two year old you're not getting away from trying to prevent access, but my son certainly responded to just having the causal chains from "do things adults consider dangerous" to "will hurt" shorter.
Another strategy that keeps giving even now that he's 9, is to give constrained choices, and make him decide or decide what he thinks the right answer is: "Do you think the hot oven will hurt a lot or lots and lots?" (or when facing a 9yo that wants to decide everything: "do you want healthy dinner A or [marginally more popular] healthy dinner B?" as opposed to "what do you want for dinner?"). Choosing a specific framing is a scarily effective way of guiding them to where you want them to be (and it works scarily well on adults too; we're not nearly as much smarter than a toddler as we'd like to think).
I certainly can't say if the above works for you, but it's worth a try.
Not speaking for the person you asked, but another thing my mother did when I was about the same age was to allow me to touch a hot stovetop when she knew it was still painful-hot, but not serious-burn hot.
I think it was the correct choice. My curiosity was sated, no punishment was involved, and she made the (for me, anyway) right choice of letting me experience the direct consequences of my actions when she knew they wouldn't be too bad.
Young children have a very limited ability to understand cause and effect. It simply isn't possible to explain to a toddler that "if you run out in the road then you might get badly hurt", because their brains still have a limited grasp of "if... then" and "badly hurt". I am strongly opposed to corporal punishment in the general case, but I am willing to concede the possibility that it is a necessary option in cases of genuine life-or-death emergency.
Operant conditioning. Running in the road and getting spanked are both tangible experiences. Being hit by a car is entirely hypothetical until it actually happens. Learning the association "running in the road hurts" or "running in the road makes me sad" requires less much less cognitive development than understanding the hypothetical "if I run in the road then I might get hit by a car, and getting hit by a car will hurt". The latter requires a degree of imagination that many young children have not yet developed.
I'm not saying with any confidence that spanking is necessary in these circumstances, only that it may be justifiable given the risks involved. You need some sort of strong negative stimulus. It's not nice, but neither is being hit by a car.
The grandparent didn't say young children don't understand cause and effect, they said they have a limited understanding. A limited grasp on communication as well. Saying they shouldn't do something does not land as well as an immediate pain response to doing something bad. "No that is bad" has no meaning if it's not associated with something bad.
How can corporal punishment be a necessity in a life or death situation? I think you mean in preventing the recurrence of that situation. Screams and tears of fear and other emotions will suffice. One day my 3 yr old decided to bike away in a park near a pond. I cried when helpful bystanders found him about 1km away. (Don't search in concentric circles! Go for the playground.) We all share that memory even though a lot of other memories of preschoolers fade. No corporal punishment necessary.
Honest try to respond. I guess a child needs to associate the right emotion with a situation. Violence is a bad example as a resolution and fits with the emotion of anger. A scream or tears can be a result of fear. In case of danger fear for a childs life is a more fitting emotion imho than anger.
No, you can't. Maybe it did, but you don't know how you'd acted if they'd just talked to you instead. It's easy to think we can untangle how a given event shaped us, but we really are horribly bad at it.
It ignores that people who never were spanked regularly can tell similar stories about just having been talked to (that's how I learned not to stuff wires in outlets). You can't tell if they are right about how it affected their behaviour either. In either situation we're guessing based on how it made us feel.
I don't think the very occasional spank is likely to be massively damaging, but I also don't think its necessary - I grew up around the time it was outlawed in Norway in the 80's. It was publicised enough that the one time my mother slapped me when I was a child, I threatened to call the police because I'd heard about it on the radio.
People insisted the change in the law would be a disaster and that children needed to be spanked, and it'd be all doom and gloom.
It was largely a non-event, apart from some pastor that made a big point of protesting and telling everyone how he still spanked his children.
Children still learn not to put wires in electrical outlets whether their parents spank them or not (as I'm writing this, I've had flashes of recollection of scary scenarios that feel like they may have been things I was told about as a child, but I really has no way of knowing if that's a real memory or "fabricated"). There was no massive rise in badly behaved children, or sudden surge of people electrocuting themselves. Of course, nor did it make us all magically better adjusted.