Is it your point, guy, that you are at one of the best colleges in the world because you were beaten by your parents many times when you were young? Or is your point that beatings don’t matter, because both top-tier college students and prison inmates have been beaten? Or am I too unintelligent to glean your exact meaning? Sorry to exhibit such a lack of critical reading skills, but the mere fact that you’re at a great college doesn’t mean we should condone or emulate your parents’ disciplinary methods, at least in my logic-challenged mind. Let’s see what you do with that college education first. And the fact that so many of your peers are there without having been beaten suggests, to me, that one doesn’t need beatings to be admitted to “one of the best colleges in the world.” </p>
<p>If it makes you feel better about having been beaten many times by your parents when you were young to insult my intelligence, go for it. But it wasn’t necessary for them to beat you in order to produce a human being who could get into a top college. Truly, my sympathies.</p>
<p>What did I do right? I let my daughter be herself (instead of pushing her in a certain direction with beatings or bribery or humiliation). </p>
<p>I feel very sorry for any parent or student who would feel like a miserable failure if they couldn’t add “HYP” to the family name. That is truly sad.</p>
<p>^^wonderful post, frazzled. My sympathies to screwidah too. It’s appalling to be treated so cruelly by the people one looks up to and loves. No college makes up for it. And one of the few ways to rationalize it is to lose one’s own compassion and generosity of spirit…huge losses. I hope you can hold on to your own compassion, screwidah; all the education in the world won’t be worth much without it.</p>
<p>People want to justify their upbringing was ok. It is hard for people to admit their parents were horrible for doing what they did. It is easier to come up with some excuse why their parents did what they did (and forgive them) then to admit it was not ok. On the other hand, unless you could admit what your parents did was not ok, you wouldn’t look to change the way you raise your kids someday either. That’s the sad part.</p>
<p>My grandfather regularly beat up my grandmother and my father. My father swore he would never raise his hand to his wife or kids. My dad could be difficult, but he has always treated my mother like gold. At the same time, he has fallen short as a father at times. My siblings and I have talked about how we hated the way he had treated us, no physical abuse, but mental abuse at times. In acknowledging that, we are trying to do better as parents. I am sure I have also fallen short in my kids’ eyes, and I hope they could do better someday as parents.</p>
<p>I have spanked both of my girls (once in each case), and I do not regret in doing so.</p>
<p>As far as the corporal punishment - I think they jury is still out on that and of course it is
always a matter of degree and context. Beating is not only cruel, it is also likely illegal. I
doubt it is truly effectual. A rare swat on the behind when the child is young - I don’t think
that is particularly humiliating or damaging, and may be effective on some kids. But that is all just my opinion. </p>
<p>My stepson was pretty old when I married his mom, so obviously I never spanked him. I don’t think his mother did either. Now he is certainly no academic superstar, and I do worry about his future, but he is not a criminal, and fairly well behaved. Regardless, I doubt it would have made much difference anyway. He is a very stoic, self-actualized kind of kid. No punishment or reward seems to motivate him much one way or another, and
a spanking might just tick him off enough to do worse in defiance.</p>
<p>As for me, my dad spanked me fairly regularly and sometimes probably a bit more than he should have. The poor guy didn’t know any better, and with each subsequent kid he did it less and less until by the last couple he wasn’t doing any corporal punishment. And he felt some degree of guilt over what he had done in the past, although I don’t really believe it was horribly excessive. We all turned out okay, although I think my relationship with my dad may have suffered - I feared disappointing him for a good portion of my life. But eventually we worked all that out.</p>
<p>omg, i don’t NEED your “sympathies”. HAHAHAHA what arrogance indeed. how intelligent it is to automatically label parents as villains and “sympathize” with the child immediately, nothing exemplifies the disastrous politically correct state of things today. the knee-jerk reflex of jumping to conclusions without a second (or single) thought makes me laugh so much harder than your ill-informed ideology. I’m going to have to decide which one to laugh at, and that, for me, is worse than being beaten by my parents.</p>
<p>i DID not suggest that one has to be beaten to get into a top college. is there any way for you uneducated mind to juxtapose two different events WITHOUT trying to find a causal relationship between them? you’re clearly unable to to wrap your mind around this and i’m sorry to stretch your mental capacity so badly, but i was referring to your joke of a grand statement that some people ending up in prison has anything to do with parental beatings. you betray your intellectual inadequacies when you used the same lens to assume that I was saying that being beaten got me into a top college. you did not even realize it was a challenge to your pathetic argument. </p>
<p>ok, now that i’ve finally got my laughing fit under control, let me just state categorically that your little notion is prematurely formed. you obviously hate the idea of parental beatings but no, it doesn’t mean you’re right about their supposed consequences. there is a difference, and the world (thankfully) doesn’t revolve around your little brain. coming up with some unproven crap about people landing in prisons because they were beaten by parents just makes you look like the fool you truly are.</p>
<p>nope, just an impatience for stupidity. and no - it’s not because i was beaten. my parents never forced me to study, much less through beatings. they beat me only when i was behaving badly or naughtily, never to make me study. hahahaha i see a lot of people here eating their own unformed thoughts now.</p>
<p>WHAT? you are another example of arrogance - immediately assuming that I have issues with my parents because they beat me when I was young. I have nothing to work out with my parents and we’re close. Does the world have to end just because a parent beat a child once? </p>
<p>Another example of unintellectual shortcuts that plague people in this country today. If you’re a Democrat, then whatever a Republican does is evil and vice versa. if I got beat by my parents then I end up in jail 20 years later. Please.</p>
<p>I find children who have issues with their parents generally have problems dealing with other adults. They tend not to trust other adults and are very antagonistic toward adults. Instead of working it out with your parents, you are lashing out at adults over the internet.</p>
<p>They didn’t beat you to get good grades and you ended up in a good school. So apparently it wasn’t necessary to beat you to get you to perform academically.</p>
<p>They did beat you when you were behaving badly, and here you are launching a barrage of ad hominem attacks at people on the web, including implying they are stupid. To me that’s behaving badly. So apparently that didn’t work too well.</p>
<p>Let me just say that I would tend to be more on your side of the argument than many people on here, but your method of argumentation is probably not too effective. You should knock off the name-calling if you actually care about making your point. If you just like calling people names, go ahead.</p>
<p>screwit is proving the points that have been made. He/she will grow up. And hopefully gain some insight-- though many don’t. </p>
<p>It does bring to mind the thing I think I did most right (maybe this will help get the thread back on track)-- I knew D (like most people) really wanted to be good, that she just needed to have the way pointed out to her. Those moments when she was a toddler and really acting out–I’d think, yikes, I should have been firmer. In fact it was almost always a sign she was getting sick! After a while I’d put my hand on her head when she did something bad, and say “this isn’t like you. Are you coming down with something?” 9 times out of 10 that was enough to change the behavior. (Would be different with a different kid, I know.)</p>
<p>I agree with Screw for i Too grew up in an asian household with traditional asian parents who have adopted the Belt. I have a feeling that the correlation between asian kids and high test scores and GPA is due to the beatings their parents give them. I have personally witnessed my friends, who now attend Duke, Princeton, Penn, and Cornell, get beaten by their parents. Not exactly your NYC convicts eh?</p>
<p>To those who have been (leather, not those wimpy belts) belted, you should know why I try so damn hard not to get on my dad’s bad side. The belting caused me to avoid belting, forcing me to act properly and get a grip.</p>
<p>In the end, the beatings paid off: I now attended a prestigious private school in NYC with exceptional test scores - even for this site- on SAT and SAT II’s. Seriously, consider beating your kids. If they act defiantly, subsequent beatings tend to squelch their behavior.</p>
<p>And you would rather have “normal” kids who cling on to every word you say on the internet, simply because you’re an adult. Has it ever occurred to you that the adults in question may simply be subpar?</p>
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<p>Another joker here who needs to put lots of assumptions in other people’s mouths. I did not ever mention that parental beating was necessarily effective. Read carefully.</p>
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<p>Let me give you a hypothetical scenario. A bunch of atheists are in full agreement with one another that all Christians have paranoia and anger issues because they are indoctrinated from young to fear an all-mighty God whom they can’t see but is supposedly everywhere. Then a Christian walks by and listens to this and naturally gets REALLY angry. The atheists point to the Christian and say “well, that proves our point exactly!” Sounds familiar? :)</p>
<p>Beatings never “pay off”. There is simply no place for child abuse. And sadly victims often become abusers themselves. There are plenty of kids who made it to the top schools without having to fear being brutalized if they didn’t live up to parental expectations. Not a healthy model. Sorry you have lived through that.</p>
<p>"In the end, the beatings paid off: I now attended a prestigious private school in NYC with exceptional test scores - even for this site- on SAT and SAT II’s. Seriously, consider beating your kids. If they act defiantly, subsequent beatings tend to squelch their behavior. "</p>
<p>I plan on abusing my kids because Im pretty sure i turned out alright. If beatings can make me the person i proudly am, they can make my future kids outstanding as well.</p>
<p>Look all i am saying is that what a parent does to a kid is at the discretion of the parent. Im sick of this BS about how parents cant beat their kid. WHERE IS YOUR EVIDENCE? WHY CAN’T parents beat their kids?</p>
<p>In the wild animals eat their babies. The overwhelming majority of people in the US believe beating children is bad. but WHERE IS YOUR EVIDENCE?</p>
<p>The above post is a perfect example of what i am talking about.</p>