A topic that has come up a lot with me has been about beating your kids … Somewhere someone said it wasn’t okay to beat your kids and instead of giving a spanking, you should give them a “time out” … In this issue of the Out On the Town, there is a benefit concert to be held for kids by kids … One of the promotional things they’re using is the “We Are The World” song that I think was put together by Michael Jackson a ways back … When I saw this, it moved me and I put it up at www.wombatsweb.com … I also threw a link to the concert on the www.ootweb.com page … and one thing I recently found interesting was a web page pointed out by a guy in S. Il …
http://maddox.xmission.com/beat.html … I think he starts off with a valid point that at some point someone forgot where discipline stopped and child abuse begins … Of course maddox puts his spins on things and goes on to suggest methods of whacking your kids, but I think his point is made … We all grew up being “beat” by our parents … Most of us probably didn’t end up in the hospital as a result of it …
I watched Bill Cosby, Himself one night while flipping around on the tube … Amost the whole routine is about him “beating” his kids … I think a lot of people forgot that Mr. Black America talked about this openly and full of humor … I remember a Damon Wayans show where he talked about this as well … I’m not trying to single out black comedians, but they’re the ones that stuck, and I think they made the point as well …
I proved this point myself … I have a 17 year old son who was not disciplined with the hand, but rather by depravation … It didn’t work … There was nothing to deprive him of … When spanking was tried later on in his life, it had no effect … My 5 year old however had this habit of being mean to his younger brother … I think it was a form of jealousy as well as him not knowing what to do with his feelings as well … I mean when sat down and asked why he did what he did, he said ‘I don’t know’ … That’s what we used to do, make him sit on the couch and not get up until we told him he could …
One day it came to a head … He was being mean to his brother, so I put him over my knee and gave him a spanking … Surprised the crap out of him … That worked for a while, but then we caught him again poking or prodding his brother … Pushing him … again, he went over the knee … He hasn’t been mean to his brother since (and this was 2 or 3 months ago), and we are finding that in other areas of him misbehaving, the threat of a spanking would help to persuade good behavior …
So I have come to the conclusion that spanking a child when they’re bad as I was is the way to go … the “time out” didn’t work obviously, cause we did that a lot … Ultimately, the pain to the posterior was the solution … I didn’t pull down his pants and smack his bare behind … I didn’t find a weapon such as a shoe or belt, I used my hand on his clothed butt … and my hand did hurt … about 10 smacks to the butt in a systematic regular interval … He now knows we mean business, and his behavior has gotten much better … Does he live in fear of us? I don’t think so, but I’m sure he does a little … I think if you have the threat of a spanking in your armory, it helps a lot when in situations where sometimes kids get away with discipline … When we’re in public, and beating the crap out of your kid just seems to be socially unacceptable …
In the store, your kid is being bad … You look straight into their face, grit your teeth, “Do you want a spanking?” BOOM! Instant turnaround in behavior … Maddox ends his beat post with “If you love your kids, love them enough to beat them so they don’t grow up to be idiots.”