There are 3 types of punishment used on children Physical, Mental and Emotional.
Timeouts are mental and emotion abuse of a child, causing pain by using the child's need to be around people against him/her.
Spanking is physical abuse by causing direct pain to the child.
Timeouts are the new in thing but how much different are they then using the child's fears against him. Like I am going to put you in the basement with the monsters if you don't behave. I would think the child would probably more want to be smacked on the butt.
Is it more acceptable today to cause your child problems as an adult because of mental and emotional punishments than to cause him direct pain today to correct a problem.
I would like to point out that a child can easily understand pain and is far less mentally and emotionally developed which is why so many see psychiatrists in the adult years.
One can understand why psychiatrists support banning physical punishment.
What are your thoughts.
2011-06-29T08:33:42Z
*** My experience, My father used the belt always explained why we were being punished. My mother used not speaking to us and guilt. I have a good relationship with my father and iffy with my mother. I spent 2 years in therapy discussing my mother's punishments.
coldrain2011-06-29T08:44:14Z
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First, mental and emotional punishment is more evil than physical punishment. Second, whatever you do to your child will impact his/her life, so there is no one solution fits all since all children are different. Third, in my opinion physical punishment is out of love but mental/emotional punishment is something else. Of course, any kind of punishment cannot be excessive or it becomes abusive.
Society has placed a taboo on physical abuse of all forms for two reasons:
1) It can get carried away and become dangerous to a person's safety. 2) It can then lead to emotional and mental pain experienced by a child. I've never seen a timeout used in such a drastic manner - usually it's just having to go stand in a corner until you're ready to apologize. So while there may be some mental/emotional pain, it is not fully experienced by a child. On the other hand, hitting a child will initially cause them physical pain, but it may then evolve into emotional pain because the physical pain is viewed as being callous towards the child in question. This sometimes makes kids want to run away because they think their parents are mean - whereas with a timeout, a child doesn't have to experience that evolution of pain.
I think you have the idea of timeouts wrong and that is unfortunately why timeouts often don't work. It isn't the idea of "putting a child in the basement with the monsters if you don't behave". It's simply to remove the child from whatever stimulus is causing the offending behavior. True, it does remove a child from social interaction and that's part of why it works, too.
While I can think of a few examples where spanking may be appropriate, the problem is that most parents do it wrong. What they actually accomplish is to teach their children that aggression and violence are the ways to resolve conflict.
The biggest problem parents have in most areas is lack of consistency.
Because what we do is learned behavior. If we teach our children through spankings that thing's are right we are reinforcing that it is the physical force that makes the action right. As long as I am the strongest I make the rules. This is not a very healthy message for us to grow up with. With time outs the child has time to think about what they have done and most importantly why it was wrong.