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Spanking in the USA
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As far as a San Jose appeals court is concerned, parents don’t need to spare the rod with their children. The court has ruled that using a wooden spoon for a spanking that causes serious bruising should not necessarily translate into a finding of child abuse.
In a ruling designed to establish legal precedent, the 6th District Court of Appeal overturned a trial judge’s finding that a South Bay mother should be reported for child abuse for trying to resolve discipline issues with her 12-year-old daughter by spanking her so hard with a wooden spoon it severely bruised her.
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Alternatives to Smacking Are Truly Violent
Research by the Auckland District Health Board has found a strong correlation between school suspensions or expulsions and poor health and life outcomes including early death. Sure, only a correlation not a causal relationship has been uncovered, but if the new feminist-preferred methods of discipline were at all effective or helpful for children that correlation might be expected to be smaller. If suspending or expelling children were sound methods then we would not see so many children’s lives go down the gurgler after being subjected to those methods. On the other hand, despite a great deal of research efforts to show life damage from typical forms of physical punishment (as opposed to unrestrained beatings etc), normal smacking and corporal punishment have never been shown to wreck people’s lives.
Another consequence of the new feminist-preferred forms of (non)discipline with emphasis on ‘children’s rights’ and against parental authority was evident in this tragic story. This young boy and his cousins were told by the mower driver to leave the park before the mowing began. The children did not obey. Why should they? Have they been trained to obey instructions from adults? When I was a child, if a council lawn mower told me and my friends to leave an area about to be mowed, we knew that if we didn’t obey he may well twist our ears and lead us forcibly to our parents who may well have respected the propriety of the worker’s action, apologized for the inconvenience caused and provided some punishment for our disobedience and disrespect to our elders. Nowadays, the lawn mower was disallowed from enforcing any authority directly over the children, indeed no such adult authority existed for him. If he were aware that the children remained on the grounds he was mowing, his only safe (regarding his own hide) option was to phone his employer or the police and wait for some response. He was then at risk of being treated by police as the suspect of some impropriety possibly alleged by the children annoyed that they were being targeted for their disobedience. His income was probably as a screwed-down employee required to complete the job within a time limit that in no way could be achieved if he waited for police to arrive at what would likely be a very low-priority call out. It’s understandable then that he simply met his responsibility of telling the children he was mowing and that they needed to vacate the park, then leave that choice up to the children while he got on with his job. This young boy’s death resulted from the concept of ‘children’s rights’ over ‘adult authority’, erosion of any expectation on children to respect and obey adults (especially Men) and the removal of any right by adults to assert any authority over children. The roles of discipline and authority over children have been removed from citizens and handed over to agents of the state such as police and CYFS who will never be able to fulfil those roles adequately and when they do will probably do so ineffectively and problematically.
This removal of adult authority arose largely from feminist ideology for whom ‘power and control over others’ especially when enacted through male physical dominance was seen as undesirable. Although many men may agree with banning the use of force in discipline and in enforcing authority, the ideology arose out of feminist subjective preference and was pushed by misrepresentation of research and other lies. Unfortunately, this young boy killed horribly by a mower and thousands of children rejected through suspension and expulsion from their peer group and normal socialization processes have become victims of the flawed feminist ideology. They are only the beginning.
Comment by Ministry of Men's Affairs — Thu 10th October 2013 @ 6:03 pm