by Mitera Nikkou » Thu Dec 07, 2006 3:32 am
As someone with experience, I know that teaching children is no easy matter, and one particular action, no matter how poignant, is hardly ever the answer for them. In my case, my parents got me stuff to keep me out of their hair, but they still punished me when I did something wrong. I probably received physical punishment until I was thirteen, just before my father left to commit some adultery. I was punished with all sorts of things. When I was nine or so, I had threatened my mother with a big stick (about my height, and as thick as my arm). Later, when she got ahold of it, she beat me with it (not just anywhere, like if I had been bent over a knee with my butt exposed), and you can imagine what she had said. More than once, I was pummeled by my father, depending on what I had done and how much alcohol he had in him. They even experimented on where to hit me, and with what.
Every child is different, and will react differently to the same kind of stuff. Where some might have become too afraid of the punishments to risk doing something wrong, I never stopped until I lost my interest in life. Only then did I take any serious considerations into how the world worked. And that happened a few years after my mother tossed me into a mental "hospital" (I consider it more like a prison) three times, because she wanted there to be something wrong with me so she could get me on SSI and, thus, have income. Damn what effect it could have had on me.
As for the lower-income and lower-education parents, I can see how that would make it harder to raise children more appropriately. I only disagree with the lower education, because even an idiot should be able to figure out how to take care of children. It isn't hard. If anything, I'd place equal blame on the system (in the US, at least) as much as the parents. Children need attentive parents, time with them, and ones that can set examples. But that's hard to accomplish when low-income (which is usually the case) parents have to spend more time working, putting minimum effort in raising children because they have a lot of other concerns to worry about, such as paying bills, making sure that they and their child have a roof over their head, and food on the table. It's hard for most young children to understand the sacrifices that parents have to make so they have what they do, and they can make the parents feel worse because they don't like them for doing the best that they can. Too many parents have too little time, too much stress, and using their own ways to deal with it, to have the right amount of opportunity and frame of mind to devote to their children.
It's simply not as easy as using the right punishment, the right attention, or the right information (and how it's delivered). You can do things that would be considered good parenting, but the child can still become a homocidal maniac. Even bad parents can produce philanthropists (take me, for example ;p). It's a very complicated process, which needs to focus on the individual needs of the children. Maybe the mother mentioned in this topic had done what she had decided was the next step in trying to teach her child about the wrongness of his actions, because her other methods didn't work. You have to give her credit for trying, especially if she had exhausted other, less dramatic methods beforehand. Whether or not she made the right choice will depend on how the boy turns out. Maybe he'll learn, and maybe he won't... And beyond that, whether or not it will have a positive or negative effect mentally. The measures that my mother took (which included calling the police on three occassions beforehand), just because I was a frustrated teen who wanted parental attention (and wasn't getting any), led me down the road to depression, detachment and apathy.
Before criticizing this mother, on whether she was right or wrong, think about this: there is no right and wrong; there is only trial and error. Until she commits a criminal act in her endeavor to teach her son (such as stabbing/cutting him with a knife, or throwing him through glass windows, et cetera), she can only try her best until she finds something that works. There are many parents that don't even bother to put that kind of effort into it, so, we can only hope that it works out, because different things work for different children.
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned because only women can give two tits for every tat.
♥
