From: arodgers@dcs.qmw.ac.uk (Angus H Rodgers)
Newsgroups: misc.kids
Subject: Re: 20/20 and Spanking
Date: 8 Nov 92 18:04:42 GMT
Organization: Computer Science Dept, QMW, University of London

In <26034@optima.cs.arizona.edu> 
bweiss@cs.arizona.edu (Beth Weiss) writes:

>A (not otherwise very good) book I read suggested that the reason
>children say "I don't know" so often is because they've learned that
>no other response is safe

That must be why my wife says it such a lot. She, along with her
brothers and sisters, was frequently beaten by her rigidly religious
father (and still has the scars to prove it); and she reacts to me as
if I would react in the same way as he did (which makes me mad ... !).

She learned that it was better not to admit to any wrongdoing,
because the "logical consequence" of such an admission would be a
beating, the same as if she'd been caught doing whatever it was.

>--or because they really don't have words to
>explain why they've done what they've done.

She also reacts to any question about motives as if it were an attack.
Like me, she learned in her childhood to *hide* -- perhaps because
she'd been given so many "good hidings"?

>I'm concerned that the idea of "hit then love" is really setting a
>child up to be too forgiving of being hit or abused.  I am _NOT_
>equating a spanking with child abuse.  I'm applying the idea that
>"children live what they learn" to this type of discipline.  Will a
>child who is used to being hit and then loved by a parent grow up to
>accept that type of treatment from a lover?  Will the child grow up
>believing that "when we love someone, we hit them and then tell them
>we love them"?  WIll s/he think "it's okay to hurt someone's feeling
>when they do something we don't like, as long we hug afterwards"?

>I find this to be a _VERY_ compelling reason not to spank.  (I'm about
>to type in a list of other reasons--new thread :-)

There's an even worse possible twist to this. For instance: literally,
absolutely literally, the only time my mother *ever* told me she
"loved" me was after sending me up to bed weeping after a spanking. 

This really rubs the lesson in, I can tell you!

(It might not be quite so terrible to be "hit then hugged", so long as
you get some hugs some other times, too. -- Not that I think it's a
great idea.)

Another of her great ideas was to spank me for wetting the bed. Guess
what? It didn't work! I continued to be a bed-wetter until my teens.
(Of course no-one was ever interested in why.)

Another very nice twist is if only one particular child in a family
*ever* gets spanked -- which again, believe it or not, is the sober,
literal truth of my position in the family I grew up in.

I think it's as a result of these sadistic twists in my mother's
treatment of me (which my father stood by and allowed to happen,
while my sister watched gloatingly -- having also learned that she
could get me into trouble any time she wanted to, with no risk
of any impartial investigation) that -- unlike most other people who
have been spanked and resent it -- I have absolutely no loving
feelings towards my parents and sister at all.

Sorry if I'm going on too much [and I also owe Judy Leedom Tyrer a
personal apology, which follows separately], but it really helps to
get this off my chest, amidst a responsible group of people.

I've tried psychotherapy (for many years, at great expense), as a way
of coming to terms with my own childhood, and have been utterly
flabbergasted at how uninterested therapists (still less psychiatrists!)
are in the *facts* of how one was treated as a child -- given that it is
common knowledge how significant one's upbringing is for one's adult life.

Alice Miller, Ronald Laing, and Jeffrey Masson are well-known honourable
exceptions -- but one is dead (and a somewhat dubious influence anyway),
and the other two have given up the practice of psychotherapy!

So the question arises whether *anything* can actually be done to
undo the effects of a bad upbringing, or whether parents simply 
*must* get it right, while they have the chance (i.e. be "good
enough", in Winnicott's terminology) -- or risk producing a mess
like me! :-)
--
Angus H. Rodgers  (PhD student), | arodgers@dcs.qmw.ac.uk  
Dept. of Computer Science, Queen | [ +44 | 0 ] 71 975 5241   
Mary & Westfield College,  Mile  | "But what is contact? No two points
End Rd., London E1 4NS, England  | are in contact." -- A.N. Whitehead.
Newsgroups: misc.kids