Giftfromme said:
It was fucking hilarious, I read a recent study that showed that kids should not be punished at all, in any form ever. I'm not joking, you literally give in to the children on every single demand, and it's meant to produce happier parents, better kids etc
I just think this is the ultimate form for political correctness, it's simply reached its zenith
We have... severe issues with young adults that come from parents with a mindset like that. Basically, the parents outsourced any and all correctional influence to outside sources, so they can remain to be the 'nice guy parents'. Thing is, their kids, in general, hate them significantly more than kids who are known to come from functional families, even if those families feature divorces, adoptions or the kids have known histories of rape. These nice guy parents often consider themselves to be some sort of superhuman know-it-alls, and handling them is just as difficult as trying to keep their offspring out of trouble, out of jail and on some very generously laid-out acceptable track, even when they have a tendency to randomly do very random things, ranging from violent behaviour against peers, violent behaviour against teachers, vandalism, sexually aberrant things like preying on smaller and weaker kids... the list is long. And it costs a whole lot of money and attention, with little hope of being successful, really.
This is one extreme that, I think, should be debunked as totally bonkers and wrong. It causes so many issues and problems it's really difficult for pretty much any given society to cope with.
The other extreme is the kids from homes where 'raising kids' seems to involve belts and wooden spoons and pans and strangling and whatnot. Sometimes, I think it's these parents those laws were originally aimed at. Thing is, they'll have none of it, not even the most extreme forms of intervention have shown much success so far, safe for messing the kids up even more, be it by just turning their brains into layer cakes of traumata, or by daddy upping the ante on the violence front. If no police or lawyer can set these folks straight, why have laws that turn other, decent parents into law-breaking criminals? The occasional, justified spank is a good tool. By removing that tool without offering any replacement, the state risks an elevated probability of dysfunctional extremes popping up, and from what I can make of the human experiments conducted so far (time-outs, bleeding-edge pedagogics, therapy, medication, etc), I have to say I still couldn't shake my doubts, quite on the contrary. We're breeding a generation of randomness, and I don't like the high amounts of knock-your-socks-off medication and crippling therapy. I'm not with Scientology, they're just as bonkers with their "Industry of Death" dramatization of things, but we currently do have more issues and problems replicating themselves than we got convenient solutions at hand.