Carrying the "Everybody feels good" mentality too

[Dustdevil]

Dust claims that somehow being a peds nurse gives him some type of extra insight into parenting skills. He claims that evidence isn't needed to support his views anymore as history has shown his views to be correct, because they 'seem' to be. I would rather believe that I've been wrong about the sky being blue than to believe that Dust were capable of making such a silly argument.

I think your argument here is disingenuous. I believe that if you knew something to be absolutely true from exhaustive personal experience, and a few eggheads published a few papers saying it was not true, you would stick with what you knew to be true. And that is exactly what I am doing here. It has everything to do with logic and intelligence. Both tell me that my observations are valid. I choose to trust what I see more than what I read. That is the very height of logic and intelligence.

And yes, being a pedi nurse has indeed given me a unique insight that you probably have not enjoyed. It just seems that you are so caught up in defending what you personally do that you are unwilling to even entertain that others might enjoy successful results otherwise. And again, if it works, I don't need a paper to certify it.

[akflightmedic]

Has been an interesting read for sure, losing a ball game has turned into spank or no spank parenting. We have had numerous threads on this topic and a lot of good points have been raised, discussed and ended with people walking their own way, some more enlightened and educated, others stuck in a rut, indifferent or indignant.

As I have posted before on this topic, my views are well known, have not changed and will not change. There are very few topics where I can say with absolute certainty that I can not be convinced otherwise and hitting a child for behavior is one of them.

How can I as an educated, caring man strike a child who is learning his way in the world. A child who admires everything I do, follows my lead, LOVES me and respects me and then beat them into submission or terror to acquire behavior I deem desirable/acceptable?

Desirable behavior is very subjective as we all have seen, heard of or experienced child abuse and some of the things they are beat over has nothing at all to do with acceptable behavior by societies standards, but everything to do with whatever warped concept the abuser is experiencing that day in that moment.

I have been on the beaten side, I have been damaged. I am still damaged in some areas of my life. Somehow, I was smart enough to not continue down the same ignorant path. I was able to realize it was wrong and make every effort to do it differently, to break the cycle. My brother, not so lucky, he has had a lot of misfortune in his life (prison, failed relationships, inability to hold jobs, anger issues, it goes on and on). My sister, good kid but emotionally damaged. She will follow in my steps with her kids physically, emotionally I am not sure of yet. My brother, his kids...well my brother went down the tried and true path and it didn't work out so much. He has three kids with anger issues, a young teen son who is doing everything he did. His punishments are reminiscent of the ones we grew up with....the cycle continues on that branch.

I do ask this question?

If spanking is so effective, why do we stop doing it? If I am late to work, shouldn't I just get a few smacks and all will be well? If I fail on a project or neglect to secure a new contract, a few swats and everyone moves on?

Why can we not do this? It seems we would have a much more productive and happy workforce. Everyone would know their place and when we get out of line, a quick reminder and all is good.

We do not do this because we KNOW it is ineffective. Same reason we do not spank teenagers. We quickly realize we have to use new tools as spanking is not an option. It is ludicrous. If it is so ludicrous to imagine spanking adults for misbehavior, then please tell me why it is not just as crazy for striking a child?

For teens and adults, we take away privileges. Screw up at work, you get a note in your file, you get bad references, consequences which can have very long term ramifications. You can lose your job, which then affects every other aspect of your life. Teenagers lose their cars, their outings, freedom. All of these things are very effective at controlling the majority of the population.

It seems to me that the most obvious tried and true method through centuries of observation is the fact that communicating and granting or removing rights/privileges is more effective than beating someone to illicit desirable behavior.

Does anyone disagree with that statement?

[AnthonyM83]

Actually, the blue light seen in the sky is not the sky at all, it is scattered rays of blue light from the sun, the sky is coulorless. :wink:

Naw...the sky is general levels of our atmosphere. Those atmospheres scatter said light (among other things, I'm told) which transmits that blue color to us.

(I'm almost typed the same thing, btw...so when I saw your post, had to contest it)

[DwayneEMTP]

Dust claims that somehow being a peds nurse gives him some type of extra insight into parenting skills. He claims that evidence isn't needed to support his views anymore as history has shown his views to be correct, because they 'seem' to be. I would rather believe that I've been wrong about the sky being blue than to believe that Dust were capable of making such a silly argument.

I think your argument here is disingenuous.

As I believe of yours as well. I'll explain the best that I can below out of respect for your response.

... I believe that if you knew something to be absolutely true from exhaustive personal experience…

You and I have had dozens of hours of conversations, many of them very personal in nature, yet you've never mentioned your children to me, nor your exhaustive experience gained during the full time raising of someone else's children. This caused me to assume that these children hadn't existed. My apologies if you felt this information to personal perhaps to share with me and I drew incorrect conclusions. But if not, then I question the exhaustiveness of your experience as part of the weight of my argument.

..and a few eggheads published a few papers saying it was not true, you would stick with what you knew to be true.

But this is where I most feel that you continue to purposely push the conversation off into bullshit. If your educational experience is nearly as vast as you've previously claimed, particularly where psychology is concerned, and you've claimed in the past to be very familiar with the theories I've posed, then you know very well that they have been well tested and attacked from every corner of science for well over a century. Not eggheads, but well respected scientists. Not a few papers, but thousands at the least. Most published in respected scientific journals for scientific scrutiny.

... And that is exactly what I am doing here. It has everything to do with logic and intelligence. Both tell me that my observations are valid. I choose to trust what I see more than what I read. That is the very height of logic and intelligence.

Nonsense. That is the very basis of pseudoscience. The very reason people still fear ghosts and UFOs. They believe their eyes and their feelings, which, and I'm comfortable any birthday party magician can validate this for you, has been proved for centuries to lead us astray.

There was a time where you were the strongest, wisest advocate of verifiable medicine, of the advancement of EMS through the proved scientific advancement of medicine as the cornerstone of intelligent practice. But suddenly you'd like us to believe that you're right simply because you say it's so. Doesn't wash. It's never been how we've worked things out since I've been a member here, and I'll do what tiny bit I can to disallow it from becoming the new standard.

...And yes, being a pedi nurse has indeed given me a unique insight that you probably have not enjoyed.

I certainly have not enjoyed it, and have respect for what you have done. In fact, if you don't look at that statement very closely then it almost seems relevant to this conversation, but it isn't. Unless you were a pediatric nurse that lived 24/7 with the family of the child you cared for, without interfering with that environment, then this is simply another attempt to cloud the issue with pretend evidence. Please show me if I've misunderstood this in some way.

... It just seems that you are so caught up in defending what you personally

I don't have time to reread the thread, but I'm fairly confident that I've not made a single statement regarding how I've raised my son. My memory isn't what it used to be though, so I may be wrong.

My entire argument has been based on doing what is shown to be successful, what is proved to be successful. Dylan's autism makes me unable to spank him. The last time I did so, perhaps 8 years ago, I couldn't get near him if he made a mistake of any kind. And when he finally understood I wouldn't spank him any more and stopped running away, he would simply punch himself, for I'd taught him that violence is the proper response to errors.

Does that mean I hate spanking? I've said over and over that I don't, yet you still claim that I do, that I'm a follower of a "few eggheads", that is why I believe you are being disingenuous. You are way to smart not to be able to see the points, and argue them at the college level, yet you continue to make arguments I expect to see in the tabloids. That makes it impossible for me to believe that you are committed to a progressive debate leading to our best possible answer. Perhaps not yours, nor mine, but better options than what we started with. Instead it appears to me that you’re simply muddying the water for your own purposes.

...do that you are unwilling to even entertain that others might enjoy successful results otherwise.

I would love to share their success. But this seems to only work in Texas, as my experiences have been completely different from yours and Lone Star's. I have simply asked for evidence that you're not bullshitting yourself, if not with what you see, but the reasons that you see it. Unfortunately you seem to have come to a point where you're so smart you have no further need for proof, no need for reproducible, unbiased views of something that we seem to agree, is the most important job in the world. At no point have I claimed that spanking doesn't work, that it should be banned, that it has no place. I've simply asked for one single piece of scientific data to show that it does. That should be the easiest thing in the world as it's enjoyed unbridled success since the beginning of time, right?

...And again, if it works, I don't need a paper to certify it.

Good for you. I'm not asking you to change a thing you've done, or may do in the future. I'm simply asking that you stop pretending to participate in this conversation using pseudoscience at the high school level as valid evidence.

I'm a much better person today because you refused to accept my bullshit when I didn't know any better. This is simply my attempt to return the favor.

Dwayne

[Lone Star]

And I'm saying that you're pulling a logical non-sequitir... for all you know, those kids may be the only ones in their family NOT raised via hands-off parenting philosophy. Unless you can prove that they WERE hands-off kids, you have no grounds...

Sure, school shootings have emerged as a newer form of violence. But what about all the sickness of society that's gone on for CENTURIES? Pedophilia? Rape? Murder? Organized crime with brutal physical violence?

One could argue that mafia beatings and killings have DECREASED to the PUBLIC EYE... and I bet a lot of the Mafiosos were raised in households where they were spanked... does that explain the mob violence of just a few decades ago?

You're saying that school shootings, this particular form of violent killing sprees, have increased because parents no longer spank their kids. I'm saying that unless you can draw a direct parallel, you're just making that association because *surprise* it's what you WANT to see.

Wendy

CO EMT-B

I included statistical data that proves my point. Yes, ALL school shooters come from maladjusted families. I'm just showing that there are MORE 'maladjusted families' since everybody started listening to knotheads like Dr. Spock.

To include people like Ted Kaczynski, Ted Bundy, Terry Nichols, Timothy McVeigh, Charles Whitman, John Wayne Gacy and Jeffery Dahmer et al is skewing the facts and ignoring the point I've established. Since the trend to move away from corporal punishment as a viable tool in the arsenal of raising children, it seems that we're doing MORE harm with the current way of thinking and dealing with our children.

It was said that the reason you should give your children 'time outs' instead of spanking was because the spankings damaged the tender psyches and ids ...thereby making the child unable to live a normal, healthy life.

Having grown up in a 'split family' I've seen both the abusive side of life, and I've also seen where spankings have been used as an EFFECTIVE form of discipline. I can be used to disprove that whole theory alone.

I’ve never gone to prison, I don’t use illegal drugs, I don’t abuse prescription drugs and I’m not an alcoholic. I don’t abuse children, I don’t try to sleep with the family pet, and believe it or not, I actually came out of school with an EDUCATION. I wasn’t passed on from class to class because I put forth minimal effort, and I didn’t get to play on school sports teams because I showed up for practice. I actually had to EARN a spot on the team, and had to work my ass off to KEEP it!

Yes, our teams got beat unmercifully in some sports, but we also returned the ‘favor’ in other sports. No parent flipped out over it, no newspaper tried to make us feel bad by showing us how we failed because we beat the other team.

No, my generation wasn’t perfect….but by and large it’s turned out pretty damn well; despite what the ‘experts’ said about how we were raised!

For my generation, the most commonly diagnosed (over diagnosed?) ‘problem’ was ADD/ADHD. Now the new one is that the child is ‘bipolar’ and placed on mood altering drugs, anti depressants, etc. We make up all sorts of new ‘syndromes’ to justify the child’s unacceptable behaviors.

[Dustdevil]

I do ask this question?

If spanking is so effective, why do we stop doing it? If I am late to work, shouldn't I just get a few smacks and all will be well? If I fail on a project or neglect to secure a new contract, a few swats and everyone moves on?

It's a simple concept of developmental psychology. Swats on the arse are a tool for communications with a devloping child that lacks the ability to reason maturely. Once maturity is reached, the ability to reason makes it possible to communicate effectively with words only. That's why I can hand you a story to read, and you understand it, but I have to actually show a child what I am talking about. Kids are different. They are not just little adults. Ritalin and Benadryl do one thing to kids, and something completely different to adults. Reasoning is just another one of those differences.

You and I have had dozens of hours of conversations' date=' many of them very personal in nature, yet you've never mentioned your children to me, nor your exhaustive experience gained during the full time raising of someone else's children. This caused me to assume that these children hadn't existed. My apologies if you felt this information to personal perhaps to share with me and I drew incorrect conclusions. But if not, then I question the exhaustiveness of your experience as part of the weight of my argument.[/quote']

I guess you misunderstood the analogy. I was not talking about me. I was talking about you. And I wasn't talking about the discipline topic. The fact remains that, if YOU knew something (ANYTHING) to be absolutely true, from exhaustive personal observation, that a simple piece of paper could not possibly convince you that the reality you knew was false. And your refusal to admit that is the disingenuousness that I referred to. You KNOW that, given a different topic, you would do the same thing that I am doing now.

It's not bullshyte. It's the simple "show me" level of scepticism that most adults hold in this world. Some people are impressed by paper. Others are impressed with results. There are credible scientific papers written by aerospace engineers and astrophysicists that say the bumble bee lacks the design to fly. Guess what. It flies. Do you need another paper to prove the first paper wrong, or is personal experience good enough for you?

I believe you are quite confused on this issue. It's not about my "say so". It is about observable results. EBM. Evidence based medicine. I have my evidence. What is not logical, and in fact bullshyte, is ignoring the observable evidence in favour of theoretical evidence.

I'm not sure you have misunderstood so much has you have doubled back on your own argument with this statement. It seems that you are saying that your theory is more valid because you personally have raised a kid with it. Well, isn't observational evidence exactly what you have been telling me is invalid for the last several pages? Whatever happened to the scientific method you were promoting earlier? Your experience with one child is more valid than experience with thousands of children? Where is your control group? That reminds me of all the monkey medics who believe they know what they are doing after ten years, when they've never been outside their own little system to see how others do it.

Well, I was giving you credit for actually living by the convictions you espouse. I can't imagine that to not be true, but I apologise if I was mistaken about that. Besides, you did say you can't spank him, so it seems self evident.

Mine too. And in my experience, the most well behaved and well adjusted kids I have seen were the product of parents who were not afraid to physically discipline them. And the most obnoxious, poorly behaved children I have seen were the products of no discipline. Sure, there is a lot of middle ground and exceptions to the rule, but then again, I never said one approach was ideal for all children, or even for all parents, or that only one approach can be used with any one child. You haven't either, so I still fail to see exactly what the argument is here.

Exactly, so again, wtf are we arguing about?

Since I did not make that statement, I feel no duty to provide evidence to support it.

And I am asking you to stop pretending that you actually need written verification of everything you know to be true. To stop pretending that you too do not simply accept many obvious truths in life without ever once reading a paper to verify its truth. You take a million things a day for granted that you have never seen a scientific paper about, but now you want to argue this one point over the lack of a paper, and that is disingenuous. It's hypocritical, ivory tower snobbery. If I can show you one scientific study that has been produced on ANY subject that turned out to be invalid (shall I start with MAST pants or bretylium?), then your whole theory is blown. Do you really want to start down that road? Come on. If you want to argue the finer points of discipline, using observable evidence, I can get on board with that. But right now, you're only arguing that you read a paper about something somewhere.

Sorry, but when you deny that you disagree with my belief, and then immediately turn around and argue that it is wrong, I have to call bullshyte. I still don't even know what you are arguing about. Best I can tell, you're not even arguing theories of discipline. You're making a completely theoretical argument of whether something -- anything -- can possibly exist without paper proving it exists. That is the definition of bullshyte. It's like arguing that a kid born without a birth certificate in Mexico was not ever really born.

[spenac]

How about this? Lets agree that there are many ways to raise a healthy happy well behaved child. The key is do people other than close friends/family think your child is well behaved? I know many parents that bragg about their children being well behaved yet they actually make Satan seem like a saint. So if your child is actually well mannered, well behaved you are doing it right regardless of what all the so called experts claim. Heck anyone with any age on them know that the experts come out with so called proof that the previous way was all wrong. In fact a few more years and the experts Dwayne, Wendy and others refer to will be supposedly proven wrong. Then another 10 years and they will be copied by someone else with slight changes. There is nothing new under the sun.

[DwayneEMTP]

Statistics, science of collecting and classifying a group of facts according to their relative number and determining certain values that represent characteristics of the group. The most familiar statistical measure is the arithmetic mean mean, in statistics, a type of average . The arithmetic mean of a group of numbers is found by dividing their sum by the number of members in the group; e.g., the sum of the seven numbers 4, 5, 6, 9, 13, 14, and 19 is 70 so their mean is 70 divided by 7, or 10.

..... Click the link for more information. , which is an average value for a group of numerical observations. A second important statistic or statistical measure is the standard deviation, which is a measure of how much the individual observations are scattered about the mean. The chi-square test is a method of determining the odds for or against a given deviation from expected statistical distribution. Other statistics indicate other characteristics of the group of observations. In addition to the problem of computing certain statistics for a particular group of observations, there is the problem of sampling. This is an attempt to determine for what larger group (called the population) of individuals or characteristics the statistics for this particular group (called the sample) would be a representative figure and how representative a figure it would be for a given larger group. This second problem of sampling can be solved only by resorting to the theory of probability probability, in mathematics, assignment of a number as a measure of the "chance" that a given event will occur. There are certain important restrictions on such a probability measure.

..... Click the link for more information. and higher mathematics. In most applications of statistics to scientific and social research, insurance, and finance, the statistician is interested not only in the characteristics of the sample but also in those of some much larger population. Consequently, the theory of sampling is the most important part of statistical theory.

http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Statistical+data

A little help for you regarding the term "statistical data." When you continue to use terms well above your education level, and claim to have "proved" points you haven't even justified as viable theory yet, you simply make yourself look more silly.

There is nothing scientific about pulling a bunch of shit out of the tabloids, or Googling "school shootings" and posting all that you find. If you want to use science, you need to do the work of science. There are no realistic short cuts short of promoting a logical cause/effect chain that will at least make one go "Hmmmmm?"

According to your 'theory', the violence in early New York? If immigrant parents had had some balls all would have been well. Gangs in the inner cities? Simply the effect of 'hands off parenting.' The Taliban? Certainly there must be a Dr. Spock book in every home. Come on Lone Star, get real.

Dwayne

Dwayne

[tamaith]

the way i see it is basketball is normally a high scoring game and baseball and hockey are normally low scoring so when a baseball or hockey team wins 6 to zero ( hockey) or 15 to zero ( baseball) to me that's equivalent to 100 to zero in basketball. do those wining coaches get in trouble in other sports no they and the team get praised and ppl say congrats, job well done. i don't think the coach should get in trouble

[spenac]

How about this? Lets agree that there are many ways to raise a healthy happy well behaved child. The key is do people other than close friends/family think your child is well behaved? I know many parents that bragg about their children being well behaved yet they actually make Satan seem like a saint. So if your child is actually well mannered, well behaved you are doing it right regardless of what all the so called experts claim. Heck anyone with any age on them know that the experts come out with so called proof that the previous way was all wrong. In fact a few more years and the experts Dwayne, Wendy and others refer to will be supposedly proven wrong. Then another 10 years and they will be copied by someone else with slight changes. There is nothing new under the sun.