Leo06girl, thank you. I wish Social Services would rescue that poor boy. It just makes me so angry when people abuse or neglect children, and right now I wish there was a crying angry face emoticon available. I hope you can somehow rescue that kid in some way or another, even if he has to fabricate some stories. Normally I'd be against that, but if he's being neglected and Social Services is not helping at all, he needs to take a few drastic measures, even if it means lying.

Jdacapo, my mom and I do as much as we can for every child we know in a bad situation. I would actually like to be a social worker, but I don't know if I could restrain myself from going off on abusive parents/people.

Also, I laughed when you said you're starting to respect the Sims social worker. No offense. I hate most of the NPC service people. The newspaper deliverer is the only one who doesn't annoy me.

Mistermook, I may not have ever given birth, but I do have a lot of experience in raising/taking care of kids. As a matter of fact, there was one situation where I was the Mommy and the real Mother was the babysitter.

I probably wouldn't restrain myself either. Abusive parents are terrible, and for Pete's sake, parents need to listen to their kids when they are trying to say something is wrong.

Of course it is. Any form of physical touch that causes pain is abuse. How can children be taught to do the right thing by spanking? It makes no sense.

So if it causes pain it's abuse? That's lovely. So now you've set the bar for calling people child abusers to a perception, a non-empirical sort of thing. You know, over here they've got the little visual chart where you point at the expression and go "it hurts this much" and serial pain pill abusers and people with high thresholds for pain go "1" and hypochondriacs go "10!" It's as useful as asking someone about their feelings, ie useless. So now you're taking people's kids away on that and giving them over to whatever passes for orphanages and fostering systems in your country, and arresting their parents based on that. Or perhaps you believe that inviting the government into the conversation of raising a child as a second-guesser is superior?

Sorry. I'm just not buying it. If it's abuse then it has to have penalties, and if it's abuse the penalties have to be consistent with other forms of abuse. You're setting up a system where people should be afraid of their children, where legally incompetent entities without full adult awarenesses literally have the power to ruin your life based on something impossible to say "well, that didn't happen." You might as well put people in prison because I don't like them, or because their neighbors find them "unpleasant." It's not about abuse, Pain isn't a metric. Even in legal cases where "pain and suffering" enter the equation it's long after proof of actual harm has taken place. You've removed that, and it's nonsense. You've turned children into an evil, unpleasant burden - a nasty little time bomb where an emotionally inconsistent person gets to send people to prison on little more than their say so. It's not just wrong, it's grotesque.

In my country, depending on the circumstances and all that, parents can get up to 4 years if they do violent acts to their kids, and more if they cause serious damage. Other forms of child abuse (passive/active/psychological) is also covered by the law. Physical punishment of kids hasn't been allowed at all since the 70s.

Physical punishment like spanking, hitting over the hands with a ruler, and so on, was sort of allowed up until the 70s, but different times and all that.

And it's not like kids can come and say that they're being abused, and their parents are thrown away in jail immediately. Cases have to go through court and all that, along with interviewing the kids in controlled forms, examining for physical damage, and you name it.

Social services might not be as perfect as they ideally should be, but for the most part they do their job. We usually hear about the bad cases, and rarely about the cases that turn out good. Also, the goal of social services is to as far as it's possible let kids live in their own home or with trusted family members, as long as it's safe for the kids. They don't (should not, anyway) take kids from their family unless the case is serious enough, and the goal is to assist the family as far as possible before that happens. It's not always easy to know when it's right to take the kids out, and when it's safe to let the kids stay. Situations can seem very serious at first, while not being as bad as they look - and can similarly seem not so bad but end up as a disaster. Abusive people are often very good at hiding the abuse, and sometimes not even their spouses know anything, let alone friends or relatives. Similarly, kids can be too loyal for their own good, or too scared of their parents to even dare say anything.

As for "actual harm" it can't easily be measured on a scale. Actual harm can even be caused without anyone laying a finger to the child. Psychological harm can be just as bad, and sometimes even worse than psychical harm. Visible bruises or wounds are not the only marks of an abused child, but they're the easiest to notice.

And while I'm not against spanking, I'm fine with that as long as there's not some shallow line in the sand drawn of "any pain is abuse," because that's bullshit. My daughter didn't like it when she'd have her head buried in her gameboy and I'd have to yank her out of harm's way all the time while we were out, but she didn't have to like it and I didn't care if it "hurt" her if it meant no daughter-road-pancakes.

It's the same issue I have with feminism when it starts setting the bar really low. Fuck that. I read an article the other day that tried to equate men smiling at women in public with rape and All That Is Male Evil. Seriously. I don't think anyone's arguing that anyone should be beating the shit out of their kids or anything, only that there's a vast amount of things out there in the range of rationale, sympathetic, proper parenting that are better than equating some of these lowered bars with abuse. Because ultimately when you invoke abuse you're asserting a criminal act which takes people's kids away from them, puts people in prison, and ends up with kids as wards of the state. I do not think that's a preferable state of affairs for 90% of children, sometimes even in cases of actual abuse (like when it's clear the government child welfare situation is even more nightmarish).

I'm not sure you understand the differences here, Mistermook.

It's one thing to yank someone out of a dangerous situation. It's another to willingly cause harm or pain to punish someone when they're out of said danger. The two can't be compared, because the first one is life-saving and should be done, the second one is potentially harmful and should not be done.

If my kid had their nose in a gameboy and went straight for the steet, I would yank them back, too, and wouldn't even care if it hurt, because being run over by a car would hurt a great deal more. But this would be good parenting, not child abuse. The difference is that I wouldn't beat them up later on to teach them a lesson. I'd rather take the gameboy from them, and tell them that gaming is for when they're sitting down in a safe place, not for when they're walking around in traffic - just like you shouldn't text, or read, or do other things that take too much concentration while you're walking around in traffic. That applies to both children and adults, by the way.

I have to second that there is a world of difference between acting immediately (Although unfavorably) for the greater good versus consciously using the infliction of pain upon a smaller, defenseless other because it's either in your own childhood or most convenient. I don't think anyone's arguing that the right thing to do wouldnt be the immediate thing in the case of the snake or car, but that's hardly comparable to every other disciplinary situation that arises (As I assume there are many. I'm not a parent either, though I do hope to become one eventually...there's your scary idea for the day).

Good god, people still spank their kids to try to teach them a lesson? That...just doesn't work. If anything it makes the kid angry and afraid of their parents/abusers. That's right, in my mind spanking is either a fun activity between two consenting adults *wink wink*, or physical abuse towards a child. It still haunts me, the way my parents held me down and beat me up when I was young *shudder* and it messed me up quite a bit. I hope they die a horrible death and burn in hell for that.
Ahem! There are much better ways to teach right and wrong, anyway, like being supportive ("that's a cool thing you did there, buddy. keep it up") or, i don't know, calmly talking and explaining that running into cars is not a good idea.

I'm not sure about this whole issue. I was spanked as a child (not often) and my mom said she once hit me so hard it left a handprint shaped mark, which she felt horrible about afterwards.

I don't really remember that, though. What hurt a lot worse was when my dad said I was stupid for not understanding my homework, or when either of my parents said or hinted I was fat, or when my mom said I was self-centered and selfish when I told her I was depressed, or that my problems were too small and other people had it worse.

All this is not to say my parents are horrible cruel people; they aren't. They've said thousands more things that were uplifting, encouraging, and kind. But everyone says things that are hurtful sometimes, and it's easier to remember those.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that verbal 'abuse' has affected me a thousand times more than physical, if either can be considered abuse anyway. My father was beaten as a child, my mother had her mouth washed out with soap and was spanked, and most of the people I've known who are minorities had corporal punishment inflicted upon them. I did have one friend, though, whose parents were awful, and that's where I draw the line. She was beaten with a belt often and she told me of one incident in which she and her brother dropped food on the floor and her mother forced them to eat it off the floor. That was just the tip of the iceberg.

Some of you obviously just plain don't have kids. Some kids, time out is a reward. Some kids don't care if they loose privileges because they didn't want them that much.

Those of you who are saying if you cause a kid pain that's abuse, nope. Giving kids their necessary vaccines is not abuse. Forcing them into a car seat they don't want to be in is not abuse either, but either of those can hurt when you have to force a kid to do it.

Some of you think the rattlesnake thing Jdacapo mentioned is a bit farfetched, I'm guessing. I nearly stepped on one this summer by my laundry lines. Not everyone lives in a sanitized of wildlife city. Not that rattlers are a big deal, you just shoot them. Moose are much more dangerous. The rule here is that kids obey adults NOW and ask why LATER. Because not obeying adults NOW leads to dead or maimed kids. (And this kind of works both ways: if my kids say 'Freeze" I do.)

Those of you who think you can raise a kid without any form of corporal punishment, play with this thought experiment for me: he's ten years old and doesn't want to do his homework and chores. He doesn't care if he's grounded. He doesn't care if he looses his privileges. His favorite activity is daydreaming: time out is a reward. He can't be motivated by bribes. He can tell you exactly why he ought to do these things--the homework, which is math, so he can go to college when he's older and learn to splice DNA and the chores (dishes) so you can cook meals, but he still isn't going to do them. How are you going to get him to do his homework and chores?

Okay, I'll participate - first of all what is 'spanking'? Is it a pop on the butt? Is it x number of 'spanks'? Because what if the kid doesn't mind a pop on the butt or x number of spanks either? What if he'd rather be spanked and then do what he wants anyway? Is there spanking escalation?
Also is there an age limit on 'spanking'?
Also what if the refusal to do homework is a daily thing - is he spanked every day then? Some conflicts are ongoing - I don't see how spanking helps solve them in the longterm.

I don't know why you're participating in this, Sunbee. See, Rose has babysat kids. It's exactly the same thing. She's an expert on when the government should take away your kids.

If nothing else works, then spanking isn't going to work, either. Kids only learn to be more devious about their wrongdoings, which is probably the exact opposite of what the parent is trying to teach them.

Doing dishes won't teach him how to cook. If that's what you're trying to teach him by doing dishes, then you might be a little far off. Doing dishes will teach him how to keep dishes clean. Cooking is a whole other process.

Maybe he needs more responsibility, and maybe he needs to learn consequences of his actions. Maybe tell him that today he's making the dinner, or his own breakfast, and if he doesn't, there won't be food on the table. Or simply hand him a knife and tell him to chop up vegetables while you're cooking the rest of it. A lot of kids love to help with cooking, and will do so gladly if you just ask them in the right way. Kids usually love to have a say. If you decide everything over his head, then he'll go off daydreaming because his opinions are apparently not important enough. Maybe he simply needs other types of chores. Maybe you can promise to take him out for some sort of treat if he does his chores. Make him have something to look forward to, rather than trying to bribe him every time. Working toward a goal can work much better than simple bribing.

If he doesn't want to do his homework, then maybe there's a reason. Perhaps he thinks it's difficult, and he avoids the problem rather than wanting to do something about it. Maybe sit down with him and try to help with his homework. Help him learn how to do it, so he'll manage it mostly on his own.

The daydreaming might not just be him not wanting to do anything. A lot of daydreamers tend to be loners, or they have problems at school. Daydreaming is often a way to get away from reality. Maybe just sit down and talk with him as if he's a young child that's learning about life as he's stumbling along it, instead of seeing him as a tiny adult that needs to grow up asap. Sometimes all the kid wants is attention. If the kid gets enough of the right kind of attention, then they won't do bad things to compensate with the bad kind of attention.

I'm not saying all of the above is right, or that it's the right way to go about, but it might be worth a try to get a little deeper into the problems you're having with him. Might be he's just being stubborn. Maybe he's like most kids who hate doing homework and dishes, and perhaps trying to force him into doing it ust isn't working. But I'm pretty sure spanking isn't going to help.

The way I see spanking is that it's very often used wrongly, as a last resort when nothing else is working. And if spanking them once doesn't stop them from being unruly, then I'm sorry, but spanking isn't working, either. Maybe you just have to go and look through your methods once and for all. Usually the problem isn't in the method you're using, but how you're carrying it out.

You may know the ingredients for making a complicated dish, but that doesn't mean you won't time and time again end up with a stinking, black mass of goo because you're not following the recipe.

No, I don't have kids. But I have nephews, and it's not all that long since I was a kid myself. I know how I was as a kid, and while I could be unruly and stubborn at times (still can be, though within more reasonable limits), I know that I would have been even more so if my parents had spanked me. I wouldn't have felt safe if I knew that the hands that held around me and comforted me, were also the ones to hit me when I did something bad. Mom mostly knew how to pull my strings, so when I did something bad, I felt it - not on my butt, but in my conscience, where it actually should be felt. Somehow they must have taught us the difference between good and bad, because punishment was rarely needed to keep us in line. I learned to use logic and reason, so that I could figure out on my own what was good or bad to do. As for life skills, I learned most of the cooking I do on my own, after I moved out. I also learned the improtance of doing dishes, and how to clean the house. It's amazing what you can learn to do when you suddenly have responsibility over your own life, and when not doing chores actually have proper consequences.

Actually I've raised 6 kids - 3 are from my husband's first marriage. I've raised a lot more kids than you have.
Edit: And I was trying to get definitions for terms in the so-called 'thought experiment'.

Apologies, you all sound the same and say the same things, it's difficult to tell you apart.

From experience, and rumors, the cane should be brought back for extreme cases, e.g Severe Vandalism, Consistent Bullying, Large Fight, Rebellion (yes, it happened in my school before. They said that if you go outside, you stay outside. One day I go outside, I get turned away from the door, next thingnI know, there is a loud murmur, my friends run over thinking its a fight, and they get involved in a full stage break back in to the school - shoving open the doors. Teacher guarding the door just watched, and I stupidly decide to join in, pretty much get an adrenaline rush. The 'Riot Police', or high-ranking teachers, run over start shouting, and I belt it, running all the way to another high rank teacher. He is oblivious, and I get away scot free from the Berlin Doors.)

But seriously, not all at one time, just drag the rebels out of class, then cane them like an execution squad. Parliament, in 1987, said no, I say yes. We need more disipline. My classes always have low level distruption, if the cane was still here, there would be none.

TL:DR, Took part in a revolution, now agree with corporal punishment.

I won't.
On the other hand, I will refuse to cook for him until the dishes are done (Although I will cook for myself with the dishes I clean) and I will take every opportunity to make everything he says or does, about math. We'll see how long it is before he gets too hungry to care about being stubborn and feeling too stupid to not want to apply himself. With a ten year old, it'd probably be less than a full day. Children with active imaginations can be motivated by their very own self-generated concerns.

People can have opinions on things that they don't have personal experience of. For example, I support gun control and oppose large capacity magazines and automatic weapons, but I've never owned a gun.
Men can support or oppose abortion even though they can't become pregnant.
Someone can support drug legalization even though they don't use drugs.
Etc. etc. etc

I agree with Mistermook. He is a very helpful poster. There is a difference between corporal punishment and physical abuse just as there is a difference between arguments and emotional abuse. He has proven to be knowledgeable in several subjects.

I am also opposed to the Nanny State that takes away freedoms and destroys families in the name of the "greater good" according to the politicians, which is obviously skewed because they have little-to-no practical experience.

The truth of the matter is that abuse is wrong but some things that Radical Progressives claim is abuse is actually not and is rather beneficial in stead.

I know I will get at least 2 "disagrees." I don't mind that.

--Ocram

Would you rather that kids are beaten, being physically/mentally/verbally/sexually abused, neglected, otherwise horribly treated, or even murdered by their own parents? Or perhaps they have to watch their one parent being beaten up by the other parent, or have to live with parents who abuse drugs or alcohol so that the kids are left to their own device. Because in case you didn't know, that still happens today. Social services (or the "nanny state" you call them) might not be perfect, and they might not always do the right thing in the right situation, but if they can hinder a lot of these things from happening. Most of the time, they tend to do just that - getting kids out of bad situations. Seems that most of the times when they don't, is because people are afraid of reporting cases. Most of the times when they do mistakes, are when cases are misunderstood or were wrongly reported, or the parent(s) of the child are manipulative enough to escape the prying eyes. The people who work for social services are people. These people have to follow laws, and these people sometimes make mistakes, simply because they are people.

Anyway, maybe the views we have differ on the matter of whether or not corporeal punishment is legal or not in the country or state people live in, in addition to personal opinions. Like I said above, in my country all forms of corporeal punishment to children is illegal by law, and has been so since before I was born, so even if I happened to think it was the right way to go about, I wouldn't have been allowed to do it. Not even my parents ould have been allowed to use that kind fo punishment on me or my siblings. Allowed or not, I do think of it as a horrible way for an adult to treat someone who is smaller and more vulnerable than themselves. In my opinion, the only thing you gain is dominance over the kid, and some level of fear. Neither fear nor subjugation are the same thing as respect. Respect is always gained, not forced.

1. The Nanny State is not just social services. The Nanny State includes adding authoritarian restrictions to what citizens can eat, what citizens can drink, what citizens can drive, what citizens can buy, what citizens can say, and many other unreasonable things.
2. My father was verbally abusive to my mother when drunk and was not faithful to her so they got a divorce and my mother got primary custody. That was the right thing to do and it was the decision of the family, not the state to do so. The state might have taken us away and put my mother in a shelter and my dad in jail if it had the legal system of whatever crapsaccharine country you are from (I assume it is in Europe)

I agree with the first part of your post; as someone who worked for the county for over 20 years, I'm painfully aware of what goes on in CPS. When I left, the experienced workers were leaving in disgust (high case-loads, etc) and the new starry-eyed were learning finding the TRUTH can be impossible.
On the other hand, some family experience with CPS makes me really hate them! The definition of child abuse is not as difficult as the TRUE discovery of it, or the solution to it.

My definitions...

Spanking- A pat or two on the bottom, firm but not rough and forceful.
Whooping- using belts or other household items on the bottom, legs, back
Beating- slapping, punching, pushing, bleeding or bruising.

Im only okay with spanking, that is sufficient. Then talk and find other solutions to the problem without violence.