I don’t know if I agree with the third stanza of this poem by Philip Larkin, but if there are four lines that contain any more truth about the human condition than this first stanza, I don’t know them:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
If you don’t think those lines are true, then perhaps you are the kind of person who would beat your kid because your parents did the same to you.
I don’t think my parents are much worse than average, but I spent a lot of time as a parent trying to avoid making some of their same mistakes. I hope my child, nieces and nephews will all do the same if any of them decide to have children. I won’t be offended if they do, because any honest parent acknowledges that being a parent involves making a lot of mistakes.
But don’t let me stop anyone from discussing this ad infinitum and ad nauseum because some ignorant football player is too dumb to understand that some of the parenting he got was a shitty mistake.
jl
One very small point in favor of the pro-football celebrities, is that they don’t huge sums of money on them to spout ignorant poison on the public airwaves, while supposedly disinterested supposed objective and analytic news people.
Maybe Hannity and Lemon can lead a panel on that topic.
Iowa Old Lady
Sorry to go OT right off but I’m dazzled by the Kansas Senate race developments. Apparently, Kobach claimed he had a DoJ waiver to delay sending ballots to military personnel, but he didn’t. Also, apparently, he already sent some of them with the Ds name on them. He must have been confident he’d win in court. Finally, he’s no longer demanding that Ds put another candidate on the ballot.
What an entertaining idiot.
Anoniminous
Love to see a study comparing the maturation level of football players compared to their peer groups. My guess is the former would be well to the left on a Bell Curve.
Cacti
My parents were into harsh physical discipline, much like Adrian Peterson’s were, because that’s “how they were raised”.
However, it persuaded my siblings and I to eschew corporal punishment with our own children.
Whatever my parental faults are, I know that I’ll never slap my kids in the face or hit them across the back with a belt.
RobertB
Larkin’s one cheerful fellow. This one will really kick your weekend off with a smile! *
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178058
*poem may not really lead to smiles
Mr. Longform
I was an expert parent before I had kids. I’d see people with their kids in public and I’d come home and spout off about how awful they were. I still think they were awful, I just know now that I’m not all that great, either. Sure, I can say “at least I don’t beat my kids”, but that’s a pretty low bar. There are so many opportunities to be patient and to let things go that I missed, and to what end? No one ever responds well to sternness, whether it’s “deserved” or not. People respond to love, end of story.
Skerry
Wow. Blunt and to the point.
I know I have not been a perfect parent and I have probably given my kids plenty to discuss with a therapist, but I know I tried to not make the same mistakes as my parents. My kids were never hit by me. I left my husband after he hit our daughter, 7, across the back of her head.
Court still gave him joint custody.
kindness
I got spanked as a kid. My folks didn’t beat the crap out of me or anything. I got the belt when I was really bad. It was acceptable back in the 60’s.
I never hit my daughter. Times do change.
Violet
Roger Goodell has given some sort of a speech. Said they would get their house in order. Blah blah blah. Said this:
Isn’t it the other way around. Isn’t it the NFL that needs the help from those organizations?
wenchacha
Thanks. It’s tough being a parent. You want to do what is best for your child. There are still way too many people who favor corporal punishment for their offspring because it did them so much good. It is much the same for any abuse: violence, emotional, controlling. It was too easy for me to yell at my kids, even when I meant to do better.
My mom tells me I was stubborn. No doubt one could say the same about my firstborn daughter. We had some battles when she was little and I would get mad. In spite of my mistakes, she kept her sense of independence, her willingness to challenge herself. I still wish I had done a better job for her sake, but I did take some more steps away from the way I was raised.
Beating a child is abuse. We don’t often allow strangers to beat each other in the streets (well, cops,) but parents are desperate to hold on to that authority over their children. I feel the same way about soap in the mouth, hot-saucing, and whatever other little tortures have been used over the ages.
We are truly capable of doing so much better than this.
SatanicPanic
@Mr. Longform: Yeah, it’s harder than it looks. And it’s tough to look at all the mistakes I’ve made and keep making. Would be easier to say “that’s how my parents raised me” and just pat myself on the back.
cleek
on the other hand:
Uncorrected personality traits
That seems whimsical in a child
Maybe prove to be ugly
In a fully grown adult
If you give in to them
Every time they cry
They will become little tyrants
But they won’t remember why
Then when they are thwarted
By people in later life
They will become psychotic
And they won’t make an ideal husband or wife
Oy, so…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5sUfV1Mi7w
BGinCHI
The whole point of life is to avoid making the mistakes your parents made.
What the fuck is wrong with people?
Oh, wait: lack of self-awareness. Sic semper humanitas.
Karen in GA
@cleek: As I’m sure you’re aware, lack of involvement with the father or overinvolvement with the mother can result in lack of ability to relate to sexual peers.
Mnemosyne
@cleek:
Shocking as this may sound, there actually are options other than “beating your children” and “not disciplining them at all.” True story!
Console
I love what Chris Carter said about the issue:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOXomRgX_1o
“My mom did the best job she could do, raising 7 kids by herself… but there are thousands of things I learned since then, that my mom was wrong…”
Hawes
“I was whupped as a child, and I turned out fine. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go bleed my four year old.”
BGinCHI
@Hawes: Is that a quote from Hannity?
BTW, who did he ask to determine how he turned out?
Alce_e_ardilla
@RobertB:The first time I read Philip Larkin, I thought, there is a man who needs to get laid, badly.
SatanicPanic
@Mnemosyne: I can’t recommend that book highly enough. Without a doubt the most important parenting book I’ve ever read, though Alfie Kohn had a good one too.
Kylroy
@Alce_e_ardilla: Although based on a cursory look at his Wikipedia page, he did alright in that department.
skerry
And then we have the story – from Florida, natch – of a father who gave his 13 year old son a gun after the child said he was suicidal. He also slammed the kid’s head down on a table. Father of the year material.
WaterGirl
@Karen in GA: Have I just been on the wrong BJ threads, or have you been MIA? I miss Iggy, too. Is everything okay?
May I ask what’s happening with the “yes he has heart worm, no he doesn’t situation?
scav
@Violet: Noted. Isn’t it heroic of them to bring these issues to our attention. Also the emphasis on their House needing to be got in order might be less than felicious — coupled with, from what I’ve read, very little discussion of the procedures, policies, consequences following a clear set of guidelines for infractions. Nah, all questions of punishment and discipline gotta be left to the personal immediate whim, mood and needs of the biggest of the daddies in the hierarchy. Daddy furthermore assures you he’s doing a good job.
maurinsky
I was spanked (and beaten, depending on how drunk or angry my father was). When I became a parent, I discovered that the only times I wanted to spank my kids were when I was furious, which was often out of proportion with their offense. I started to give myself time-outs, and avoided corporal punishment, including the oft referred to “swat on the butt”.
I disciplined my kids the way a person would deal with a puppy – correct and redirect when they were young, and getting them to tell me some better ideas they could choose if they were faced with the same choices in the future when they were older. I don’t really believe in punishment, even.
My older daughter is 25 and my younger one is 17. Both of them had delightful teen years, they’ve never been afraid to talk to me about anything, and they’ve almost always made good choices, and the less good choices were not harmful ones. They are awesome human beings, and I’m proud that I never resorted to physical violence, because I love them more than anything on the planet, and I would be ashamed if I had ever hurt them.
Roger Moore
@Violet:
Absolutely. The NFL is trying to buy some good publicity.
Mnemosyne
@SatanicPanic:
I am very lucky that my dad figured out early on that the way he was raised had damaged him and he tried really, really hard not to do the same. He still managed to screw us up quite a bit, but at least he tried.
I’ve never read that book myself, but he always had it in the magazine rack next to his easy chair. Luckily for me, he figured out early on that spanking didn’t work on me (undiagnosed ADHD) and decided to try other ways instead.
BGinCHI
@maurinsky: This is very much my experience. My son is almost 3 and trying my patience is a daily affair. I’m learning a lot about myself as we go through it. I think that’s key: being willing to keep your self-awareness alive and handy so that you can stop yourself from going down a path you inherited.
It’s amazing to say to yourself: “I choose not to do something just because I have strong feelings.” Once you do that the compulsion gets lesser and lesser. I still have my moments, but I’m getting the hang of it and beating the cycle.
Another Holocene Human
@wenchacha: I never hit children under my care as an adult, although I probably slapped some hands getting near dangerous stuff as a kid because that was what I’d been taught to do (I would also yell “NO!” in a really scary voice) and of course I did whale on the older siblings as they did on me. But for some reason when my rescue cat was in an insane pika-chew electrical cords-bite ankles kind of phase I took some advice from a coworker with anger issues but a bunch of cats that you had to establish dominance with the cat by forcing their head down.
It. Didn’t. Work.
It made the cat’s behavior worse and I realized that she was getting more aggressive because she was terrified. I feel really bad that I tried it at all because it didn’t sound like a good idea, but I was desperate and this guy was really good friends with some really serious cat ladies as well as dating the monkey rescue people so I thought this was real cat expert advice. (Later, when he got some horses and starting talking about breaking them I realized his issues went way beyond the relationships-with-humans issues I knew about.)
Thankfully I found Jackson Galaxy’s show and his methods for dealing with cats really work. Also Way of Cats. What I do now for serious misbehavior is put her in another room for a few minutes. If she acts like a jerk and I get up she’ll run off to the other room on her own now. This is infrequent. She is much better about being handled, and can even be affectionate. Like a whole new cat.
I feel terrible that I terrorized my cat that way. More education is needed as a society. These methods don’t work.
Mike in NC
My parents didn’t believe in corporal punishment. On the other hand, those nuns in our parochial schools could be terrors.
srv
So not to be progressive or anything, but are there any studies that show football players / athletes are any more prone to being physical abusers because of
1) Head injuries
2) Roids
3) Republican coaches
Do competitive swimmers beat their kids as much as soccer players?
Flimflam
Those lines from the poem certainly do not describe my parents. I guess I have been lucky. They raised my sister and myself with tons of love and though we were poor, we always had what we needed. They never disciplined us with any spankings or whippings and I have raised my children the same way. We weren’t always angels, but they very lovingly corrected our bad behavior.
What I don’t get is why you would state that someone who does not believe the lines to be true would be the kind of person to beat their child. That makes no sense at all.
Fair Economist
My parents spanked me and I’ll never spank mine – but I still thought they did a pretty good job. I went through a common phase where I fantasized my “real” parents would find me – but since I really thought my parents were objectively superior to all of my friends’, I wasn’t really sure I wanted them to.
Violet
@srv: I was told here on Balloon Juice that head injuries among swimmers is a huge problem.
Another Holocene Human
@Mnemosyne: Yes, google “authoritative parenting style”. It is more effective than authoritarian parenting style or the hippy let your kid run wild and free style.
Authoritative parenting is a very structured home, but it doesn’t rely on the “Obey! Because I said so!” bullshit of authoritarian parenting that is very reliant on punishment, easily compatible with corporal punishment, and can slide so easily into actual abuse. It does require parents to be patient, thoughtful, and to pay attention to what their child is doing.
Lots of parents seem to have absorbed this notion that you can just ignore small kids and they’ll go away or something. Doesn’t work, and they don’t learn how to behave in public or control themselves and they also learn to REALLY act out to get your attention because you’re not paying any attention to them.
That US tv show with the British nanny was a real eye opener.
raven
I got my ass whipped by my old man and the cops. I don’t have kids.
raven
@Violet: Say what?
SatanicPanic
@Mnemosyne: I found that one while I my wife was pregnant. Just changed everything I thought about teaching and raising kids. Really an amazing book. I tell people I’ve never punished my son (which isn’t totally true, I’ve yelled at him every now and then- I’m not perfect), and they’re like “well, yeah, you probably don’t need to.” But that’s kind of a chicken or the egg statement, right? I tend to think punishing kids makes them rebel. In our house there’s not much of anything to rebel against.
Harold Samson
The most toxic social thing we do is blame.
For me, the test as a parent is whether you give better then you got.
My old man spanked me on occasion, and verbally abused me more often then he should have, but I give him a pass because grandpa was a rage-filled alcoholic who beat my dad enough that my dad ran away from home never-to-return at age 13.
Gindy51
@maurinsky: That’s exactly how parents who were not beaten by their parents raise kids. Neither of my parents were hit as kids and neither were my sister and myself. She never hit her kids and I never hit mine.
Another Holocene Human
@BGinCHI: His stacks and stacks of cold, hard cash.
Probably also asked the bishop he sends regular donations to in order to stay on the super sekrit Rich Cat’licks KKlub invite list. Wouldn’t be surprised if he’s involved in men’s only Catholic fraternal organizations. Getting ranks and joining orders really puffs up a narcissistic’s hollow self esteem.
Hannity is the classic case of a torture victim who identifies with the torturer. He always has that bully’s self-satisfied, smug smirk on his face, a true Backpfeiffengesicht.
Violet
@raven: Seriously. It was some sports discussion thread about the NFL and head injuries. People were talking about whether or not they’d let their kids play sports. I said something about how swimming had fewer head injuries than things like football and was told by someone that I didn’t know what I was talking about. That swimming was a sport rife with head injuries.
BGinCHI
@Violet: When Cole swims. Everyone else is fine.
raven
@Violet: Swimming as a pastime maybe.
Iowa Old Lady
@Another Holocene Human: Does Hannity have kids? Scary thought.
BGinCHI
@Another Holocene Human: He’s like Mel Gibson without the talent and mullet.
Amir Khalid
This happened a few months ago. The public reaction in Malaysia was surprise and outrage that the parents got jail time for what people here regard as a perfectly justified parenting action.
raven
I went to a session on how to help vets in higher ed. The dude trotted out some study that said 75% of eligible people didn’t qualify for the military. This was a rationale for having vets as part of a “diversity” effort.
Violet
@raven: Yeah, no, it wasn’t about that. It was discussion school kids doing sports. I compared the probability of head injuries for school kids playing football to those on swim teams and said kids on swim teams were less likely to have the head injuries. Was told I was wrong and didn’t know what I was talking about.
jl
@raven: Could you clarify, or maybe a link? I’m not sure I understand your comment 100%. I am in higher education, so topic is interesting to me.
Violet
OT–Bob Shrum is on MSNBC on The Ed Show as a talking head. He looks like he’s got some sort of tremor. Does he have Parkinson’s or some other issue?
jl
@Amir Khalid: It takes all types to make a world. Many Native American cultures did not use physical violence as a tool of child rearing. From what I have seen in most (not all, but by far most) Filipino families, physical violence on kids is considered absolute last resort and a very big deal. But maybe that is just the culture of the Filipinos who mainly happen to live in SF Bay area.
raven
@jl: http://blog.seattlepi.com/militarywire/2013/08/06/americas-youth-too-dumb-corrupt-fat-to-serve/
jl
@raven: thanks.
raven
@jl: Let me be clear that I think it’s bullshit.
cleek
@Mnemosyne:
did you hear a whooshing sound when my comment went sailing over your head?
Another Holocene Human
@Harold Samson: Really? The most toxic?
Blame where blame is due. Some people and institutions do not want to accept responsibility for the harm that they do. That acceptance would require them to change at the least, to seek forgiveness and mitigate their harm at best. But authoritarians have a fear of ever admitting to fault. Ever.
Misplaced blame is wrong. Much harm is done this way.
As for your cool story, bro, it might fit the paternal side of the family, but on the maternal side, actually, my grandmother escaped a house of horrors in rural Kansas and doted and loved on her children. Did almost too much for them, perhaps because as a younger woman she’d been little momma or an abused domestic to other people’s kids and these were HER kids and she did everything for them. She may have done a little spanking but not beating or verbal abuse and she sent them to an Ursuline school where corporal punishment was not allowed. My mother was shocked at the mean way that her grandfather spoke to her and her cousins when they went over to visit. Oh, it was a German thing, Germans are just hard to children.
My grandmother struggled to break the cycle and make life very, very different for her children, but my mother has a personality disorder. The spanking is one thing–I was the oldest child, and by child #4 she had stopped the spanking, decided it wasn’t a good parenting practice. But when she was raging, she got physical. Her verbal tirades were relentless. Fear and anger ruled. And defiance was answered with unhinged explosions of violence.
There was other stuff, too, nothing to do with crime and punishment but the relentless playing out of her needs and neuroses, let me not bore you with it all. I pay my therapists to listen to that stuff.
It was her choice. She could have sought treatment for depression. My dad had a good job with good bennies and he got treated for depression. But no. Psychiatrists are evil. She could have restrained herself instead of beating me in a rage. But no. She was confident that she had sowed so much fear in us of DCF and “the system” that we would never report her. She could have made changes to make her and our lives less stressful and on the edge. But no. It was about her needs. And she wanted a little person to control, that had to love her and need her.
jl
@raven: Interesting link at least first 2/3. I disagree with his editorializing at the end of it. You should be glad you don’t live in California, and you can honestly talk about a ‘diversity effort’ without having the Prop 209 goon squad jump down your throat unless most of the ‘diversity effort’ is focused on rich white kids who don’t need it and aren’t particularly interested.
raven
@jl: Decent rebut.
Trollhattan
Cigarette companies once provided sound parenting advice.
“Yes, you need never feel over-smoked.”
raven
@jl: Ever read “A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League”?
Cedric goes to a diversity program at Brown before his freshman year. It was diverse OK, mostly high achieving Asian students.
jl
@raven: thanks for that too. I got a little folder of interesting things on supposed total fail of US education from balloon-juice blog. I will add that to my collection.
Another Holocene Human
@Amir Khalid: Remove the rotan and make it an American couple and the American press would have exploded in remarkably similar rage, I promise you.
Remember when that American was caned in Singapore for some fucking graffiti? The press was cheering it on, only had a scruple that it might tarnish their “American passport is a get-out-of-jail-free card anywhere and everywhere”.
Mnemosyne
@cleek:
I’m posting from work, so my snark meter may not be quite level at the moment. Apologies if that’s what I did.
pluege
kids are completely vulnerable to grow up and make the mistakes their parents avoided making. And the beat goes on. Everyone needs a generous portion of luck to have a good life and a positive balance sheet.
p.a.
I don’t remember much of anything before age 5, assume I got some bum swats from my mother. Always felt my dad never hit me because he was worried once he started he wouldn’t be able to stop. Only event I really remember was coming home at 3am at age 13 (summer vacation) and my mom waiting for me with a skinny dowel- the kind around at the 4th of July with American flag stapled to it. Beat me from the front door to my bedroom. At first I was shocked, then I was laughing as I backed towards my room protecting my face with my arms. Didn’t really hurt, just kind of stung. Good times. I don’t remember having too many meltdowns like I have seen 8,9,10 year olds have. I can see how those could bring out the worst in parents.
jl
@raven: You would not believe how effing shitless scared the worthless academic admin suits are of doing the simplest damn thing here in CA, unless one rich AND white kid gets exactly, or more just to be careful, than anyone else.
Common sense ordinary nothing special crap like, I Joe Professor, go to some friends’ HS to do a presentation and interact with some random group of kids. Big big big ‘compliance’ BS nonsense, Jesus Mary and Joseph I can’t even finish… it is so infuriating and dishonest.
I gotta be like Professor from Gilligan’s Island. Of what, from where? Nothing and nowhere, just a ‘professor’.
Edit: I got a stern and panicked talking to, once, when I took a bunch my pamphlets for my place’s official outreach program. Big big bad inappropriate OMFG thing I did. It may have even gone into my Permanent Record, young man!
PhoenixRising
@maurinsky:
Oh yeah–time outs worked on me as a kid, because my mom only imposed them when I really needed to calm myself. They worked wonders on my kid when she needed to think things through (much less frequently than I did at the same ages).
And, more recently, I’ve been giving myself 1 min for each year of my age when my teen is really getting on my nerves, and telling her that I’m going into a 43 minute time out. With the dogs…
Botsplainer
Dad was, um, overenthusiastic about physical discipline due to upbringing by a physically abusive mother and a checked out, raging alcoholic dad. My mom just sort of let him express things that way because she figured that’s how things were. It included ever ting from belts to boards. Finally (seems like I was about 10) he really lost it and forgot which end of the belt he was holding and broke the skin pretty badly on the back of my legs with the buckle. That kind of burned it out of him, he left me alone after that (probably could have benefitted from some saner levels of correction after, during teen years).
Instead, I became the kid with no rules.
Ironically, as adults, he and I have a great relationship now and I bear no grudges – he came from a complicated family, and was generally there when needed.
We didn’t physically discipline our children. The one – and only – time I reached for a belt with one of my kids, my wife wound up starting to pack suitcases over me even considering it. I soul searched and knew what was valuable, and never even thought about going there, not ever again, no matter what they did.
I don’t regret the choice.
Schlemazel
Oh gosh, what a perfect poem! Perhaps I am not the MOST negative person?
Amir Khalid
@Another Holocene Human:
Sure I remember that case. 18-year-old expat executive’s kid. It became a big deal when a reporter over there mentioned it to Bill Clinton. There was some kind of diplomatic appeal for clemency, I seem to recall, but no real grounds to grant it; the sentence was what any Singaporean would have got. Weird Al mentioned it in his parody of that Crash Test Dummies song.
Major Major Major Major
OT: Obama needs to fire Dempsey immediately.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/rift-widens-between-obama-us-military-over-strategy-to-fight-islamic-state/2014/09/18/ebdb422e-3f5c-11e4-b03f-de718edeb92f_story.html?hpid=z4
cleek
@Mnemosyne:
i could stand to be a bit less dry.
all is forgiven.
skerry
Related, but OT: New article on ESPN
Rice case: purposeful misdirection by team, scant investigation by NFL
skerry
My longer comment is in moderation for some reason, but here’s the new ESPN story on Ray Rice
Betty Cracker
@Major Major Major Major: Why? He told the truth. If you look past the click-bait headline and find out what he actually said, it is this:
That’s not defiance of PBO’s policy. It’s a military strategist saying if things change on the ground, he’d recommend changing the strategy.
Mnemosyne
@raven:
@jl:
A few months ago, rikyrah posted a link to a really interesting article about a university (probably private) that established a dropout prevention program for students who were the first ones in their family to go to college, because they discovered that when those students ran into fairly normal college problems with studying, being on their own, etc., they didn’t have anyone to advise them how to handle it because nobody they knew had been to college. It was really interesting — I can see if I can track down the link when I get home tonight.
Schlemazel
My dad came from a screwed up family. His stepmom (his mom died) hated him & told him so Granddad died when dad was 15 so he quit school & got a factory job that he worked at for the next 50 years. He knocked up my mom when he was 20 & she 18 & they popped out a kid a year for the duration of WWII after that. I was a change of life baby. I have only very vague memories of the older kids getting a yardstick across their butts. I think they had given up by the time I popped out. When dad wanted to ‘correct’ me he smacked me across the head, hard enough to knock me down & on occasion hear bells.
He passed his f’ed up on to me. I made every effort to make them stop here. I don’t think I ever had spank the eldest, he is a pleaser & being displeased with was almost more than he could stand. The younger boy & girl got swatted on the behind with my hand 3-4 times always for pretty severe stuff (I caught them torturing out cat one time. I wish I could say I was calm & never swatted them in anger but had I not been angry they would not have gotten smacked. I feel like I did better but assume I screwed my kids up in my own way, whatever that is.
Dog On Porch
Another Angst Anthem, courtesy of the late, great Johnny Ace:
“As soon as you’re born they make you feel small
By giving you no time instead of it all
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all
A working class hero is something to be
They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool
Till you’re so fucking crazy you can’t follow their rules
A working class hero is something to be
When they’ve tortured and scared you for twenty-odd years
Then they expect you to pick a career
When you can’t really function you’re so full of fear
Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV
And you think you’re so clever and classless and free
But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see
A working class hero is something to be
There’s room at the top they’re telling you still
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill
If you want to be like the folks on the hill
A working class hero is something to be
If you want to be a hero well just follow me”
Major Major Major Major
@Betty Cracker: Thanks for the correction, I’d misread a couple of subjunctive clauses actually. Slippery article. Whoever wrote it (Craig Whitlock, I guess) should be fired immediately. Probably get promoted for driving hits though…
Lots of very recently former military commanders commiting some offenses that would have recently been cause for dismissal though. Perhaps that’s the real reason for the ‘former’ and not just the usual churn.
Roger Moore
@raven:
Competitive swimmers dive into the pool a lot, and a small mistake can result in hitting the bottom. It used to be common enough that they were forced to increase the minimum water depth near the starting blocks, which required changes to a lot of existing pools. And divers are certainly at a very big risk of hitting their heads- and other body parts- on the board because having the dive be as close as possible to vertical is part of the scoring.
Betty Cracker
@Major Major Major Major: Slippery article for sure, and you’re right about the former crew. Gates in particular is being an armchair QB dick. And WaPo is hastening its transition into Politico, not that it had far to go on that journey.
Corner Stone
It’s a self-selecting group, of course. But it sure seems like a lot of us here at BJ were beaten like ragdolls as children.
Roger Moore
@Major Major Major Major:
Or maybe it’s the other way around: they would have loved to disagree in public before but kept their mouths shut to avoid charges of insubordination.
scav
excuse this random explosion of data, I needed a break.
Eta, this should be at Elon’s, reading while listening is dangerous, but I really needed a change in rants though.
a) on the tomato front, there actually could be some truth to the store bought ones not tasting as good as the ones from gardens, major caveat being it depends on the store and the garden. The pretty, bred to be all red ones had a gene knocked out that boosts sugar content. Sciency-Wiency here (circa 2012) so that there can be further on-air arguments. unaware of any results of using only free-range, gently-raised sparkling water on courgette cultivation.
b) All that huffing and puffing about removing goD from beneath the wings of the Air Force by rolling back to the that little bit is optional standard. God-botherers silently removed the option a year ago, (new link marker) have been inconsistent in applying it since, but suddenly it’s now it’s the only thing between us and heaped bodies in the street.
Major Major Major Major
@Roger Moore: That’d be the proper thing to do, yeah. Could be both.
I used to like Gates. He did his job. Now he’s president of the Boy Scouts, maybe he should fucking focus on that.
cckids
@maurinsky:
I so agree. I brought mine up much the same way, for some of the same reasons – I was spanked, often, as a child, along with what we’d now think of as emotional abuse. I also realized that the angrier I got at one of my kids, the more I felt myself falling into that “spanking” mindset. It was clear to me by the time my challenging child (the girl) was 2, that she made me way, way too angry to even think about swatting her once. So we learned to talk it out.
And also, my kids’ teen years were good, we didn’t have the “can’t be seen with parents” crap, nor the rebellious snotty attitudes. It also helped that we treated them with respect & expected to be treated the same way.
Your kids will walk where you walk, not where you point.
Matt McIrvin
If Larkin were entirely correct, parents would be beating their kids more in each generation, not less.
Eric U.
my mother had a spatula. The threat was worse than the reality. I think I got the spatula once or twice, and it stung, but no big deal. It surely was less effective than the threat. Later, she was into PET and other fads of the day. She could have invented PET if she really thought about how she treated us. Very similar, only PET didnt’ involve spatulas
I posted in the last thread that kids can be self-regulated if you let them. They will not want to be told they are misbehaving. If your only tools are screaming at them or hitting them, you have inadequate ability to deal with lesser offenses. But what happens is that a parent that can only go to an extreme solution will be reluctant to use that and will allow all sorts of bad behavior before the result to corporal punishment. And the kid will constantly be testing the limits of what they can get away with. My daughter did something that deserved a timeout after a couple of years of no punishments. She really was a good kid. I swear the reaction I got was like I beat her sensless. My son never even did anything the merited going to timeout.
wenchacha
@BGinCHI: Good for you! It is not an easy thing to do, to put faith in something you didn’t see firsthand. Watching your own child grow is one of the sweetest things in life.
maurinsky
My parents definitely had rough childhoods, we are fairly certain that our mother was sexually assaulted by a family member, although she will not talk about her childhood at all, it’s just something we pieced together from little bits of information we overheard. My father only went to school until he was 12 and then started working, and his parents were far worse than he was. More importantly, there was a gap between my older sister and I and the next group of kids (I was born with a birth defect and was in the hospital a lot and so they took a break from being good Catholics for a few years) – and while my older sister and I were definitely abused, my parents recognized that it wasn’t the best way to parent.
My father gave me a sincere apology, and I forgave him. I know he was serious about it, because he never laid a hand on any of my younger siblings. That made a big difference for me, I think it really gave me an example of how to be a little more thoughtful as a parent.
My Truth Hurts
It’s not just parents, it’s most of the adults children encounter. Teachers, principals, shrinks, priests, coaches, counselors, random adults, uncles, aunts, cousins. We ruin our children. I’m surprised we have lasted this long on earth as it is.
Applejinx
When I struck a child in anger—a stepkid, never to say ‘my’ stepkid though at the time the absolute command was that I had to love this kid as if he was my own flesh and blood—I cuffed his hand with the back of my fingers, with alarming sharpness and a flash of rage.
I was melting down on a blood sugar crash and stressed out as hell, and he was picking his nose while I was reading a bedtime story to him, sitting in his mother’s lap and staring me right in the eyes.
I too had a violently physical father, in the very earliest years of my life, and my reaction was almost like a panic attack. It was like the kid had suddenly grown three heads each of which were terrorists and Hitler. It was like I HAD to make the nose picking stop, since I couldn’t physically make him stop staring me in the eye. I have autism (so did he, in fact) and staring in the eyes is pretty intense for me.
It was the end of that marriage, in one instant. I will never know whether it was purely his mother, or whether he had suffered a total loss of trust from that one blow from the back of my fingers, so near his face. I did apologize, meant it, was deeply alarmed at where things had gone and sought to do better, but it’s probably a mercy that I wasn’t allowed to continue being a part of that family. It meant the world to me and I did well at the time, but it was also killing me trying to keep up with the requirements.
I never saw them again.
I was probably just as likely to blanch and storm out of the room and hide from that situation, and had I done so I would have been in very big trouble because I was already in big trouble most of the time. I was neither the first nor the last person that my ex found inadequate and sabotaged or abandoned: she required superhuman degrees of indulgence and serenity on a daily basis, hated herself and resented her life and her child as much as she loved him, and desperately needed me to justify her conclusion that she’d married a monster.
I filed for divorce, no fault and no ties, and got it. I suppose I could have done worse as things broke down, but if I had to do it over again I wouldn’t have hit any part of the kid, however glancingly. It’s possible she would have killed me one day, in the belief she was pre-emptively defending herself from future hostility: I firmly believe that.
At the time, her parents were astronomically more wealthy than my family, so it must have been a decent arrangement for me to relinquish any possible claim on her inheritance. I’m not sure what she’s doing, though strangely after flipping out and claiming I intended to murder her and fleeing across the country, she ended up moving back into my home town. I have never seen her, or the kid who’s now a teenager, in the street. For all I know, they’ve continued to migrate.
I’d welcome that. Doesn’t feel safe having them in my town. I was less fearful when I’d hear vaguely, from third parties, about them moving from one distant state to another, and I’d say that’s fine, I don’t want to know any more. Figured the best thing I could do was aussage that panic (or was it calculated, a story to get a result?) by taking no interest and making no attempt to ever again see the people who had become my whole life and reason for living, only to remove themselves when they found me wanting.
To have ’em move into the town where I live seems like being mocked, but it also suggests that the original ‘Applejinx is a crazed murderer and monster’ story might not have been totally sincere. I’m sure the emotional truth lies somewhere in the middle, and I wasn’t the only one dealing with tough personal issues. ‘Mag mell’ can go on protecting those in need of it, with no interference from me. I’ll wait to hear that once again, the family moved on to yet another place, and I’ll breathe a bit easier. Truth is, I was always more scared of her than she was of me, and that’s probably why she married me.
AF
Based on personal experience, I don’t think they’re true–or not always true. My wife had a pretty terrible childhood, and while it left her with many emotional issues that color her relationship with our son, she’s never going to treat him as she was treated. In this case, at least, the fuckeduppedness is decreasing with each generation. She and her siblings have many issues, but those who have kids are doing right by them; her parents are despicable people who should have had their children taken away from them; her parents’ parents, from what I’ve gathered, were absolute monsters who should have been locked up. It gives me hope that Larkin got things exactly reversed.
Anoniminous
test, again