Child abuse

Post Reply New Topic

These figures are staggering. 1) Why the various "pro-life" people of the churches dare to fight against contraception in all its (also gruesome) forms? 2) Should there not be a parenting licence in the same way that there is a driving licence?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/04/us/04abuse.html?

Hi Paolo, I agree with the pro-life side that abortion sucks, but I agree with you about certain Churches opposing ANY birth control at all, particularly in places like Bolivia which sets families up to have more than they can properly nourish and take care of. About the parenting license, some aspect might be okay in theory but that certainly could open a can of worms. Child abuse is easy to get real angry about, I have my own views on dealing with such people but that could cause thread drift so I'll leave that alone.

When the society believes beating...err "spanking" your kids is good "disipline" this happens.

http://www.stophitting.com/disathome/fa ... iction.php

http://www.google.com/search?q=spanking ... =firefox-a

Whoever got the bright idea and said; "Lets teach the children at an early age that violence is a good solution to problems"?

It seems to go against everything psychology teaches us of parent mentality, I just don't get it.

I think that the children in the figures reported in the NYT are no so much children spanked once in a while, as rather children not wanted, not loved and simply tolerated. In which case they may be submitted to violence just because they find themselves "in the middle", or just punished in a senseless way. simply because they "exist" and are an obstacle in the road of the parents. In the case of Henry Roth's Call it Sleep, the father was terrifying (though the mother protecting her son strenuosly).

I am pro-life to the point that I have problems in cutting a branch of a tree, but I would't force any woman, especially a teen, to go underground to avoid a pregnancy they are not prepared for.

"Four months etc" by the Rumenian Mungiu (it's on DVD now) describes very well this tragedy.

Here is a beautiful story on today's NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/world ... china.html?

Read Alice Miller's "Thou Shalt Not Be Aware."

Child abuse is silently approved in most human cultures. And I probably don't need to tell you people this, but child abuse is the leading cause of sociopathic behavior. Most violent criminals were abused as children.

I have a running semi-joke that I will bet anyone $50 that Dick Cheney was sodomized as a child. It's one of the only things that can explain his extremely sociopathic behavior. Simple greed isn't enough of an explanation.

Saw this story covered on New Hampshire Outlook (local PBS tv show):
"Spanking kids increases risk of sexual problems as adults, new research shows":
http://www.unh.edu/news/cj_nr/2008/feb/lw28spanking.cfm
"These results, together with the results of more than 100 other studies, suggest that spanking is one of the roots of relationship violence and mental health problems."
“Furthermore, because other research shows spanking is not more effective than other discipline methods, there is no need to expose children to the harmful effects of spanking. We can help prevent mental health problems and relationship violence from happening by a national health policy recommending never spanking,” he says."
-(Murray Straus, co-director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire.)

The big problem with parenting licenses is that there aren't enough people to do the training/testing. When the vast majority of parents take parenting classes pre and postnatal, then you can licence them and put pressure on the rest. But it takes a long time to train people to train and that's not something you can rush. Darn it.

You trust the government to decide who gets to be a parent?

in my view not using the "rod", which should be correctly translated twig, would child cruelty.

I would never trust the government to determine who should or should not be a parent. I doubt I would be granted a parenting "license" due to my past "mental health history," but I am a very devoted mom, I'm very gentle with my kids, and have never been abusive.

One of the problems with the idea of parenting licenses is that no program like that could ever be fool proof.

We have many areas of our societies in which people are carefully screened and selected, then trained for various positions of power... still... people get through all that and commit acts of violence towards someone under their control.

It's much more than just training someone to be a good parent.
Each person who is responsible for a child carries with them their past.

I believe the best we can do is to help the child grow up into a nurturing, loving, responsible adolescent, teen, adult.
Even this is not possible 100% of the time.
So from there, we go to correcting the person's reaction to whatever stimuli causes them to behave in a manner that is unacceptable to society's standards.
Some would advocate punishment either physical or mental, such as prison.
Others would like to see more rehab.

In the end, I suspect we will never be able to stop child abuse as a society.
Just as we cannot stop physical assaults between adults or murder....

All we can do is to try and lessen these types of trauma to the innocent and be there to help them after the fact.

I think that providing supportive services to parents--like making higher education, and quality daycare while the parent obtains said education, free--would be of benefit both in reducing child abuse (less likely with less stress, less stress with more money, more money with more education) and in a number of other ways to society at large.

I also think that mentorship programs are key to minimizing the negative impact of child abuse and keeping it from making the intergenerational leap that it so often makes; I once read that the number one preventative factor for getting "at risk" teenagers to graduate hs and not end up in jail is if they have one adult besides their parents who is active in their life. I believe this.

If you want to fight child abuse, instead of whining that people should be licenced before becoming parents, get involved.

http://www.nationalcasa.org/

http://www.mentoring.org/

yes. .

as they will if there's too much of it.

Empiricism implies awareness of quantity. Science did not determine "carbon is bad."

I beg you. . . please. . . a little bit of nuance in your arguments? Pretty please, with cream and sugar on top? Just a little?