Thoughts on spanking and respect

The mother-in-law - Rae's former stepmother, who remains the major maternal figure in her life, for a variety of reasons - recently called her, offended that they'd posted "so many" anti-spanking memes or articles on her Facebook.

As far as we could tell, that was two of them, but that's us being pedantic.

She thought it reflected badly on her, which she found unfair as she'd never spanked Rae.  This is another demonstration of her world view that everything is about her.  Suffice to say, while the stories are not mine to tell, she did do things I consider worse than spanking - far, far worse, in fact - but it's worth crediting her for being right about that issue.

I have no patience with her, but that's my failing.  Not that she deserves a bit of my patience, but Rae deserves a lot more than I give too much of the time.

The point that the mother-in-law is missing is how often parents of a toddler has pro-spanking messages fed to them.  On social media or in the world.

I read Spanking Your Children is Hitting Your Children by Chuck Wendig to Rae today, a couple of days later. It's a very good article and my feelings on the issue match the ones expressed there, so I won't go into more detail than to highly recommend it.  I also read Spanking is Hitting, Part Two, which gives a more tempered argument that is also important to make.

In Honor thy father and thy mother, I discussed the question of people bending to nearly any length to justify their parents actions.  I think the dialog on corporal punishment largely comes to a standstill because of this one single, stupid problem.

Look at the dumb fucking meme that inspired the original Chuck Wendig post:

The entire thing is predicated on the notion of the person's parents being "right".

I think the implicit contempt expressed in the tone suggests more than a little that their psychological self-evaluation has failed on a massive scale.  Of course, the average person has little concept of what respect is.  It's a modestly complicated concept and most people were trained as children that respecting people was demonstrated by obeying them, which isn't a very good beginning to understanding it.

"Respect for Others" is taught by example.  Period.  There is no other way.

Spanking is not a very good way to demonstrate respect.  In fact, it actively demonstrates the opposite.  It's an act of profound disrespect.

Saying a person can't learn without violence being inflicted upon them is perhaps the ultimate in contemptuous statements.  It's certainly arguable in cases of Nazi Germany and rapists that without violence - or, at least, the threat of violence - one might not be able to stop them from their atrocious actions.  It happens I hold my child in much greater esteem than Nazis and rapists.

I don't remember either way if my parents did this to me, but I've always hated, even as a kid, watching people trying to teach their kids manners through humiliation.  "Hold on, what do you say?"

What a crock.  If you're polite and respectful to the people around you, your child will most likely grow up to be polite and respectful to the people around them.  That humiliation game is just intended to bolster your reputation as someone teaching their kids "manners".

But let's circle back to the world in which there's explicit and implicit messages pushing you to spank, outside of dumb as fuck Facebook memes.

Conan recently took up screaming.  Not screaming in pain or excitement.  Mostly randomly, although frequently it would seem in annoyance, as he'd often follow-up by saying "Annoying."

He'd do this in various public places, but especially on the bus.  I speculate he was annoyed about being in transit and a bit bored with the wait, but he wasn't able to communicate the more complicated point unfortunately.

Rae and I would do our best to gently shush him or tell him to stop in a more commanding tone.  Neither of them got us too far in those moments.

But at the worst it was intermittent, even when it was fairly often.

You could see people stare and glare and mutter that we should obviously be doing something more.  Most likely not everyone thought we should strike him, but you could tell we should be do something more and more aggressive to quell it.

I'm not sure what that would based on.  My experience, although admittedly anecdotal, in witnessing people who tried to physically punish or get into a screaming war with a toddler over making too much noise is that 100% of those escalate into something worse than intermittent screaming.

Now, he seems to be getting over that.  Not completely.  But largely.

And so goes life.

I promise, as soon as I stop seeing people arguing that I should spank my kid, I'll stop talking about why I'm not going to do that.

On the other hand, if you present an argument that isn't awful, I might treat it with respect.  As we can see above, that's not very likely.

And just to  hammer it home, here's Why Shouldn’t You Spank Your Kids? Here’s 9 Reasons.

The things we believe in

I've been on this little school rampage for a little bit, as you can tell.

I didn't really start this blog to go over these things.  I wanted to - and want to - share more personal things about our life and our son.

I'm bad at doing that.  When Conan's learning a new thing or whatever other thing he does, I tend to live in that moment and enjoy it, listen to her sing "Smells Like Teen Spirit", as I noted in this post on my other blog, talk to him as she figures out the body parts on his doll, or read What's That Squeak? to her for the umpteenth time, and then, unless it's relevant, there doesn't seem to me much of a story.

But I'll try to find more contexts to write about those things, because they make me unbelievably happy.

This subject, on the other hand, put me into a black, black headspace and I need to step away from it for a little while anyway.

I wanted to hit one more thing I note, and I suppose it's not unlike the earlier post Honor thy father and thy mother, but it's hard not to keep noticing the awkwardness of having this conversation in public.

The thing I notice is that saying you don't think compulsory school is the best way to teach kids seems a lot like saying you're an atheist.  In both cases, there seems a defensiveness among a significant group of adherents, religious believers or traditional schooling advocates.

It feels to me like many people need to be assured that your lack of agreement with their belief system is not an attack on them or their belief system.

It's harder for me with school to offer that.  As I noted, here certainly, this is not, for me, an idle point of casual disagreement.  I feel like what those Jesus Camp kids or ones from similar kinds of religious background seem to feel when they get out of that environment and reject those beliefs.  It's a white hot anger.  Sometimes it's an atheistic anger at religion, others are angry at God.  Either way, it's not something I have a relationship to on that issue.

On religion, you believe what you believe, I'll believe what I believe and as long as you don't try to inhibit my life with your beliefs, we're totally great.  Go out and do good.  Make the world a happier place, please.  Whatever name you choose to do it in is fine by me.

Conversely, if you're doing harm and acting maliciously against the happiness of the world, I don't care what excuse you have either.

With school, it's harder.

Off and on, I've studied it.  I even took some degree of interest when I was in school.  Partially from my own frustration, partly because education had always been an active interest of my mother's, so the material was around me. I've studied it in the years since and, of course, with renewed vigor since Conan was conceived.

People try to convince me of the benefits of school for Conan's benefit, and some of that has made a difference, along with our experiences.  You can see Thoughts on school for a relatively large adjustment we've recently made.

Most people, even when they express concern over Conan, are defending the status quo.  They're entrenched in what they believe in.  For those especially, it's hard for me to argue.  Obviously, it's impossible to do without criticizing things they believe in.  Were I simple non-believer in school, I'm sure I could make those arguments reasonably and tactfully without straining myself.

So, for the record, please know, I'm not disagreeing with your experiences.  That teacher that inspired you was undoubtedly terrific.  In my opinion, even more so for standing out in such an extraordinarily flawed system.  The things you learned, the friends you made, the skills you gained are all valid and acknowledged by me.

I just think there are ways you could have gotten more, as well.  And I think all of who were - or who at least feel we were - failed by school could have gotten more from it, as well as less frustration.

Here's Conceiving Of Change And Invisible Alternatives to assist my point, as I'm running out of ways to state all of this in a positive way.

Like I said, all of this thought and discussion on this subject has not done good things for my mood.  I need to spend some time away from it.  I'm going to just enjoy Halloween with Conan and get back to my general feeling of satisfaction with my life.

Rage and imprisonment

I've mentioned The Evergreen School before.

I don't recall the details of why I started going there, but I remember liking the environment on my first visit. I remember all of the student books around the library. I remember the copy of Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella that I looked at often over my time there, but never got around to reading.

I mention this, because most of the things, positive and negative, that makes the things I read by Peter Gray resonate so thoroughly for me. I try to explain some to Rae and tend to say she should read his blog or his book, Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, when we get it. Last night she expressed the concern that I was merely parroting back someone else's philosophy and I had to explain that the issue isn't me parroting back what he said, but that he so perfectly expresses the things I've felt for so long, and backs them up with such great evidence and examples.

I don't remember much about my days there. I couldn't tell you any which way what I studied. As adults, we joke merrily how we don't remember what we "learned" in school as if that was either our failing or an amusing piece of happenstance, rather a core flaw in how our schools work.

My parents paid a lot of money that they couldn't easily afford to send me to these schools.  I'm not certain I can find the same casual amusement in that as everyone else does.

I remember one teacher, Ron Cohen, who taught me about musical theater.  He also had a mock trial of Harry Truman for war crimes and crimes against humanity for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  I don't know that I gained what I was supposed to from it.

I did watch Give 'em Hell, Harry! in there and still think of Truman and the movie fondly.

I remember being frustrated that I didn't think that the jury fully understood their job and took too much of their initial beliefs into the jury box rather than what was argued.  I also don't recall there being clear definitions of the crimes for them to work from, just their loose understandings, same as when they came in.

His class was also where I wrote "The Case of the Playground Monitor", which I think was kind of the Quentin Tarantino of early '80s short stories by eleven-year-olds.  It was popular but divisive, excessively violent, featured stretches of profanity and jumped around through storytelling styles.

I might have oversold it, but luckily I don't have a copy around to disappoint you...  nor does the school.  The first time in the school time in the school's history they didn't maintain a copy to show off to new parents and students.  I took a fair amount of pride in that at the time.

Now, I just feel angry.

I was kind of off to go with the writing thing.  I was pretty proud of myself.

Now, I'd always been a socially awkward kid, or considered myself so.  I don't remember ever feeling comfortable around other people - being a confusing character like The Loud Extrovert and 30 years from beginning to understand it was a factor - and I'd long felt picked on and never took well to it.

But I'd become friends, for a time, with my one-time rival, and easily the coolest kid I knew in the whole 12 years I was confined to be educated.  His name was Quentin.

I don't remember the details of us moving from rivals to friends.  I know it happened on the playground, though.

We played Four Square and a team version of "Smear the Queer" that, as best I remember, we largely made up.

(I'll briefly jump in to say that Wikipedia article on Tag provides a variety of alternate names for this game, starting with the decidedly British "muckle" and the incredibly awkward "kill-the-guy-with-the-ball". It was the '80s and we were of the right pre-teen age that homophobic slurs did occur, but I can't remember any suggestion of the game's name being one of them.)

We weren't allowed to play the game.  Not because of the name, but because it involved tackling.  If someone was watching, we had to switch to two-hand touch, which frankly ruined the game completely.

We read Savage Sword of Conan and tried to draw like the artists in it.  We read the Robert E. Howard Conan stories and wrote our own pastiches, but both agreed that we avoided the ones by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter that were shoehorned into our beloved paperback books.

He was better at drawing than I was, although I couldn't trust my memory well enough to say it was good by a standard other than what an eleven-year-old does.  I also feel like I was better at writing, but I could be being kind to myself, as I hate to be so far behind Quentin on everything, but it is possible, as I suggested, he was really, really cool.

I had other issues going on in my life, including some turmoil and major changes in my home that had probably left me unsettled.

But there were some kids a year or two older than me who liked to flip me crap.

As when Quentin had flipped me crap a year or two previous, I tended to respond by getting into physical fights.  This had been a recurring issue in my life.

Somewhere between the increasing concerns about my fighting and the "disturbing" trends in my writing, I was made into the problem.  I'm sure no one involved told me that, and perhaps no one even really thought that, but that was the "lesson" I took away.

People fucking with you is something you're just supposed to expect and "ignore" when you're a kid.  As noted, here, that's because it's a prison.  In a prison that's a normal expected factor and you need to man-up and deal with it.

In all of this it was my anger that was considered a problem.

At least that's how I took all of it.

If I took action on my anger then I was misbehaving.  "In trouble", as the saying goes.  "Bad", as all kids inevitably when they are "in trouble".

No, I'm not really defending fighting as an expression of anger, however coming up with a way to express my anger productively was decidedly not on the table.  I was told to "ignore" it all, which is a load of horseshit.

When I tried to work it out, express it creatively, that, of course, added fuel to the fire of me being a "concern".

I learned, for a long time, not to express my anger at all...  or barely.  It all turned inward.  I've never really gotten past the tendency to turn all the anger I have, whether personal or toward the great injustices of the world, on myself eventually.  Nothing does more to set me into a bleak depression than getting mad, even if justifiably.

That's that legacy.

Somewhere in there I became scared of my voice as a writer and stopped writing with any regularity, despite always thinking of myself as a "writer" and "writing" being the thing I was going to do.  And occasionally I do.  I write all the crazy, bloody, fucked-up shit that got me "in trouble".  I've never seriously considered writing anything else.  Was that just who I was already by then or is that another legacy?

I've been reading Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence, which an incredibly insightful book by Gerard Jones.  Jones has incredible insights on children dealing with violence through violent play and media, and I'd love to just be celebrating that someone is just saying these things, but I'm not.

I'm angry.  I'm angry at people for not saying these things more.  I'm angry at people for not saying these things all along.

And, of course, I'm angry at myself, because that's what happens to me when I get angry.