As a kid, I was never spanked. My parents were not the type to physically punish me, instead they opted to grounding me. If I did something wrong, I would get privileges taken away. These punishments ranged from no television for the day to being totally grounded for weeks on end, depending on the egregiousness of my acts. I was the type of kid that got grounded a lot; I was always doing something that merited a punishment. I wasn't a bad kid in the general sense of the phrase; I didn't get into fights or get bad grades. Instead of that, I would do one little thing wrong, and then dig myself into a deeper hole from there. For example, I would call my older sister a name, and lose television privileges. Then I would ignore my mom and continue to watch TV. I would then lose the TV for a week but keep ignoring my mother. The punishments would pile up, and the next thing that I knew I would be grounded for an entire month. It isn't that I didn't fear these punishments or think that they would not hold water, I just refused to think ahead to think about how these punishments would actually affect me in the future. Then after the interactions with my parents were all over, I would sit and think about how stupid I was being and regret my actions very soon after it was all over. Despite these emotions, the next time I would get in trouble, nothing changed. I never really learned how short-sighted that I was being. This still is a problem for me today, as I will still get into altercations with people of authority and lose horribly. This happens to me in soccer with referees, and used to happen with teachers in high school. I am working on it though, and I'm getting better.
As you can see, every type of punishment is going to come with some negative effects. Aversive conditioning can cause people to be cripplingly fearful of people with authority, while the ways that my parents punished me may have caused me to have not enough fear for authority figures. I think that the best way to condition children is to understand the child and simply know what they will respond to the best.
I think some people might listen to your case history and say, well there's the case for spanking--he didn't learn the proper fear of authority. I have my doubts about this. I think that the real reason a spanking--as opposed to a physically brutal punishment, like actual corporal punishment, which isn't of course really on the table in any serious discussion of the subject--is that people already have a certain respect for the authority figure dishing it out. Maybe with this type, it does really underscore the lesson. But I also wonder if they would turn out the same in any case. It is, as you say, a very individual, case-by-case matter.
ReplyDelete