Misdemeanor torture

Stripping an individual, stuffing him in an enclosed space, blasting him with frigid water while yelling at him as an interrogation technique and video-taping his shame was deemed torture at Abu-Ghraib. It is a felony to do these things to those deemed our enemies, but a mere misdemeanor to do it to those we love.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/hot-sauce-mom- ... d=12796871

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The hot sauce is a good idea, don't know about the cold shower. I think a feather duster handle to the arse would of been suffice.

 

Why is this shocking?

I think the mother's persistence and the stages of the discipline is what strikes me as shocking. I understand that the specific punishments were for separate offenses, but it still seems off.

I wonder how hot the hot sauce was. Sauce gets unpleasant for me pretty easily. I can see that getting unbearable quickly.

Cold showers suck, but they just suck. That kid seemed to be sounding off extremely vocally for how bad I imagine a cold shower to be. Then again, as a child I remember crying at scraped knees and I can suck it up nowadays, so I guess discomfort scales up for children.

I do not even know why I'm analyzing this. What is fucked is fucked and I cannot imagine this being good for the child. For that matter alone, this needs to change.

 

I got a better idea; lets not discipline our kids. Lets use words that they don't understand, that will teach them. When I was a kid if you bumped into an adult you apologised, these days if a kid bumps into you the parents scream bloody murder.

I am a strong believer in having to have a license to procreate.

 

I can endorse a your-first-two-are-free policy.

 

Men can get years of jail time for much less, even without any shred of evidence.

She should lose custody of the children along with most of her assets and branded unsafe around children for life.

 

Why? It isn't as if she's leaving bruises.

 

Psychological trauma appearantly exists.

Not the shears, not the shears, I won't nibble my thumb again, just keep the shears away from me!

 

Just a case of hardening the fuck up when you get older.

 

Since when was discipline supposed to be pleasant? You don't learn to do the right thing by getting off easy when you do the wrong thing. I tend to think corporal punishment is a more direct and effective way of training a child, but God help you if you leave a mark on your child these days, or someone even suspects that you got after that ass with a leather belt. So what recourse do parents have besides mild psychological torture? I'm pretty sure every alternative to corporal I've heard of could be labeled as something negative: emotional abuse, sensory deprivation, etc.
There is always a fine line between discipline and abuse, but I don't think it's in the method; it's in the spirit in which it is applied. There are parents who can wear out that backside out of love, and there are parents who torture their children without ever laying a hand on them.

I guess what I'm saying is, if the woman in the video didn't sound like such a bitch, her actions wouldn't seem nearly so harsh.

 

It's harsh because it's stupid and has not worked, as evidenced by two things:

1) The Kid knows the consequences of being caught doing something bad. This is easily collected from their interrogation.

2) The Daughter felt the need to film the event and mail it to Dr. Phil. Either the Daughter doesn't get the same degree of punishment, or she's willing to risk the consequences to cry out for help. Both are awful.


The Kid finds it easier to just hide his troubles from his mother, as we can see from him not telling her that he had gotten in trouble at school. In fact, what I get from this video is an idea that the kid would have gotten the same punishment for confessing as he did for withholding.

The point is, however, that the Kid still gets himself into trouble. Otherwise, it would not be a long-term issue worth video taping and sending to a television show. What's the Mom going to do when that kid isn't five years old anymore?

Well, the Kid might grow up and end up walking the path of Brett Reider, who in 1993 killed his mother after what witnesses among friends and family described as years of physical and emotional torture (sorry I don't have a better link for this film. This is the first matricide that comes to mind, because I saw the documentary on television in around 2001 or so). Now, you could argue that the Kid in this case turns out alright, but it doesn't make the Mom any less of a corpse.

What you're saying, Japes, would make perfect sense if people were getting upset over a spanking. We could have a reasoned discussion where that makes sense. The context of what we are seeing here is actually oppressive and not at all conducive to correcting a child's wrongs.

 

When training any kind of big, dangerous animal, negative reinforcement is the equivalent of starting a time-bomb ticking.

Guaranteed: This kid will replicate the abuse, if not to his children then to others.

 

A punishment does not always deter. I remember as a child knowing right from wrong, being familiar with the consequences for committing wrong, committing wrong, and suffering the consequences anyway. If the mother seeks absolute obedience, I'm confident she could cook up some seriously gruesome punishment that would keep her child in line. My point is that were the mother to adopt a different disciplinary approach, it would also likely be as unsuccessful by this criterion. The success of punishment is not necessarily inconsistent.

I was confused as to why the daughter was filming the scene. I do not see how the mother could be unaware of the filming. I had assumed that the mother sees nothing wrong with her method and thus does not care whether or not it is recorded. I had gone so far as to assume she encouraged the recording.

Precisely, it is more how she is disciplining her child that appears to be the issue more so than whether or not the experience should be pleasant for her son.

I'm curious as to what the family dynamic is when the kid behaves himself.

 

If a punishment fails to deter, a new punishment should be attained. Doing something terrifying to a person over and over again whenever they do something wrong is not actually conducive to teaching them not to lie.

Was this how your childhood punishments went? My father raised three children with the "Belt with love" strategy, and all three of us were obscenely rebellious and had issues with authority. I guess you could argue that we all ended up as good, strong, take-no-bullshit people because of our resentment at being "trained" like a barnyard animal, but I don't think it would be entirely accurate. I was bullied incessantly until I got into high school, which was also around the time the Belt-tactic really winded down, where I suddenly came into social confidence and became popular with other teenagers.

This sort of shock and awe parenting is worse than any of the cuffs and spankings I got as a kid, though. I just don't think this works. What's the end goal of this method? Making your child a bitch? Seems to me that your child will either end up as a worthless coward worth nobody's time or a vicious brute to be avoided.

 

-Must have double-clicked the submit button-

 

My point about the inconsistent effectiveness of a particular punishment is that a practice should not necessarily be abandoned because it is occasionally ineffective.

What we have witnessed should be abandoned for reasons other than its ineffectiveness in this case.

 

If something is consistently ineffective, it should be abandoned. Why would you think otherwise?

 

How many of you actually have kids?

 

I have been a kid, does that count?

 

I don't have children of my own, but I have volunteered with beaver and cub scouts on a regular basis in the past, including several day camping trips and sleepovers.

But if you want to use the "Haha! The abusive mother is validated because raising your own children is hard!", I will gladly concede that I don't know what the woman is going through. The only evidence I have that she's doing something wrong is the plethora of mothers who don't force their children to hold hot sauce in their mouth and end up on a talk show.