In article , Dave Heil
writes:

ike Coslo wrote:

Dave Heil wrote:

Mike Coslo wrote:

N2EY wrote:

And the argument is null anyway. If beating your kid worked, you
would only have to do it once or twice.

You're on a slippery slope, Mike. If TALKING to your child did any
good, you'd only have to do it a couple of time, right? I can hear my
mother's voice now: "How many times to I have to tell you?"

Ahh, but talking DOESN'T work! You can't always reason with a
child.

Take my word, my folks never attempted reason when we were younger.

Yup. In many cases it's counterproductive. For example, if you want a kid
to go to bed at 7 and he wants to go to bed at 8, and you spend half an hour
or even half a minute after 7 trying to reason with him, he's "won", because
his bedtime wasn't 7.

My
sister and I were issued edicts in no uncertain terms. If we argued or
talked back, we could expect some time in a corner or in our rooms or
were grounded.

Which today is called "time out" and which works very well if done right.

You have to deprive them of something that they value for a little
while. Then you give it back to them until the next time they misbehave.
I'm not advocating talk, and I'm not advocating beatings, I'm advocating
something I've found that works.

Bingo. And for most kids, what they value most are freedom and attention.
Deprive them of either or both, and the message gets through.

My dad called it "giving us a little more leash". He retracted some
leash when we demonstrated that we couldn't handle the extra freedom.

And the lesson was that the *kid's* behavior is what caused it.

In fact, I was recently enlightened to the fact that (I hope this
doesn't invoke Godwin's law!) Saddam Hussein, Joseph Stalin, and Adolf
Hitler have one thing in common. They recieved regular beatings as
children.

So the secret seems to be, beat your children on an irregular basis and
they won't grow up to be tyrants and ogres. It'd be interesting to find
that Jeffrey Dahmer was never spanked and that his parents tried to
reason with him.

Read:

http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_k...er/naked1.html

for an interesting if horrible accounting of Jeffrey Dahmer.

Indeed, he was not raised in an abusive environment. But it is
unfair
to attibute anything to a pathological serial killer's upbringing
compared to a normal person. But there is a difference between Dahmer
and the nasties I mentioned above. Many people call them all madmen, but
there is a huge difference between Dahmer and the others.

I'll check out the link.

Me too.

I would point out that *most* kids, beaten or not, will not grow up to be
serial killers. But the legacy of violence plays out in other ways.

And there's even a connection to amateur radio policy in all this:

Dave's dad's analogy of "leash" is very accurate. FCC gives its licensees a lot
of "leash" (freedom) in exchange for proper behavior. Violate that agreement,
and the "leash" is shortened. As in the cases of licenses not renewed for
"character" issues (meaning the licensee was convicted of serious crimes
that were not violations of the license itself). The kid who talked back or got
into a fight at school might find he wasn't allowed to watch TV, even though
the offense had nothing to do with TV. Same principle with FCC licenses.

73 de Jim, N2EY