I think I am a bit more of a crusader than you are, Penni. I do see spanking as a practice that is utterly wrong, and am advocating for the civil and human rights of children not to be hurt. I haven't even started on the circumcision issue! One of your strengths is taking a whole lot of disparate elements, people, opinions, etc. and making some kind of delicious cake out of it all. I think that is why so many people enjoy your posts. I also think that growing up in Virginia and living in Texas probably exposes you to a wider variety of ideologies than I am exposed to here on Old Hippie Hill on the Left Coast. Then there is the fact, often discussed here, that it is easy to trade insults online that we would all be much too well mannered to say to each other in person.
I am not sure exactly how it came to be that there are a couple of armed camps at Feelings. I was not here when it happened. As I recall, in the early days here it was accepted that it was a place that soft and gentle people, pagans and free thinkers, and even liberals, could hang out and not be bothered very often. That does not seems to be the case anymore. I actually thought I had written a very conciliatory post when I answered yours though, acknowledging that child development was complex, and that most children were survivors of a diverse set of parenting practices. I cannot be myself, though, without calling the age of spanking the Dark Ages. If I have to scrape so much of my personality and my beliefs from my posts that they would never bother anyone at all, I don't think I can keep writing them.
Does anyone have a source for that brain study of teens? I would like to read it. I think what happens is that suddenly they are as big as you are, and doing adult things like driving and working and expressing intellectual concepts like adults, so it is easy to think of them as more mature than they are. My daughter has made several choices that she was absolutely adamant about, and they have turned out to be very wrong choices for her. Now I know that she is very strong willed, but I no longer take that as a sign that she will intuitively make the correct choices, and am guiding her a bit more closely.
This shouldn't be a scary place to post an opinion, Penni. But I do not really know how to solve the problem. I don't think having SI Bob as a babysitter is the answer, though. Of course, why should I be surprised that some of the most obnoxious posters (in my humble opinion) are also big crybabies? |
