Well, Michael, your clarification is helpful regarding your personal feelings about spanking. To sum them up, you are saying that spanking is not actually GOOD, but is an ACCEPTABLE parenting practice. There is a difference in these two concepts.
What would you consider a scientifically valid study? I would think that one done by medical researchers at a university would be considered pretty reliable. The fact that it was published in the journal of the Canadian Medical Association means that it is peer-reviewed. This represents a high level of confidence in the methodology.
Is it actually the research methodology that you do not agree with, or do you just not agree with the conclusions?
How would you conduct such a study differently?
Why are you calling the Canadian study "foreign"? Do you think Americans always do the best child rearing in the world?
Do you think Canadian doctors or parents or children are any different than American doctors, parents and children?
Do you think being spanked as children might make Canadian children have increased incidences of alcoholism, drug addiction and depression as adults, but not result in increased numbers of the same diseases in American adults who had been spanked as children?
What is the basis of your bias against pseudo-intellectuals? Do you believe that uneducated parents are always better or more informed parents?
Do you believe in general that as more research is done on the way children develop, we might all become better parents by learning more effective and less damaging ways of rearing children?
Do you understand that while spanking may not damage everyone who is spanked, it is impossible to predict who will be damaged? Is this a reason you believe spanking should continue as a disciplinary tool? How do you justify the risk, when quite a few children will be damaged? Isn't every child important?
Do you realize that you are also misinterpreting my posts, and putting the most dire spin on this issue, by emotionalizing it and imagining mothers and fathers in jail because they spanked their child? Do you remember that I said in previous post that the way this would almost certainly be handled would be by a public health campaign like we have for smoking. It might then lead to parenting classes for parents who continue to spank, like the classes that are mandated now for spousal abusers. A parent so out of control that he or she continued to spank after all of these teaching methods had been exhausted strikes me as someone who would probably have a great deal of anger, or perhaps be a child abuser.
Do you believe children have any rights?
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