Spanking of 8-year-old boy for cursing was not excessive, court rules

[LumRaiderFan]

Why is this even in a courtroom...geez!

 

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/07/21/spanking-8-year-old-boy-for-cursing-was-not-excessive-court-rules/

[5GallonBucket]

I think you know the WHY.  Look at what has happened to our society.....PROGRESSIVE....we can't hurt anyone's feelings now days.

[baddog]

Our unspanked generation is on the streets carrying UZIs.

[tvc184]

Silly NY laws that have no bearing in TX anyway. 

[PN-G bamatex]

They act like it's such a big deal that the kid could have been spanked with a belt.

I don't think I ever got spanked without a belt.

[LumRaiderFan]

I got spanked with whatever was handy.

[jv_coach]

I think you know the WHY.  Look at what has happened to our society.....PROGRESSIVE....we can't hurt anyone's feelings now days.

It's all about children's rights, because if they have rights then the parents can not discipline them. Thus the children are not infected with the parents morals or convictions and then the children are primed to bring about hope and change.  

[Englebert]

I got spanked with whatever was handy.

 

Me too. The worst was a section of Hot Wheels race car track. Or a balloon stick. The belt was the usual method of choice...well, not my choice.

 

Most of our principals, teachers and coaches in school would give us the option (if the offense wasn't too bad) of taking the paddling at school from them or a call to our parents. We all took the paddling at school 100% of the time. My dad's belt was way worse than that big ol' wooden paddle (although the paddle did have a biting sting to it). Cursing at a teacher would probably have gotten you both, a paddling at school and a phone call, which would lead to major whooping when you got home. Waiting for my dad to get home from work was agonizing.

 

The freshman woodshop class would make the paddles for the teachers. It was not mandatory, but everybody thought it was due to the woodshop teacher kinda implying that it was. The seniors would make their own paddles for freshman initiation.

[baddog]

My Dad used a belt and would hit me high enough so as not to show below my gym shorts. My Mom liked a switch. You better not come back with a puny one either. Both of these offenses would land both of my parents in jail today. I loved my parents to death and hold no grudges for being disciplined. We have become a country of wusses.

I told my kids early on that if I ever disciplined them and they called the cops on me and I went to jail, then they better run because one of us is going to the hospital and the other is going back to jail. I can actually count on one hand the number of times I spanked my kids. I guess i was lucky. When they were old enough and I made them have a conscience. I was able to reason with them. I would make them apologize to their Mom and never sent them to their room or to timeout.

[LumRaiderFan]

The good old days. :)

[tvc184]

......... and if anyone cares, TX laws says the actor (parent or guardian) can use any force other than "deadly force" against a child for discipline to the degree the actor believes it is necessary. 

[Englebert]

Is the "rule of thumb" still in effect? With the way the media portrays our ever growing girth, I'm sure a lot of men have some very wide thumbs now-a-days.

[westend1]

Truth is, we didnt see pics of the kid.  We all know some parents can get carried away.  I doubt that the family court judge just  made this stuff up because he was a liberal.   i would be willing to bet that it was pretty bad. 

[NDNation]

I like to take the electronics away. They would rather the spanking.

Some parents do go to far.

[thetragichippy]

Me too. The worst was a section of Hot Wheels race car track. Or a balloon stick. The belt was the usual method of choice...well, not my choice.

 

Most of our principals, teachers and coaches in school would give us the option (if the offense wasn't too bad) of taking the paddling at school from them or a call to our parents. We all took the paddling at school 100% of the time. My dad's belt was way worse than that big ol' wooden paddle (although the paddle did have a biting sting to it). Cursing at a teacher would probably have gotten you both, a paddling at school and a phone call, which would lead to major whooping when you got home. Waiting for my dad to get home from work was agonizing.

 

The freshman woodshop class would make the paddles for the teachers. It was not mandatory, but everybody thought it was due to the woodshop teacher kinda implying that it was. The seniors would make their own paddles for freshman initiation.

 

My Dad used a belt (and not very often because I was a pretty smart kid and it only took one time to realize that sucked!)......

 

My Grandmother would use a metal fly swatter.......holy crap that stung!! I remember my cousin being chased up a tree with my grandma following her.....She wouldn't come down, so my Gandma went and got a lawn chair and waited for her :D

[mat]

My grandmother would make me go find my own branch, sit on the steps and pluck the leaves off. Then she'd tell me that one wasn't big enough and make me find a bigger one and pluck the leaves off again. After repeating this a few times she never did use the switch. Her intimidation/manipulation worked for some time.

[LumRaiderFan]

My grandmother would make me go find my own branch, sit on the steps and pluck the leaves off. Then she'd tell me that one wasn't big enough and make me find a bigger one and pluck the leaves off again. After repeating this a few times she never did use the switch. Her intimidation/manipulation worked for some time.

 

Smart lady

[Englebert]

Every time I hear about anything to do with child abuse I can't help but reflect on an example one of my professors used as to how statistics can sometimes be very misleading. (It was a statistics class.)

 

The number of child abuse cases is higher today than it was in the 1970s, and dramatically higher than in the 1950s. One would conclude that child abuse is on the rise. And that conclusion would be false, and in fact the opposite is true. What has led to the rise in child abuse cases is the definition of child abuse, and the number of cases reported. In the 1950s, a complete stranger could swat the backside of a misbehaving child without fear of any type of prosecution, much less any reporting. Leaving a child in car while going into a convience store was standard practice for many. Now-a-days, both can get you thrown in jail. For this particular topic, in the 1950s this trial would have never seen the light of day even if the kid had huge welps from being spanked. In fact, the person who reported the abuse would probably be more liable to being charged with submitting a false report than the parent facing abuse charges.

[Ty Cobb]

Me too. The worst was a section of Hot Wheels race car track. Or a balloon stick. The belt was the usual method of choice...well, not my choice.

 

 

I remember the piece of the Hot Wheels race track.  Not very fun.  My mom was about to give me a spanking once with a yard stick.  I decided to challenge her by taking the yard stick away from her and breaking it over my knee.  BAD MOVE!!! Then, for some reason I handed both of the broken ends back to her.  ANOTHER BAD MOVE!!!  As you can probably imagine, mom went to work on my little behind with both ends of the yard stick.  One of those childhood memories that I will never forget!!!  Never challenged my mother again!!!

[PN-G bamatex]

This is slightly off subject, but it's a memory the topic of this thread brought back to me after some thought that I felt would be of interest to some of the other posters.

 

I tend to dismiss a lot of the conservative claims about the pervasiveness and abrasiveness of liberal professors on college campuses. There's no doubt in my mind that professors are liberal more often than not - that's just shy of a statistically proven fact. But there are many out there who would have you believe that those professors treat every student who walks into their classrooms as a target for indoctrination. My own observation suggests that this is a gross exaggeration. I've met more than my fair share of liberal professors, only one of whom has ever been dogmatic; the rest have been either reserved with their political opinions or respectful of differing opinions.

 

The reason this comes to mind is the most glaring example of that one professor's close-mindedness, which was a debate over spanking. It was a communications class, in which each student was expected to give a series of presentations, either informative or persuasive, over subjects they chose to explore themselves. One of the students, who was a mother of three young children and was pregnant with a fourth, chose to give a persuasive presentation in favor of spanking as an effective means of disciplining children.

 

She gave what was, in my opinion, the best presentation of anyone in the class, myself included. Her presentation was very well researched and discussed a number of studies on the subject. She had anticipated the points in opposition to her platform, and more than adequately countered them with verified data in the actual presentation, before they could be brought up in questions. When the discussion period came after the presentation was finished, she was prepared for every question that was asked. Bottom line, the girl did her job, and did it well.

 

The professor liked to do his reviews orally in front of the class after each presentation, and then announce the grade to the entire class. I remember looking over to where he was sitting expecting an impressed demeanor and a positive review. What I saw instead was a look of appallment, and everything he said after that was confirmation of what I knew the moment I saw his face. The professor never once critiqued her delivery, her research or her preparation or any of the objective components on which the grade was supposed to be based, and instead focused entirely on the content and the position she took, which was never supposed to have anything to do with the grade at all.

 

After he had spent several minutes berating her, his focus turned to the class. He asked us to indicate by show of hands how many of us thought spanking was perfectly appropriate. When all but maybe two of the thirty or so students in the class raised their hands, that same appalled look returned. He proceeded to berate us the same way he had berated the presenter, making the same points about spanking essentially being abuse, and how children who are spanked growing up to have psychological problems. He never cited a single study, and several of the studies mentioned in the presentation had preemptively contradicted this, but he nevertheless continued to focus on them.

 

The most revealing point he harped on, though, wasn't even really about spanking. One of the things he kept saying was how shocked he was that "educated people" could tolerate spanking and not demand an outright ban on the practice. That stood out to me the most because it was outspoken confirmation of a belief he had already implied in previous classes: that all educated or rational people should hold the same or similar opinions on various issues.

 

That, in itself, is an irrational, and frankly arrogant, belief. Two perfectly rational people are capable of looking at the same information about the same issue and arriving at different opinions or decisions simply because they have different experiences, values and beliefs that result in different perspectives. While not every opinion is rational, to assume that no opinion besides your own is rational is naive, and I was incredibly surprised that a man with a doctorate in his field either hadn't yet grasped that concept, or simply couldn't. I suppose that's why the incident still sticks out in my mind.

[jv_coach]

Truth is, we didnt see pics of the kid.  We all know some parents can get carried away.  I doubt that the family court judge just  made this stuff up because he was a liberal.   i would be willing to bet that it was pretty bad. 

I believe that a person would "make this up" because some people believe that corporal punishment is wrong. Thus if corporal punishment is wrong then the facts can be blurred by ideology which leads to parents getting in trouble unnecessarily. When a sane person would say the kid cursed an adult and got what he deserved.    

[westend1]

SO if my 8 year old curses, is it o k for me to beat him to a pulp when we get home?   Can I waterboard him?   Is there a  line somewhere that goes too far?

[thetragichippy]

SO if my 8 year old curses, is it o k for me to beat him to a pulp when we get home?   Can I waterboard him?   Is there a  line somewhere that goes too far?

 

You said in an earlier post you bet it was pretty bad but we had no pictures...

 

The article said "the spanking "did not constitute excessive corporal punishment"

 

So, do you not believe the appeals court? 

[westend1]

Do I believe the Court of Appeals?   You mean more than the factfinding Judge who actually heard the evidence?  How would we know which to believe?

[Bigdog]

SO if my 8 year old curses, is it o k for me to beat him to a pulp when we get home?   Can I waterboard him?   Is there a  line somewhere that goes too far?

 

Yes, and the court sets the line not the liberal media.