Essential Baby published a post earlier this week on a dilemma of modern parenting, asking the question “Are parents today getting it all wrong?”

I know that I parent differently from my parents, but I think that within the bounds of normal (whatever that may actually be ) my children behave with consideration and respect for themselves and others the majority of the time.

Amity Dry who wrote the post noted that through previous comments to her writing she found:

Certainly there were many readers who felt, as I do, that smacking a child is wrong for the reasons I pointed out. However, just as many felt that the lack of smacking was part of the ’soft’ approach to parenting that is contributing to a generation of spoilt, badly behaved, disrespectful children.

This post has elicited quite a response, with over 90 comments from parents and non parents around the world. I found myself agreeing with some comments and strongly disagreeing with many others.

But the issue that came out most clearly to me was that I don’t think all of the “problems” of this generation of children can just be blamed on parent’s discipline style. Part of me lamented the structural changes in society that see parents being far more alone in bringing up children; extended family and neighbourhood networks have shrunk and family units themselves are becoming smaller and often fragmented.

Social scientists have labelled today’s tweens and teens “the most brand-oriented and materialistic generation in history.” I monitor and limit TV and computer time in our house, but I can still not hide my children from advertising and branding in the external environment and from their peers at school.

To me it seems that there is a tendency to label the newest generation of children the worst. Instead of labelling children, I think that it would be more helpful to work together to provide a more nurturing, caring and less branded environment for them to live in.

So do you think that we are rearing a generation of spoilt, badly behaved, disrespectful children?

Technorati Tags: parenting, smacking, society, spoilt children

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A recent study by a Harriet Hiscock, a pediatrician from Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital researched the impact of parent methods on children’s sleeping behaviour.

Hiscock was quoted in The Age (10/04/08) saying:

children were nearly twice as likely to have sleep problems that persisted through the toddler years if their mother’s parenting style was “hostile” - characterised by yelling or physical punishment such as smacking - rather than “warm”.

In the article titled Smacking toddlers affects sleep it stated that

her research has opened a chicken-and-egg debate because it is not clear whether the sleep problems are caused by the mothers’ parenting, or if the frazzled mothers have resorted to shouting at their sleep-deprived, cranky children.

“It’s always a cause-and-effect argument and you can’t really conclude from this which one occurs first,” Dr Hiscock said.

Chicken or egg, regardless of which came first, to me this is another reason to add to the list of reasons why I shouldn’t smack my kids. Mr Infrastructure and I agreed very early on in our parenting that we would not smack our children.

This philosophy was further cemented after reading Louise Porter’s introduction to her book Children are People Too, where Porter explains the events that reinforced her choice of title for this book.

The second event occurs when I ask participants in training sessions on behaviour management to consider what carers should do when they are feeding someone who appears deliberately to spit food back on them. There are always some people in the group who say it’s okay for the carer to smack the child. But then I complicate the situation by saying that I was thinking not of a three year old but of an 80 year old who had Alzheimer’s disease. Now is it okay to smack the elderly person? We agree as a group that it is not. But why the difference? It can’t be that you can reason with one and not the other as Alzheimer’s disables individual’s reasoning skills. After some discussion, those who were willing to smack a child but not willing to smack an elderly person realise that, deep down, they were thinking that children weren’t people yet and so it was okay to hit them. The underlying belief in this book, in contrast, is that age is no barrier to human rights.

Megan at Imaginif has a great reading list on this topic on her post To Smack or Not To Smack.

What’s your view on the smacking debate?

Technorati Tags: parenting, smacking

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