ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/spanking-kids-leads-adult-mental-illnesses/story?id=16695697

Guessing this is it. Interesting. I still would like to know what constitutes "sometimes" vs. "almost never." E.g. my parents used spanking maybe a handful of times in my childhood as a kind of last-resort punishment. My father also got physical with me maybe three or four times in my childhood out of anger -- not extremly severe, but a couple of times he shoved me hard and once or twice he hit me -- a single shot to the arm. I don't know if this constitutes "sometimes."

It is an interesting study and I am dead-set against spanking kids, but this little disclaimer is very important.

"They cautioned that the study was cross-sectional, which precludes drawing any causal inferences. Moreover, they noted, the data was retrospective, which could introduce recall and reporting biases."

TBH in my memory the incidents with my dad were much more damaging than the light spanking incidents were this controlled response to situations where I had become stubborn and absurd and they kind of snapped me out of it, whereas what happened with my dad just seemed disproportionate and scary and out-of-nowhere.

The actual question doesn't use the word "spank" at all: "As a child how often were you ever pushed, grabbed, shoved, slapped or hit by your parents or any adult living in your house?" All those examples do sound more like examples where it was a parent losing their temper and responding physically, rather than as a more controlled punishment for misbehavior (i.e. spanking as the more buttock focused version of a time-out.)

yeah spanking was like a controlled annoyance/irritant that I endured cuz I was acting out/being wild it wasn't something my parents did because they were crazy hostile or abusive. I don't think either of my parents ever laid a finger on me in anger, really

I think it's very hard to separate out hitting due to discipline and hitting due to anger. I know my parents were nearly always angry when I got slapped. They didn't just hit out, they'd warn me about it beforehand, but they were hitting me because they couldn't deal with the situation and had lost control.

Non-parent dipping into the parenting thread again, but that article kinda strengthens my feelings that what fucks people up (kids and adults both) is living in danger, under threat, being subject to anger and harm from others.

You could never spank your kids but emotionally manipulate them, for instance by being inconsistent with anger/affection responses in a way that disconnects their actions from your reaction--living with the uncertainty of that is v v destructive even in the absence of physical harm.

I don't have final thoughts about spanking as a controlled discipline (or not), but I don't think that's what this article is about.

There are so many gaps in the way the research is reported in that article (or possibly in the research itself) I don't know where to begin. The headline needs a question mark at the end of it IMO.

xxp Agree and it might actually be impossible to separate them out. Still suspect that the conclusion drawn in the tagline (spanking is BAD for kids) is impossible to infer from the text of the question.

This is really about neural development and a child's brain creating pathways and emotional connections.

Laurel is OTM, as usual, with this: "what fucks people up (kids and adults both) is living in danger, under threat, being subject to anger and harm from others.

You could never spank your kids but emotionally manipulate them, for instance by being inconsistent with anger/affection responses in a way that disconnects their actions from your reaction--living with the uncertainty of that is v v destructive even in the absence of physical harm."

Abuse; physical, emotional or sexual; in childhood causes actual brain damage. The hippocampus is smaller, there is decreased communication between the cortex and the limbic system, the left side volume is decreased, the neuro-endocrine system is out of whack and a bunch of other stuff I can't remember now. Basically, kid is traumatized, kid dissociates from reality to deal (flight, flight, freeze response), emotional dissociation leads to the emotional center of the brain and its communication with other parts of the brain to never completely develop resulting in a plethora of life-fucking-up behaviors and disorders.

I doubt spanking w/o anger is represented here but like vicky i have no idea what that would look like.

I had no idea you guys were Australian.

my girl is 2 years old today :)

happy b-day! get ready for wild times. ours is three in a couple weeks. just moved into a big girl bed. here she is pretending to sleep in it.
https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/549517_4376577253096_685381926_n.jpg

evie's 2nd birthday was a little over a week ago, we had a party that basically took me out of commission for an entire day after

too many cupcakes?

haha yeah we had the party (a duck/dinosaur themed affair because she liked dinos and ducks), man it was a lot of work!

she's turning into a little demon sometimes lately though! she's so sweet most of the time but goddamn now she gets hungry and it's crazy

yeah woke up early and was running around a lot getting stuff ready and then i was frosting her cake and ended up eating too much frosting and then having a sugar crash during the party, there is video footage with me in the background just like sitting on the stairs with my mouth open. then i felt vaguely sick the entire next day but was not actually sick.

evie wants to eat all the time and it's hard to figure out how much to try and limit that. don't want to keep her from getting nutrition but i feel like if we kept giving her food, she'd keep eating it.

she is mostly good but we do get some tantrums, usually related to putting on clothes or taking off clothes.

happy birthdays!

we just sang twinkle twinkle little star together. she wasn't singing the actual words, but it was really close.

M turned one in June, second child syndrome she didn't really have a party, just a few friends round. It's Aidan's 5th birthday and party on sunday, I'm dreading it. It's turned into a military operation to plan and my to do list, to be fitted in with work, tidying the house ready for said party and mother and sister in law coming down for a week, and looking after two children, is starting to scare me a little.

Time sure does fly by with kids, doesn't it?!

My little brother and his fiancée set their wedding date to be Henry's third birthday.

We're still a little miffed about it, but deep down, it's also a bit of a relief.

Happy Birthdays ILX babies! I saw this cake this morning and it blew my mind:

http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6078/6067409735_f1f2a58cbd_z.jpg

Vicky im feeling you on the 5th birthday stress and we didnt even have people coming into town.

omg I want a Richard Scarry cake for my 30th!

Seems like for it to be a true Richard Scarry cake, the oven has to blow up and a baby doll needs to be accidentally baked inside.

also a bit of a relief.

because you won't have to go to the wedding?

Because we won't have to plan a three-year-old's birthday party.

So this is kind of crazy of us but we moved into a one-bedroom from a two-bedroom to save money and be in a better neighborhood for kids. Albeit a one bedroom that is probably bigger in square footage than our old two bedroom, with a much bigger bedroom? Anyone have tips? We may wind up partitioning the bedroom.

I used a big bookcase to separate a room when I lived like that.. worked pretty well!

kid #2 has apparently forgotten how to fall asleep :(

it is much harder to "cry it out" when you have a brother whose bed is five feet from yours getting up out of it and complaining about you loudly to the whole house

i was really worried about Henry waking Beatrice up because she was until recently so incredibly difficult to get to sleep. It would literally take hours. But as it turned out Henry falls asleep real quick and honestly once those two are asleep you could prob hold an all night rave in their bedrooms and they wouldnt wake up.

also a bit of a relief.

because you won't have to go to the wedding?

― how's life, Wednesday, August 1, 2012 9:50 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Because we won't have to plan a three-year-old's birthday party.

― pplains, Wednesday, August 1, 2012 9:57 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i like to think of it as an elaborate birthday party someone else is organizing for Henry where a couple of people will just happen to get married.

so K is pushing 6 months and I want to start childproofing and also making the apt a little more friendly to crawling around.

I also need a way to set up a space for her to crawl/roll with some kind of boundary around it so she can't get out if I need to put her down. Anyone have any thoughts on this stuff?

Maybe use these?

http://www.amazon.com/GMI-Keepsafe-Expansion-84-Inches/dp/B0001J05GY/ref=pd_cp_ba_0

They come in a variety of different sizes. I don't know how big your place is, but in some of my rooms, they can go wall-to-wall. They're relatively cheap and an easy installation.

that's not a bad idea. We actually have a really nice setup for the use of gates, because our living room has these sort of half-walls on one side with an entryway, and then on the other side there's an elevated dining area (the other two sides are walls). So we'd only need to gate a relatively small area, and then I was thinking maybe some foam floor tiling in the living room area.

re foam floor tiles, we had some that fit together like a puzzle. They worked really well for a while until she realized she could take them apart. After that, the first thing she did every time we put her in her room was to take apart the tiles and throw them all over the place.

Ours was akin to this one, with lots of little pieces.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51QbKCeh6QL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

Which seems cool, because it's all honing their motor skills and puzzle solving abilities. But we found that we most needed padded flooring at an age before she was really into solving puzzles as much as just taking shit apart. She does puzzles now, but we just use an ordinary rug for the floor at this point.

Yeah. I was thinking about maybe getting some more toned-down (aesthetically) pads and running them around a larger area, like her play area but also around the couch. They make some in some nice colors, and they even make a woodgrain one which I can't decide if it would look nice or just tacky in the same way most plastic stuff that looks like wood does. H and I have this thing about wanting to balance between making things kid friendly and not letting kid stuff entirely take over our apartment and create visual chaos.

I want to find some kind of bumpers or pillows or something so she doesn't slam herself into the wall/bookshelves when she's rolling around. She's quite a roller.

The only thing we really did was progressively move things up higher and higher off the floor until eventually our place was actually sort of tidy - I realized this is the secret reason behind the seemingly inbuilt tidiness abilities of parents

we have a lot of stairs in our place and we didn't use any gates, but we did put some foam tiles at the bottom of each set of stairs... to cushion the landings

(i'm making our place sound grand, but we have so many stairs because our place is effectively squeezed up vertically into a narrow tube of rooms)

"daddy, that van sells bread"

i look up and see a van with pictures of baguettes on it

"yep, or maybe it just carries bread"

"why?"

i consider murdering my own son, again. instead i say

"hey, how do you know it has bread in it?"

"it's got pictures of bread"

"but maybe there's something else inside! maybe there's..... alligators in there!"

"daddy! alligators don't exist!"

"yes they do! alligators totally exist!"

"but not in LONDON."

checkmate

You could confuse him more by showing him these pics.

http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-snc6/c0.0.403.403/p403x403/181380_391421997579323_1612323365_n.jpg

Those are hotel shuttle vans. From what I gather, you can't get cookies from them.

they carry you to, or away from, cookies though, as i understand it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJlV49RDlLE

well yes exactly, though frankly the putative kid in louis' deathless bit asks "why" in a relatively sensible way

my child says things like "daddy, that car is green" "yep, it's a green car" "why?"

sounds like something that should be encouraged imo

the amount of encouragement he needs to ask unanswerable questions = minus 10000000000000

My kids and I are the opposite.

ME: "See that train? It's pulling a whole line of boxcars filled with coal. Why do they call them boxcars? Hmm? Because they're shaped like boxes! Now the round ones, the ones that look like … a shampoo bottle, those are likely carrying a liquid like fuel. Look at the graffiti on some of those cars, you could draw something like that!"

BEEPS: "I'm done with my gummies now."

ha ha

exactly

i mean Henry currently spends around 60% of his weekend worrying whether the ceiling fans should be on or not.
"Fan on? Fan off?"
"Don't worry about the fan. Its okay."
"Fan On?" etc etc

hahaha awwwww