Shouting is the new spanking.

Dennis: Notes:

My evolution: I did not spank my children. I believe that I bought, hook line and sinker, the thinking of our time, and I don't believe I was right. Everything within context, all things being equal, when done right, a spanking can be less injurious to a kid than yelling, especially considering what words come with the yell.

Some kids are very difficult, and there may be some times when it may be more effective to give the kid a spank.

Humiliation is a no-no, so spanking on the naked bottom is a no-no. Forcing the child to drop trou and expose his or her bottom is humiliating. The number of you who were corporally punished by a parent, as was Dennis. Dennis was corporally punished by teachers, and every time he was, they were right.

The removal of corporal punishment from our school systems corresponds with tremendous chaos in the school system.

A kid who doesn't want to be told to brush her teeth, screams. The parent is told to say, "You are making a bad choice." As if the four-year-old gave a crap about his teeth or making a choice about them.

"I have become totally frustrated and lost control of myself," says a mother, who then begins yelling and spanking.

We friend our teenagers and spend hours and hours teaching our elementary children to understand their own feelings.

If a kid knows you love him, you can yell at him.

The kid needs consequences for wrong behavior~!

Dennis, my husband and I were at our wits' end with trying to raise our children. They fought like cats and dogs CONSTANTLY and everything we tried had no effect on them. So we took our already-empty wallets to the Health Center and begged for help. We were referred to the Parents' Institute at UCLA for training. We spent six months with them and I swear we were no better off than before we had started, just more determined to keep our tempers, which wasn't part of the instruction.

Their solution to everything was simple (big surprise). They taught us a brilliant, thentofore undiscovered principle: all behavior that is rewarded is encouraged and will increase, all behavior that is ignored will extinguish. This comes from the child's urgency to please his parents and to gain the parents' approval. When normal children commit bad behaviors, they're seeking to get the parents' attention, even if it means a spanking, because the parents' attention is what they crave above all else.

Any idiot can see all the holes in this philosophy. You start off life selfish and self-centered and caring only about how you feel about anything at the moment. Knowing that you may incur your mother's wrath if you steal the cookie from the cookie jar means nothing when compared to having the wonderful sugary taste of the cookie in one's mouth. In addition there is the reward of having your own will reinforced as you win the argument, even though your mother has left the room; you're now in control, and you decide to have the cookie.

Another hole: Part of growing up means that your parents' approval is less and less central to your universe. Hopefully it will always matter but at eight years of age there's a balance--do I gratify my own wishes or please my mom? Whatever is stronger at the moment will win.

This program was a dismal failure. They were asking us to praise the kids, even make a big fuss over them, for getting along. When they fought we were supposed to ignore them.

It became very obvious very quickly that the kids would gratify themselves. "I hate my brother, therefore I slug him in the face." Ignore that and it will go away? Not on your life. Or rather, not on the brother's life, because it seemed to come nearly to that every time, and so we had to break them up.

A Seventies fad in parenting told us that if you get involved in their arguments, you're only playing into their hands, because that's the only real reason they fought with one another--to pull their parents into their circle and break up whatever the parents were doing. I noticed a few times that seemed to be what was happening, but for the most part those fights were sincere conflicts of will. ChildA wanted that toy, so did ChildB, they both wanted it now, and neither wanted it half an hour from now.

We learned one thing from some friends of ours: Time-outs helped the fighting somewhat. But let each kid stay in his respective corner until the other fighter said he could come out. They understood justice well enough to make it work on their own. If they had been primarily interested in pulling me into their fight, they would have started something right there as they sat with their faces in the corner.