I honestly think we are seeing some sort of major change in the way human brains are wired. It used to be VERY abnormal to have a child who did not respond to a normal spanking back when I was a kid, and more abnormal when my parents were kids. I am NOT talking about a beating, just a swift smack on the tushie when a behavior went WAY beyond safe. I can remember being angry about it at the time of the spanking but I can't remember being angry about it even hours later. I don't know of ANY of my peers who were furious about a spanking the next day. I now see kids who are still FURIOUS about a spanking days and even weeks later. It would not have occurred to any child I know other than my brother to WANT to hit a parent, much less to do it beyond maybe a hand waving that happened to hit a parent when you were maybe 2yo and not in control of yourself. Purposely hitting a parent was just NOT something you would even consider. Yet I know kids who actually PLAN to hit parents to get what they want. They think it is just fine.
I don't know WHY we see this, esp as until this point in human evolution we have NOT seen this. Yes, people who were beaten by parents did often strike back. I just don't think that there are enough cases of abuse to justify the violence we are seeing in our children. I also don't think the advances in communication and the openness of society are the reasons we hear about it.
I do think that the many millions of images of violence that children see contribute, esp interactive images in video games. I also think that the drugs we pump into the human body are part of it. NOT just the illegal drugs, but many drugs may contribute. We just don't have enough information on what our medications really do in our bodies to know the long term effects, esp on the female body. It has only been in the last few years, maybe two decades, that ANY research was done on how medications and medical treatments worked on females. We know, for a FACT, that alcohol acts VERY differently in females than in males, and that females do not have an enzyme that helps break down alcohol. This means that women get drunk faster and stay drunk longer than males of the very same size. Yet this is not included in most educational programs and few people know this until AFTER they get treatment for sub abuse problems. I can't help but wonder how many other medications are very different in the female body. I can't help but wonder what ALL the medications we take are doing to our bodies and to our gene pool. I do think we are seeing some DRASTIC changes in how the human brain is evolving and not all of them are good changes or ones we have ANY clue how to handle.
I am really scared for future generations. The level of violence in children is increasing at what seems to be a staggering rate, as are the levels of mental illness and substance abuse and addiction to non ingestable things like video games, sex and violence. I don't know how to stop it or help it for the world in general. I do know that MANY people have bashed me for YEARS for taking away video games completely from Wiz when he got to the point of lying, cheating and stealing to get them. Most people thought I should teach him how to self moderate and we tried this. It simply was not something he was CAPABLE of. I knew it in my gut and even when the doctors, teachers, tdocs, other parents, my parents, people here, etc... all told me that to take them away completely was going to hurt him more than what he was doing, I still knew it was what he NEEDED. Now he has thanked me and told me that if I had not taken them away 100% for the times I did remove them, he would NEVER have been able to learn to function without them. He now will take himself off of them when they start to interfere with his life. I do think that more of our kids owuld beneft from this than most people EVER want to admit. For many people the electronic screens are like alcohol or crack or heroin - they cannot moderate themselves. I know my husband goes into serious withdrawal when he cannot get online. He will go spend hours at places I normally cannot drag him to if our internet is down or at the library on their computers if his isn't working. I like mine but going with-o for a couple of days is not a big deal. I read, listen to audiobooks, work on projects, and do unplugged things. He is not able to. It scares me.
I think this is contributing to the violence and the problems that are being blamed on spanking. I wonder what would happen if those same children who reacted aggressively to spanking were unplugged for a significant amount of time? I wonder if that would have an impact on their reaction to discipline? I also wonder how those children react to other types of discipline? I know that Wiz reacted the same to ANY type of discipline - he hated it and did all he could to undermine it and to egg us into escalating things. He claimed that timeout was abusive, that taking away a toy was abusive, that ANYTHING we did to get him to modify his behavior was abusive. He became physically violent to any/all of these things at one time or another. He was spanked RARELY because husband and I believe that it should only be used for times when the child put himself into real danger, like running out into the street or trying to stick something into an electric outlet.
I do think there may be a correlation between spanking and increased aggression in differently wired kids, but I do NOT think that ANYONE can tell us that spanking causes the increased aggression. There are simply too many other things that may contribute that will NEVER be studied because they are too complex or some corporation's profits might be impacted if the results of a study showed a correlation.
I think blaming it on spanking is FAR too simplistic and that we need more resources to help our kids esp the differently wired ones rather than a bunch of media blaming it on spanking alone and parents. We are so busy blaming spanking and parents for the problem that we are NOT working to find ways to help the families, which is what is TRULY needed.
I am sometimes terrified by this generation of kids. When I started trying to get help because Wiz was violent, most resources treated me like I was a monster who made my child that way by treating him that way. It was super hard to find ANY help for a parent being abused by a child who was not even a preteen back then. Elder abuse was being talked about, and even a few cases of parents abused by a child who was in his late teens, but that was it. Even 6 years later when Wiz was a teen there was little help available. our DV center designed a program just for me because they didn't want to turn me away but they could find NO real help in any of their resources. Now? They have a group that meets that is parents who are abused by their kids - from ages 8 or so on up. They also have some children in their services who are there because they abused their parents. I don't have details but they need 6 or more to make a group, sot hey have at least that many AT ANY TIME. I have this info from my therapist there and from several parents who have been helped by them, and from a school counselor who is the mom of one of J's friends who came to me asking where I found help when she had several parents in that situation with kids in elem school. And she is in just one of our FIVE elem schools!
We have GOT to put some real resources into this, or the next couple of generations are going to be scary, scarier and truly terrifying.
just in my opinion, of course.