Where to next?
Just for fun, I watched Nanny 911 tonight, with Matt. All I can say is wow. I suppose it’s easy for one to look in from the outside and give one’s two cents about how jacked up the situation is. I really don’t understand how it ever escalates to that point. I don’t have children, but I can swear to you right now, it would never get to that point. Perhaps I’m old school, but there’s nothing wrong with a good ol’ fashioned spanking.
Fast forward to five minutes ago. I read that a nine-year-old boy killed his mother, and then himself. Complete with suicide note.. I don’t even know what to say to that. I look back on when I was nine. I remember Barbies. Friends. Family functions. Perhaps I had it good. Eh, who am I kidding. I did have it good. My vocabulary didn’t have the word “suicide” in it. I may have been incredibly angry at my mother for grounding me from Ken for thirty minutes, but I would never sit down and devise a plan on how to off my parent at the age of nine. I don’t even understand what that is. How can a child think to oneself that things are just too bad to keep living. At. The. Age. Of. Nine.
Was it my little Population 1200 small town that kept me in a bubble? Have the times changed that much in the last eighteen years? It breaks my heart to read stories such as this. Not knowing how to help or change things, even as a society, is even more appalling to me.
April 19th, 2005 at 6:33 am
actually, there’s lots wrong with a good old spanking.
(it’s my education degree coming out again)
April 20th, 2005 at 10:47 am
Yeah, I have to agree that spanking isn’t the best method. It only teaches your child that when people get angry it’s ok to hit other people.
April 20th, 2005 at 4:58 pm
I think it depends on the child and his reaction. I was spanked as a kid, and hey, I turned out just fine.
April 20th, 2005 at 9:22 pm
it only teaches them that it’s ok to hit people when you get angry if YOU YOURSELF hit them because of anger.
that would be the line when it stops being a spanking and starts being something else.
speaking as someone who’s been on the receiving end of both, anyway.
April 21st, 2005 at 3:41 am
Quality of life has degraded so far that all ages are affected. Sad but true.