Originally posted by fable
I was brought up in the 1950s, in an abusive household, yet my parents were still neglectful of my sister and myself. Just because my mother slapped me around every day doesn't mean she understood the need for time and communication within a family. Discipline in and of itself is nothing more than a series of rules (and I don't think you're suggesting otherwise). By my way of thinking, discipline must follow upon a close, loving relationship built on trust, openness and honesty--with one's self, and with each other.
This is exactly correct. The foundation of discipline is not punishment, and not all discipline involves a physical component. If a child breaks a neighbour's window playing baseball, it is just as possible to get through to that child by making him go apologise and pay for the window out of his own money as it is by spanking him.
The point of disciplining someone, whether it is your kids, students or subordinates at work, is to make them learn from their mistakes (and not repeat them). My taekwondo instructors used to use push-ups as a punishment for being late to class. Very few people were late. My parents favoured grounding as a punishment, although at some point it lost its effectiveness, and they had to find other ways to get through to us (like taking away the phone or TV privileges). My old band teacher in middle school used to make people stand up for the remainder of the period; I never once heard Mr. Miller raise his voice but by making someone stand (coulpled with the embarrassment of being singled out), he usually ensured that the session wasn't interrupted again.
There is no right or wrong way to instill discipline in someone; everyone reacts differently and you need to use different methods with different children. For instance, if you told me that I couldn't watch TV as punishment, I would be just fine with that because I love to read and don't need a TV for entertainment. However, a banning from the TV was a killer for my brother.
Similarly, there are other ways to abuse someone besides physically striking them. There is beating someone down verbally, repeated public humiliation and other forms of psychological abuse.
A guy I used to work with had a mother who used the belt on him. He told me that when she would whip him, she'd be crying more than he was because in her mind, every time he screwed up bad enough to merit a whipping, it meant that
she had somehow failed or had been an inadequate parent. There is a wonderful passage in
Starship Troopers (the book, not the movie) where Sergeant Zim and the company commander are talking about meting out a punishment and Zim is saying that in the soldier screwing up,
he had failed the soldier and the Mobile Infantry, and that gets right to the root of what establishing rules and consequences means.
We've talked before about the merits and abuses of corporal punishment on this forum before, but my main point is that kids need boundaries, rules and well-defined consequences for disobedience. If done under the proper framework, the point of the rules is not to arbitrarily restrict and punish someone, but to teach them about what is and what is not acceptable, in the family, in a social group and in society in general.
To draw this back to the original point of the thread, it is my belief that when 12 year old girls are running around with tight shirts that essentially say, "Look at my boobs" on the front, it is the parents who have failed to properly supervise their children and that no one else is to blame for this behaviour.