January 31, 2006

to smack or not to smack?

I'm being a lot more structured in my approach to life at the moment, and I feel it's really helping me to achieve little mini-goals and I get to the end of the day and go "yes". Although i'm buggered. And i still need to read some short articles again tonight for the community meeting i'm going to tomorrow about repealing legislation that justifies parents in using reasonable force to discipline your kids. If you're thinking, well why would you want to repeal that, parents should be able to use smacking as a form of discipline, it gets a lot more involved than that. I'm still getting my head around it, cause my sisters and I were all smacked. Hell, I'd even say we deserved smacking, we fought like cats and dogs a lot of the time. But that's why it's so hard to get past, because we've seen it used by our parents (who love us) as a way of correcting our behaviour and therefore we accept it, and have the potential to adopt it with our own kids.
There's lots of reasons against it. Because in a lot of families, it goes past what i'd classify as reasonable, but it's subjective, and it appears that juries, made up of new Zealand parents are seeing real violence as reasonable discipline. I think I'll probably write more on it because it's my little project at the moment. but my biggest qualm currently is the stuff i've read from the kids perspective, how it makes them feel, how it makes them perceive their parents, perceive themselves, perceive the society we live in. It's sad.

What's not sad is i rang the accommodation service today and it appears Kelly may not be coming to live on my couch until July after all. And the boy is back from Europe in 5 sleeps after this one.

Now I have a difficult meeting at 9 and a monstrous paper to write tomorrow. As well as the meeting on the smacking. So I must sleep. As my pyjamas say: I need my beauty sleep.

1 Comments:

  • At 9:49 pm, Blogger David said…

    I don't have much of a position on this. But I don't see that anti-smacking legislation will have any effect on cases of serious violence. That's already illegal, and the offenders will carry on regardless.

    I also have concerns with enforcement... My experience overseas suggests that social workers won't hesitate to take children away from families where this form of newly criminalised "domestic violence" takes place. And that the consequences of doing so far outweigh the effects of the smacking itself.

    Lastly... the post title: "to smack or not to smack?"... I thought that Gringa Pixie was acting up, and you were asking our advice :-)

     

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