Black parents, including parents who aren’t very good by many standards, do try to discipline their children, and they do tend to be extremely harsh. They’re almost always looking at a particular behavior that is annoying to them, however, and not the big picture of how the child interacts with other people, including them; and this is not true only of blacks, but of lower income whites in the South (where I live).
I hear truly nasty abusive stuff coming out of both black and white mouths when I go to WalMart, and while I think the parents may mean well, I’m not surprised that the kids don’t turn out well. In any case, it’s usually a worn out “single mother,” sometimes with a thuggish boyfriend who doesn’t give a darn, so I wouldn’t say there’s any serious parenting going on there.
Both blacks and whites need more moral instruction and more ideas about how to love their children and each other. The churches have totally failed the poor on this.
Agreed—it’s an issue of class, culture, and limited intelligence. Society needs to intervene, ideally from the church and other civic institutions, but when that fails, as in this case, the law needs to get involved. Even children have basic rights.
At the other end of the spectrum, the well off could also use more moral instruction. Affluenza is a real condition. Some parents believe loving their child means giving them everything they ask for and allowing them to do whatever they want.
Their children grow up unrealistically believing that the world was designed just for them and when they are confronted with the real world, they find things aren’t the way they were at home. Many of these more well off children find the world so difficult that they decide to end their lives. If they had received some painful discipline from their loving parents when they were younger, perhaps the experience of real world would not have seemed so cruel.
I have nothing to say against Adrian Peterson. I don’t know the situation, or what the child did to deserve the punishment. I do know that even younger kids deserved hard discipline and I also know different types of switches need more or less force to leave marks.
My father used a switch off of a bush that had extremely pliable branches. It was so pliable it was more like a whip than a stick. All you had to do was tap someone with it and it left red marks like the ones on Peterson’s child. People speculating about the force Peterson used seem to know a lot more about the events involved than I’ve seen reported.
Some lower income parents use abusive disciple practices on their children and some higher income people use abusive non discipline on their children. Both are bad for society.