Unfortunately a fair percentage of even quite young ‘children’ age 8/9 have grasped that parental threats are hollow as a result of child empowerment via ‘child abuse’ laws. The result is that many parents are greeted by open angry defiance about any sort of discipline or even attempts to enforce rules in the home. Those parents who will actually tell the truth (admittedly a small minority) will provide chapter and verse of being told’ F you you can't make me do that. Nobody can.’ or ‘Go to H-ll old man. I'll come and go as I please.’ or my favorite that my foul tempered step daughter was fond of ‘Nobody is going to tell me what to do.” Ironically schools now have a much bigger arsenal of legal ‘pains and punishments’ to deal with discipline and behavior problems than they did thirty years ago while parents authority has been systematically undermined by both the culture and the rule making therapeutic culture. Once more the state has been made more powerful and the citizen's informal authority greatly diminished. This is in many ways a parable for our times about the general drift of a society that places its faith in the formal rule driven ‘expert’ entities and views the organic institutions of society such as the family with distrust.
“Unfortunately a fair percentage of even quite young ‘children’ age 8/9 have grasped that parental threats are hollow as a result of child empowerment via ‘child abuse’ laws. The result is that many parents are greeted by open angry defiance about any sort of discipline or even attempts to enforce rules in the home.”
That is true. In my case, I did two things to deal with it. First, my kids never went to a public school (I’m not that stupid), and second I made it VERY CLEAR to them that if they EVER discussed discipline in our house or anything else that might make a Generation-X female social worker mad at us, that junior would quickly get a new set of parents. In other words, I practically dared them to turn us in. Needless to say, they were perfectly happy to get a light spanking once in a while when they acted up.
And that’s the problem - children are trained to tell the truth to authority figures. That is a HUGE MISTAKE. The only persons that I EVER wanted my kids to be truthful with were me and my wife - everyone else, including grandparents, can go to hell - as some things stay in the family. If more parents explained that, then less of them would lose their kids to some over-hormoned social worker, with a chip on her shoulder.
