Myers-Briggs, you know, the guys (gals?) that came up with the psych tool for identifying personalities, they say that some personalities respond better to corporal punishment than others. They make the point that parents may not grasp that their child has a different personality from them, and treat them as they would have liked to have been treated, to ill effect. So in addition to the blurriness of the punishment/abuse line, and the myriad parenting/exposure and genetic variations there are variations in children and their responses (which again are chicken/egg quandaries).
Spanking me did absolutely no good: I HATED the spanker and did everything in my childish power to thwart them. I was good at it too. It was a power game, and a deadly one at that. Some kids don't respond like I did----they take the lesson that they made a mistake and should behave differently, and choose to do so.
But all of this does not eliminate the correlations. Correlations are clues. They do not tell us the mechanism, but they are useful anyway.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2012-07-26 04:43 pm (UTC)Myers-Briggs, you know, the guys (gals?) that came up with the psych tool for identifying personalities, they say that some personalities respond better to corporal punishment than others. They make the point that parents may not grasp that their child has a different personality from them, and treat them as they would have liked to have been treated, to ill effect. So in addition to the blurriness of the punishment/abuse line, and the myriad parenting/exposure and genetic variations there are variations in children and their responses (which again are chicken/egg quandaries).
Spanking me did absolutely no good: I HATED the spanker and did everything in my childish power to thwart them. I was good at it too. It was a power game, and a deadly one at that. Some kids don't respond like I did----they take the lesson that they made a mistake and should behave differently, and choose to do so.
But all of this does not eliminate the correlations. Correlations are clues. They do not tell us the mechanism, but they are useful anyway.