Quote Originally Posted by Gillianren View Post
I think what we have here is another attempt to force everyone to accept a certain philosophy. I won't be playing that game.

I'm not raising my daughter, so take my advice for what it's worth. However, I think the thing a lot of people miss is that every child is different. Yes, my example tends to be based on my sociopathic younger sister, who is an extreme case. And even basing things on me isn't terribly reliable, because I'm bipolar. But what my older sister (relatively mentally healthy) needed is probably different from what my daughter has needed. My daughter is in a two-parent household, which we stopped being in 1983, and that's an important difference. My daughter is homeschooled and we went to public school. We grew up in Los Angeles, surrounded by family, and she's grown up in Washington with most of her family far away. Why expect her disciplinary needs to be exactly the same as mine and my sisters'?
This is pretty much the heart of it, if you ask me. Expecting one method or type of parenting to be a suits all solution is naive. I say that from experience with three of my own, who all require different tactics of parenting.

I read an interesting paper once, I think it was The Science of Spanking or something close. It covered the correlation between spanking and aggressive/defiant children. One perspective was that children who were spanked, grew to be more aggressive/defiant than children who weren't spanked. An alternative view was that children who were spanked, were likely more aggressive/defiant to begin with. In my experience, I find the second hypothesis to be more likely. I didn't answer the poll, though because I feel the choices were too narrow. I believe that it depends on the child.