Appleshampoo said:
Living in an area like I do, I see kids no older than 10 swearing at each other, being insulting to people they don't even know and just generally being terrible to live near. Their parents are blind to this fact, even though I'm willing to be the kid is just as bad at home.
I'm only quoting this part although I did read the whole post. I don't want to single you out, but this is a good quote for me to make a point.
I want to begin by stating that I believe that corporal punishment is the worst way to correct problems in society, especially with our children, because it is so inefficient and as studies have shown, the short term benefits are largely outweighted by the negative repercussions. I will touch on that in another post though because I want to talk about something else here.
It takes more than parents to make a good individual. As a teacher, you could say I am biased in both my perception and approach to education and how to raise children although I try to stay up to date with research done in the fields of psychology and education. Interestingly, most discoveries made in the field of psychology do not make it into the field of education (for example: On how using a reward system is detrimental on the long run for children). I believe this is partly due to the fact that most teachers like to use blunt solutions to problems they have mostly because they never sat down to think about the results they are looking for and ways to get there or they simply don't have the time or interest to research and implement alternative ways of teaching and creating communities of learners. Also, teachers, just like parents, will have a great tendency to emulate what was done to them when they were students themselves. The implication of this is also that if we want students to behave in a certain way we must make sure we do not employ the proscribed behavior against them else they will end up using the same techniques when falling back on "auto-parent/auto-teacher" when facing a crisis.
Although I will concede that some children can turn well in spite of a detrimental environment, the influence said environment has on the vast majority of children (and even adults) is undeniable. As a teacher, I try my best to help the children in the schools I work at. A key principle teachers should keep in mind at all times when looking to improve a situation is the following: what can I change in the environment to help my student(s)? As a teacher, I can work on changing my teaching approaches and methodology, I can change the way homework is done, I can change my classroom's climate by fostering certain aspects of human nature rather than others and moving stuff around and so on and I can give food to some students when their parents do not feed them.
Unfortunately, I cannot change the home they are living in. I cannot change their parents or the bad teachers they had/have and I cannot change the bad neighborhood. While teachers have a great deal of power to help students improve, the greatest changes can and have to be made by parents. If you suspect that you live in a bad place and that your kid may need to be spanked because he could be influenced by other kids, I would strongly advise you to move away to a better community. If you also think you need help with raising your child, your priority should be to look for information online, in books, talk to other parents and maybe even teachers (although I would say that I think many teachers would give bad advice - see what I wrote about not integrating results of research made in other fields) or even psychologists specialized in children's mental health. I think it would improve the odds of you having a loving relationship with your children if you did not have to spank them and, being in a better community, your life in general as well as your children's would be so much better. Again, I am not targeting this message at Apple, but is rather a comment about this fear of having to fight against a bad community to raise one's children.
