[quote]
6-Year-Olds Under Arrest
By BOB HERBERT

Avon Park, Fla.

When 6-year-old Desre'e Watson threw a tantrum in her kindergarten class a couple of weeks ago she could not have known that the full force of the law would be brought down on her and that she would be carted off by the police as a felon.

But that's what happened in this small, backward city in central Florida. According to the authorities, there were no other options.

"The student became violent," said Frank Mercurio, the no-nonsense chief of the Avon Park police. "She was yelling, screaming

What happened to good old fashioned corporal punishment? Has that been lawsuit-ed out of the system?

Brookes Owl Wrote:What happened to good old fashioned corporal punishment? Has that been lawsuit-ed out of the system?

what, you mean the "right" for a teacher to beat a child?

niuhuskie84 Wrote:

Brookes Owl Wrote:What happened to good old fashioned corporal punishment? Has that been lawsuit-ed out of the system?

what, you mean the "right" for a teacher to beat a child?

Well, in our case it was the principal. But, yeah!

Brookes Owl Wrote:

niuhuskie84 Wrote:

Brookes Owl Wrote:What happened to good old fashioned corporal punishment? Has that been lawsuit-ed out of the system?

what, you mean the "right" for a teacher to beat a child?

Well, in our case it was the principal. But, yeah!

that is so ass backwards i dont even know where to start.

Whenever I hear something like that, I think of this poem

[quote]FATHER FORGETS
W. Livingston Larned

Listen, son: I am saying this as you lie asleep, one little paw crumpled under your cheek and the blond curls stickily wet on your damp forehead. I have stolen into your room alone. Just a few minutes ago, as I sat reading my paper in the library, a stifling wave of remorse swept over me. Guiltily I came to your bedside.

There are the things I was thinking, son: I had been cross to you. I scolded you as you were dressing for school because you gave your face merely a dab with a towel. I took you to task for not cleaning your shoes. I called out angrily when you threw some of your things on the floor.

At breakfast I found fault, too. You spilled things. You gulped down your food. You put your elbows on the table. You spread butter too thick on your bread. And as you started off to play and I made for my train, you turned and waved a hand and called,

Brookes Owl Wrote:What happened to good old fashioned corporal punishment? Has that been lawsuit-ed out of the system?

That's why they had to call the cops. If you lay a hand on a kid today, you'll end up in jail. I can't blame the teachers. Sounds like the kid needed a good ass whippin' and apparently she wasn't getting it at home. Let the cops sort it out.

This will probably end up on MSNBC or the Al Sharpton show as racism.....

Brookes Owl Wrote:What happened to good old fashioned corporal punishment? Has that been lawsuit-ed out of the system?

We are a nation of ******* now.

so a 6 year old kid touches a teacher and they get a felony, but its OK for a teacher to beat a kid?

niuhuskie84 Wrote:Whenever I hear something like that, I think of this poem

Quote:FATHER FORGETS
W. Livingston Larned

Which makes me think of this story:
I was in San Francisco with my wife and we were taking the ferry across the bay to visit friends in Tiburon. It was New Year's weekend, the weather was cloudy, breezy and cool - typical SFO weather. We stayed out on deck to enjoy the fresh air but we made sure to bring sweaters, jackets, and gloves to keep warm. While enjoying the sights, we observed a father with his sons, and a woman we assumed to be his mother (she was older). The kids, I'd say in the 6-8 year old range, were wearing only sweatshirts and were clearly cold. Yet there they were wandering about the deck. Grandma wanted to know why they were dressed so lightly and Dad replied, "Hey, they're in charge." That's an exact quote.

I'm not saying you have to spank your kids. But discipline is necessary, and adults have to act like adults because kids CAN'T be in charge. I'm sure your poem is meant to illustrate the importance of enjoying your child's youth, but it seems like you are using it to illustrate the wrongness of discipline. I was never spanked by my principal. In fact, VERY few kids in my school were. But we all knew that there was a paddle hanging on Mr. Gunter's wall, we all had seen it, and we knew we didn't want to feel it. Very effective.

i never said anything about not having discipline. it is absolutely important. and i totally agree with you that kids cant be in charge. but there are other ways to go about it rather than beating a kid who is barely out of the crib.

i was spanked probably 4-5 times as a kid by my dad. he told me a couple years ago that was his greatest regret as a father and that he would never be able to forgive himself. he said that anytime he resorted to something like that, it meant that he had failed as a parent because he had lost his temper and he was taking the easy way out.

kids are kids. they're emotional. call the parents and have them take her home for the day. hell, if what she did was egregious enough, suspend her. but to call the police department in because a 6 year old was throwing a temper tantrum (and then to book her with a felony!) absolutely boggles my mind. this isnt a 16 year old....its a six year old.

niuhuskie84 Wrote:i never said anything about not having discipline. it is absolutely important. and i totally agree with you that kids cant be in charge. but there are other ways to go about it rather than beating a kid who is barely out of the crib.

i was spanked probably 4-5 times as a kid by my dad. he told me a couple years ago that was his greatest regret as a father and that he would never be able to forgive himself. he said that anytime he resorted to something like that, it meant that he had failed as a parent because he had lost his temper and he was taking the easy way out.

kids are kids. they're emotional. call the parents and have them take her home for the day. hell, if what she did was egregious enough, suspend her. but to call the police department in because a 6 year old was throwing a temper tantrum (and then to book her with a felony!) absolutely boggles my mind. this isnt a 16 year old....its a six year old.

Hitting a kid out of anger is wrong, but spanking a kid for discipline is not child abuse, is not a beating and is not wrong.

Kids today don't get any discipline and there are no consequences to any of their actions. Guess what, a "time out" is about the stupidest thing I have ever seen. Time out? WTF? A real deterrent for future misbehaving....

blah Wrote:

niuhuskie84 Wrote:i never said anything about not having discipline. it is absolutely important. and i totally agree with you that kids cant be in charge. but there are other ways to go about it rather than beating a kid who is barely out of the crib.

i was spanked probably 4-5 times as a kid by my dad. he told me a couple years ago that was his greatest regret as a father and that he would never be able to forgive himself. he said that anytime he resorted to something like that, it meant that he had failed as a parent because he had lost his temper and he was taking the easy way out.

kids are kids. they're emotional. call the parents and have them take her home for the day. hell, if what she did was egregious enough, suspend her. but to call the police department in because a 6 year old was throwing a temper tantrum (and then to book her with a felony!) absolutely boggles my mind. this isnt a 16 year old....its a six year old.

Hitting a kid out of anger is wrong, but spanking a kid for discipline is not child abuse, is not a beating and is not wrong.

Kids today don't get any discipline and there are no consequences to any of their actions. Guess what, a "time out" is about the stupidest thing I have ever seen. Time out? WTF? A real deterrent for future misbehaving....

completely agree. i was spanked at school and at home...not a lot....probably only a dozen times total. just infrequent enough to where i got the point but frequent enough to know it was an option.

This doesn't sound like a situation where hitting the child would have done any good. I find it incredible that the teachers couldn't control the child, however. Far too few details here to really know why they chose to call the police, what caused the tantrum, was this a recurring event. Were the parents available? Were they the cause of this event? Were the teachers getting sick of spending so much time with this child every day when they could be spending valuable time with other students?

I loved Time Out when I was a kid, it was much better than getting whipped with the belt.

niuhuskie84 Wrote:i never said anything about not having discipline. it is absolutely important. and i totally agree with you that kids cant be in charge. but there are other ways to go about it rather than beating a kid who is barely out of the crib.

Your poem implied it; sorry if I misinterpreted. What does that poem mean to you?

Quote:i was spanked probably 4-5 times as a kid by my dad. he told me a couple years ago that was his greatest regret as a father and that he would never be able to forgive himself. he said that anytime he resorted to something like that, it meant that he had failed as a parent because he had lost his temper and he was taking the easy way out.

If your dad hit you when he lost his temper, he WAS taking the easy way out. If this is your idea of corporal punishment then now I understand why you keep using the word "beat."

Quote:kids are kids. they're emotional. call the parents and have them take her home for the day. hell, if what she did was egregious enough, suspend her. but to call the police department in because a 6 year old was throwing a temper tantrum (and then to book her with a felony!) absolutely boggles my mind. this isnt a 16 year old....its a six year old.

What the police did was ridiculous. I was being mostly facetious in my first response above, but if that was just a 6 year old acting up, she wouldn't have done so to such a degree if she thought there would be a serious consequence to her actions. It's also possible that she's got some emotional (or other issues) that are more significant and that makes the police solution (and/or corporal punishment) even more inappropriate.

niuhuskie84 Wrote:

Brookes Owl Wrote:What happened to good old fashioned corporal punishment? Has that been lawsuit-ed out of the system?

what, you mean the "right" for a teacher to beat a child?

Do you really believe your own straw man arguments? Do you really think setting up false translations with emotional language really adds meaningful commentary to a discussion?

Thanks again to yet another failure of the public schools. And thanks again to another failure to the news media for making this an issue of race instead of stupidity.

BTW, I never enjoy spanking my son, because I want him to do the right thing and have his life go well. However, I don't "regret" it b/c I know what's best for him. A real man does the right thing even when it pains him. Saying he "regrets" it later on just shows that he never knew what he was doing to begin with.

Brookes Owl Wrote:

Quote:kids are kids. they're emotional. call the parents and have them take her home for the day. hell, if what she did was egregious enough, suspend her. but to call the police department in because a 6 year old was throwing a temper tantrum (and then to book her with a felony!) absolutely boggles my mind. this isnt a 16 year old....its a six year old.

What the police did was ridiculous. I was being mostly facetious in my first response above, but if that was just a 6 year old acting up, she wouldn't have done so to such a degree if she thought there would be a serious consequence to her actions. It's also possible that she's got some emotional (or other issues) that are more significant and that makes the police solution (and/or corporal punishment) even more inappropriate.

I agree. Frankly corporal punishment doesn't sound right for this particular situation. Isolating her was a good choice. Let her throw her trantrum by herself. She'll get over it more quickly when she doesn't have an audience, and her peers will be spared such negative memories.

The way this was handled is a tribute to the stupidity of most child-rearing "experts" of the past 90 years (and the adults who believe them) Millennia of wisdom have been thrown out, and people won't even change when the sheer stupidity of it all stares them in their face.

DrTorch Wrote:

niuhuskie84 Wrote:

Brookes Owl Wrote:What happened to good old fashioned corporal punishment? Has that been lawsuit-ed out of the system?

what, you mean the "right" for a teacher to beat a child?

Do you really believe your own straw man arguments? Do you really think setting up false translations with emotional language really adds meaningful commentary to a discussion?

Thanks again to yet another failure of the public schools. And thanks again to another failure to the news media for making this an issue of race instead of stupidity.

BTW, I never enjoy spanking my son, because I want him to do the right thing and have his life go well. However, I don't "regret" it b/c I know what's best for him. A real man does the right thing even when it pains him. Saying he "regrets" it later on just shows that he never knew what he was doing to begin with.

+1. As kids, my siblings and I were spanked on rare occasions. There were no lasting marks of any kind and it wasn't particularly painful or anything but it was made clear that you did something wrong and you better behave. Kept us all in line. I don't blame my dad one iota for it. It's the kind of discipline that is sadly lacking today.

Quote:A highly disproportionate number of those youngsters, like Desre'e, are black. In Baltimore last month, the police arrested, handcuffed and hauled away a 7-year-old black boy for allegedly riding a dirt bike on the sidewalk. The youngster was released and the mayor, Sheila Dixon, apologized for the incident, saying the arrest was inappropriate.

This has absolutely no relevance to the rest of the article. But the media writer just couldn't resist the temptation...