Child Discipline, Aspergers and Canadian Law(TriggerWarning)

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Trigger Warning: The following topic may also cover issues related to corporal punishment and possible abuse at certain points.

Hi, I was just wondering if there are any Canadian adults with "Aspergers" who can share their experiences growing up where discipline/punishment was applied and how you feel about section 43 of the Criminal Code of Canada, aka Canada's "spanking" law. If you followed the news in the last year the Canadian Medical Association Journal published an article on the controversial subject.

So

-your experiences with discipline (school, home, other)
- your thoughts on Section 43
- if you've read the CMA article, what are your thoughts?

Thanks, I'm interested to hear what others have to say, have experienced etc.

Everyone is welcome to post replies, you don't need to be a Canadian citizen.

Last edited by Snowyee on 06 Jul 2013, 2:32 pm, edited 3 times in total.

I was slapped in the face by my mother - once at 5 for crying (she says now she was having a bad day), once in early grade school for saying goodnight after she told me to shut up, and once as a teen for being mouthy (no bad words, just angrily expressing dissatisfaction). I viewed it then as now as abuse. the only lesson I learned was that mom had a temper. one of my sisters was beat with a hair brush until the brush broke. I consider myself lucky.

kids who are hit (spanked) are more angry and anxious and more likely to become delinquent than their peers who are not hit. spanking is just plain not good discipline. it teaches that might makes right and that hitting is okay. example is the strongest teacher. I was in a store. a mom hit her daughter who turned around and hit her little sister.

Dr. Phil summarizes the research here: http://drphil.com/articles/article/256

he is not my source. several articles in "journal watch" are. "journal watch" summarizes significant research for busy physicians.

I'm not Canadian, but I thought I would reply. I come from a very traditional family who are very proud of traditional ways (many of which we carried over from Ireland and Scotland). As such, I was spanked quite a bit. Punishments were always carried out with a wooden spoon or hands. Whenever my sister and I were punished my mum and father made sure to tell us they loved us afterwards. Though I hates the punishments at the time, I now see the value in them for me. I think I've turned out alright, I've done well enough in school, managed to act a certain degree of normal, and even get into college.

I realize that this is a fairly controversial topic and that I happen to land on the side that isn't always in a favourable light. Some experiences of people I have met certainly do amount to abuse. However, I think there is a line between abuse and spanking. The punishments I received never bruised anything and were always followed up with positive reinforcement from my parents. Today I do not view my punishments as abusive. In fact, some of my relatives and caretakers were much more abusive to me in words than my parents were in deed.

Feel free to disagree or agree with me, I have met many people with different perspectives on this and I always am interested in hearing different points of view.

I was spanked growing up. My mom claims she never did it that often, only like five times but I remember being slapped and having my mouth slapped and I guess she doesn't count those as spankings. I didn't grow up to be all angry and messed up and I never ever thought my parents had a bad temper for hitting. My dad curses and he has thrown things or slammed things so i think there that is a bad temper he had. it did however teach me it was okay to hit when people make you mad or don't listen to you and I slapped my brother's mouth one time for calling me a poo poo head and I yelled it was a terrible thing to say, those were my mom's words when she slapped my mouth at Brads (a buffet restaurant) for saying the f word. I took it too literal is why, I also took stuff away from my brothers as well because Mom did it to me and I also made things off limits to them because she did it to me. But I never said the f word again after having my mouth slapped. She warned me she will do it if I said that word again after everything else didn't work she had tried. I was too darn obsessed with that word and a slap cured it.

I was never abused or beaten, there is a difference. Only one time did my mom lose her temper and hit me hard because I made her so angry and it left my skin red it stung. If she did that all the time, it would have been abuse. I was also hit with a wooden spoon but not often. I have also been spanked on my bare skin on my butt. My dad did that, not my mother. She used her hand or the spoon. My dad has hit me out of anger like the time I burned a hole in the rug in his Honda with the cigarette burner, the time I was reading a book in the RV and I had my legs across the aisle and then all of a sudden my Dad cursed and started hitting my legs saying i kicked him when I didn't even move them. My mom took his side saying I probbaly wasn't aware I did it because I had a history of impulsive behavior and having no awareness. he didn't do it often so I don't consider myself as being abused growing up. I am also not in trouble with the law nor a delinquent and I am not anti social. I have a good relationship with my mother, and I still learned right from wrong. I wonder why I turned out so well than research claims?

You ever try to convince the old order Amish or Mennonites NOT to spank a child? DON'T EVEN TRY TO CHANGE THEIR MINDS! In that world, Might Makes Right, since The Bible is taken literally as the word of God. The mantra amongs this group, as well as all other conservative evangelical Christian groups (much of which I also believe, even though I'm considered by many to be a heart on the sleeve, bleeding-heart liberal), is God said it, I believe it, that settles it, end of discussion.

My parents grew up with that mindset. Mom's father saw action in WWII. He never talked about it. The few times a month we would see him, he was always drunk. It was even worse around Christmas time, since his birthday was December 24th. Mom always told us about the abuse she took as a child. Grandpa never wanted her. He always favored her younger brother, since that was his drinking buddy when he became of age. His view of women was to keep them fat, stupid, pregnant, barefoot, and in the kitchen.

I was conceived in order for her to get out of that situation. Since she had nothing that she could call her own, she and dad would use my gestation as an excuse to get out of a bad situation on both sides of the family. From that point, mom, dad, my brothers and I were considered to be the black sheep of both families. To this day, even though mom and dad are no longer among the living, my brothers and I have no contact with either side of the family. Even further, I no longer speak to my brothers, save my youngest brother and his wife, no thanks to the crappy way the next to the oldest brother treated everyone when Mom's estate went into probate.

Last edited by Meistersinger on 06 Jul 2013, 1:41 am, edited 1 time in total.

I grew up in the 70s and 80s and copal punishment(spanking) was allow and practice in school. When I was in elementary school. I lived out in a rural town and went to a small school there and I had a very mean and strict principle who was bullying me all the time because of my aspergers (which wasn't known at the time.) and about once a week, I was ending up in his office and every time. I got spank with a big wooden breadboard paddle and it hurt like a MOFO. BTW: I got smart about it and started putting padding over my butt so it wouldn't hurt anymore and even though the spankings didn't hurt anymore. My felling got hurt when the kids would tease me afterwords. By the time I got into Jr high (a.k.a Middle school). During that time. I got called to the principle's office about 4 time and got spank. But I think I deserved those because I did some really bad things at the time.

In my country any corporal punishment towards a child is considered child abuse.

That said, I do remember one time when my mother actually did slap me in the face.
We didn't have a lot of money and my mom worked full time, and as a singel mom with one child with CP and me (then undiagnosed, but still on the spectrum). She worked really hard and made a lot of sacrifices for us, and this year she had rented a summer cottage for a few weeks because my sister was supposed to go to camp close by. I was probably six, my sister seven. Anyways, my sister hated the camp and refused to go, she didn't like their food and didn't want to sleep there and the kids there were teasing (bullying?) her and she was miserable. So my mom did what mothers do, she took my sister out of camp.
And I had a temper tantrum like you would not believe. I was hitting things and breaking things (not our house, not our stuff) and screaming and the whole nine. When I calmed down my mom sat me down and asked what she could do to make this all better for me/us, the whole family.

And I did the unforgivable. I calmly turned to my sister and told her I hated her and wished she had never been born, or that she would die.
*smack*
I remember that moment so vividly, I remember the sunlight filtering into the kitchen area of the cottage through a lacy curtain, I remember the fly buzzing in the window, the smell of grass and flowers from the door, the look on both their faces when I said those words....
I remember being really hurt (not the face, the heart) because my mother had asked me a question and I had given her my honest reply and then she punished me for being honest.

In hindsight (and as an adult) I am deeply ashamed of saying something so horrible, and even more so because I understand all the sacrifices mom made to give us a happy childhood, rubbing every penny together and never letting us go without, sometimes even not eating herself to put food on our plates or going without socks or shoes with holes on their soles to put clothes on bodies when we outgrew our own.
I did deserve that slap. Not because I condone violence against children, but because I was being deliberately cruel and hateful.
She never hit me before and never ever after, and I have done some really mean and spiteful things growing up.

I think that if my mother had known about me having ASD, in general our relationship today would have been different, and how she handled a lot of my acting out would have been different. We can both look back on many events from my childhood and see that some of the things I did or said were actually meltdowns and not tantrums, and a lot of my disobedience were not actually me being deliberately disobedieng but just my ability to handle/proccess information shorting out. And many times I would speak my truth even when it was hurtful to others because I just didn't understand that all of the truth, all of the time, is not socially acceptable.

I believe hitting a child is never the best solution to a problem, and there are other tools to imlpement dicipline. However, from my own extremely limited experience, I do understand that there are moments in a parent's life, even with the best intentions and hardest work, a temper may slip and a slap or swat may be doled out. And if that is something that happens a rare few times in a lifetime, I can forgive it.
I do not feel it is appropriate for spanking/slapping/swatting a child as a staple feature in dicipline.
And I do not under any circumsdances accept a child being hit or hurt to the point of bruising or damaging the child.

There is nothing gained by hitting a child. It shows you have lost your cool. Children learn by example; if you are bigger and stronger than someone else it is OK to hit them.

I was only spanked maybe twice in my whole by my father (I must have REALLY pushed his buttons to make him do such a thing, because he is actually one of the gentlest men I know), but I guess being smacked occasionally doesn't count. I went to a Catholic school as a kid (although the teachers didn't dress like nuns or whatever) and until the mid-late 80's they would still strap you on the palm for punishment. I was only strapped once for "lying" in 1st or 2nd grade and it was horrible. I can still remember the swish-smacking of the strap. One time my aunt was babysitting and she had baked a dessert and she swiftly smacked me on my back for just LOOKING at it! She probably has no memory of it now but I still vividly remember the bright red finger-marks she left. Now that I'm an adult myself I find more and more difficult to put up with kid's being loud and whiny and obnoxious whenever I go anywhere. A store, a park, a social gathering. A few times I've even screamed for them to shut up. I fantasize about smacking them all the time and it makes me feel pleasure. But I know if I do, I'll probably get my butt arrested so fast I'll think I was in a time warp, and if the kid is being too noisy inflicting pain on them is not likely going to help. I have no kids of my own. Thank. GOD.

BTW I am Canadian but didn't know about this. I don't really "keep up" with that kind of stuff going on up here.

Although I am not Canadian, corporal punishment is very popular in most ethnic families around here including Asian, Latino, African American, Eastern European and Caribbean. Every other day I see a kid getting smacked on public transport or their mother telling them to shut the f*ck up. As for me, I've been hit with the usual stuff like shoes, belts, hair curling irons and other random objects but I never had to pick my own switch like other kids did (go out into the woods to get a stick).

For me, discipline helped me to learn consequences and know how to behave with a swift reinforcement coming if I did not. As they say - spare the rod, spoil the child. The only problem I had was with uneven enforcement of curfews and rules by gender - it seemed that every girl's curfew and punishments were more severe than their brothers'. Corporal punishment in schools is not problematic unless it is truly damaging - a paddling or smack with the ruler is fine.

Biggest problem that I sometimes see is that most parents still think that "Might makes right." Perhaps this is why bullies are made?

USA, Kansas, "Melted Pot Ethnicity", age 69. I was spanked as a child, on the bottom with open hand, until I reached the "age of reason", somewhere about 12, if the offense was bad enough, deliberate and conscious. It was done dispassionately, and "just enough" -- I was never slapped or punched on impulse. This was the same way all my cousins and friends were raised. In grade school we might have gotten spanked or legs switched, for the same intensity of offense. I was a pretty "good kid", and was seldom spanked -- the last time I was switched on the legs in school, though, was for something that I didn't see deserved it, but my teacher had a different opinion as to my intent than I did: I was in Eighth Grade at the time. When I moved on to High School, I don't think anyone was ever spanked there.

I did not learn "Might makes Right": I learned that those in authority over me had the right to punish as they saw fit, and that my parents and teachers were in authority over me until I got old enough to self-control my own behavior. I can't speak for what my contemporaries learned, but I assume that it was the same. None of us became delinquents, though some of my cousins got a little wild in high school with under-age drinking, sex, and that sort of "fun".

I did spank my daughter when she was under school age, but it didn't seem to work very well for behavior modification. She was a different person than I was.