Having children can be the best experience in a persons life. However it can also be one of the most difficult tasks a person can accomplish. Parenting is a very challenging task and one of the biggest challenges of parenting is keeping your cool, even when your child or children are pushing your buttons. Occasionally we all lose it however, trying to effectively deal with losing it can be a challenge.
To this point, I would like to bring up the woman who was caught on tape spraying her 2 year old daughter with the pressure washer at her local car wash. I guess she just thought that it was water and the child was having a tantrum, so the mother, checked the pressure of the sprayer on her hand, and then proceeded to spray the screaming child down with water from head to toe.
The owner of the car wash saw the videotape and immediately turned the woman in to the police. The mother was arrested, jailed, and eventually convicted of misdemeanor child abuse. She was given a full year of probation and was made to take parenting classes.
The mother still feels that this was merely a form of discipline and was not child abuse, calling to attention the fact that the child was not injured. She does admit that it may have been an error in judgment, and that she probably could have handled the situation in a better way. Most of agree with that assessment.
The issues of child abuse continually need to be addressed and assessed. Although an extreme method of discipline, and probably not the best choice for a two year old, one cant help but wonder if perhaps we are so concerned about the type of punishments that we are giving our kids are causing them to be as defiant and outspoken as they are becoming. Although corporal punishment is thought to be outdated, the truth is that the children from the corporal punishment era did seem to be a lot more driven and a lot less of a problem than the children of today. It just raises the question, are we causing this with our permissive parenting styles, or is this just the difference in the generations?