were you spanked as a kids?

[Pix]

And btw, we get a lot of complaints about children running wild in the USA. Most of those seem grossly exaggerated to me (such as the slutty Halloween costumes that are supposedly rampant), and actually I've seen the media lie...for example, a thrift store I do business with sells children's clothes and reporters asked about a two piece top and asked if that was acceptable (which it was, together) but then cut it so it looked as if only one of the pieces was present (which would leave a little girl nearly topless) when she answered it was appropriate...and she had angry people come to her store over that (luckily she said her customers knew better, or she might've had to sue).

A big lie is that the ACLU will come after you if you spank your little one to stop him from playing with hot pans on the stove. Not once has any of them ever been able to prove one case of that, and they can't: the ACLU, while defending kids, is more about freedom of expression in schools (such as being disciplined for wearing a pentagram, be it suspension or paddling). That is the entire thing is because Christians want to abuse children (seriously, they've beaten & starved kids to death and when they go to prison for it the church lives up to its religion by bearing false witness and saying it was over a mere spanking), but they repeat their lies so much that parents who are anxious start to believe it. (It's true that our Child Protective Services can be ridiculous--not that they're likely to be, but they do exchange their apathy for extreme vigilance when they need more cases to justify their funding--but we actually have fundies to thank in part for that as they got that way over the Satanic Panics that fundamentalists got started in which they swore children were being ritually & sexually abused by secretive Satanists and succeeded in getting the government to take their paranoid psychosis seriously.)

And as for kids today? At least in the USA they seem to be better than previous generations...and btw, a lot of violence first went down in the USA after about 13 years of legalized abortion (meaning not so many unwanted teens were flooding the streets, whereas before it got worse & worse so that we got endless 70s vigilante movies) and then violence dropped significantly again as the last boomers entered their 30s. And then there's this:

http://reason.com/archives/2002/02/01/teen-demon-tracts

Kids these days. We all know the basic jeremiad: They're media-addled, affectless, nihilist, subliterate, a Clockwork Orange-style army of "superpredators," teen gunmen, and garden-variety sociopaths waiting to happen. Advertising has hypnotized them. Video games have conditioned them to kill without feeling. And pop culture has hammered every conceivable kind of coarseness -- from anonymous sex to Satanism, from glorified violence to Internet passivity -- into their poignantly echoing little craniums. Is it any wonder that most of them are but a bully's slight or a chatroom flame away from raining hot-lead vengeance on schoolrooms or playgrounds?

Well, yes, actually. It is, indeed, a considerable wonder that any part of this hysterical caricature should command serious discussion in the first place. As almost no media outlet is going to tell you, kids these days are astonishingly well-adjusted, nonviolent, educated, and polite. Nearly all the leading indicators of social ills among American adolescents -- drug use, violent assault, teen pregnancy, drop-out rates, you name it -- have been declining for at least 10 years now. More teens are graduating high school and attending college than ever before. A record number of American teens volunteer their time to charitable causes -- twice as many as their counterparts of 20 years past. Math SATs are at a 30-year high. Hell, even teen literacy is increasing: A recent survey conducted by the National Education Association found that 41 percent of teen respondents said they read 15 books or more a year. How many adults can claim a comparable intake?