Blatherskite

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I am a Children’s Librarian living in the Portland, Oregon area. When I am not Children’s Librianing I like to play with cameras and film. I also like playing the ukulele, knitting, sketching, and hiking.

Textbook case of discipline viewed with praise, criticism

Southpinellas: Textbook case of discipline viewed with praise, criticism

At Fairmount Park on March 14, the girl swung several times at assistant principal Nicole Dibenedetto and teacher Patti Tsaousis. She created a mess wherever she went and generally refused to cooperate. She eventually was handcuffed by St. Petersburg police, who were called to the school.

I found this story via AmericaBlog. I watched the videos. It raised some interesting questions in me. At first, as I was watching I thought, “this is typical. Kids do this. What’s the big deal?” I mean, granted, it’s horrible behavior, but the kid is five years old. I was a nanny and, believe me, I experienced far worse behavior from the children I have taken care of.

At the end of the video the police come and handcuff her. Hmmmm. I do kind of think that was excessive. But on the other hand, when the little girl saw the police were there she sat down in the chair and stopped being a menace.

I guess there are some people, after watching it, asking why corporeal punishment wasn’t used. I don’t know. I really think corporeal punishment should be something the parent does and not anybody else. But maybe I would feel differently if I actually had children, and they acted that horribly and disrespectfully.

Interesting, though. Gives me a little food for thought.

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4 responses to “Textbook case of discipline viewed with praise, criticism”

  1. ManDrake Avatar
    ManDrake

    Trust me, if you don’t trust it now, when you have your own kids it will only be amplified a hundred fold. I’ve always felt that Corporal Punishment was bad, a failure to teach your kid to communicate effectively. But most of it’s a mute point anyway, because the only kids that need it usually are the ones that are already screwed up to begin with by their parents. So when you work hard to make sure that your kids doesn’t need it, you start getting angry at the notion that people who are too lazy to raise their own kids sudden start talking about lumping your kid into their corporal punishment agenda. For me personally anyone ever tries to lay a hand on my kid better pray for death, because I will settle the score.

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  2. Moni Avatar
    Moni

    Yeah, after thinking about it, I have to agree with you. I think I would be pissed if somebody laid a hand on my kid, regardless of how they acted. It annoys me that people think this little girl needed corporeal punishment. I think it probably would have made the little girl’s behavior worse. I think in the end the teachers did a good job of just preventing the little girl from hurting herself.

    I talked to my mom about this yesterday and she had some interesting things to say because she works as the secretary for security of the school district in her city. I guess this actually happens quite often, kids kind of just lose it and destroy classroom and hit teachers and become generally disruptive to the point that security needs to be called. I still don’t know about handcuffing the girl, though.

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  3. ManDrake Avatar
    ManDrake

    The point is that unless the kid has some mental problem that should be handled with medication, someone should have intervened long before that point. I know teachers can’t be everywhere at once, but they can mitigate circumstances by just removing a kid from the situation.

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  4. Moni Avatar
    Moni

    Good point.

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