Came across an article on parents under prosecution for murder in the wake of applying the techniques in this apparently God-awful book - and it’s heavily Christian, and the author is a professional knife-thrower champeen and all sorts of odd stuff.
The amazon.com Look Inside gives on the first page … “Obedience training … A dog can be trained not to touch a tasty morsel placed in front of him. Can’t a child be trained not to touch?”. It’s full of stuff like this, there’s little point me extracting more!
wtf?!
There’s a petition on the examiner link. I’ve signed it.
Unfortunately, Proverbs 13:24 has inspired an entire genre of child-rearing advice (and hardware). A quick google for ‘chastening instrument’ should pull up a fair crop(so to speak).
Hmm… The Rod “promotes a loving atmosphere in the home”, is “inexpensive” and is “an excellent gift idea”. It’s durable and comes with a replacement guarantee if you break it on your little charges.
If you don’t beat them into submission, they won’t be submissive to you. You’re not foolish enough to think children are human beings rather than chattel, are you?
Yeah, everything I’ve read about this book has been bad, but it always seems to be in the context of child abuse, so there’s that.
The title is particularly unfortunate, because kids do need training. NOT like dog training, but more like training for a sport or a marathon. A good trainer tells you what you’re doing well and what needs to be improved, and actually helps you get better, helps you keep at it and is invested in your success. When a trainer helps someone get better at doing something, it’s a good thing for the trainee. Kids need to become good at being human beings in society, and treating them like they’re not actual human beings doesn’t help anyone.
Michael Pearl tells one mother on his website, “I could break his anger in two days. He would be too scared to get angry. On the third day he would draw into a quiet shell and obey.”
Unbelievable that anyone, especially a parent in reference to their own child, would consider this a “good” thing.
Incidentally, if you have children, it is really shocking how much overlap there is between dog training and toddler training. It’s almost a little disturbing how much one is like the other… and vice versa.
The “is my child smarter than my dog/cat today?” question lasts a much, much longer time than I ever expected.
But of course the kids eventually pull away and never look back, the animals are kinda stuck at that level forever.
I’ve heard claims that some folks have toilet-trained their kids at a surprisingly young age by taking the dog-training approach rather than child-rearing approach. Not having kids myself – and not planning to ever have them – I’m not entitled to an opinion.
When trying to judge capabilities of kids versus pets, don’t forget to allow for differences in dexterity. Friends’ cat was showing signs of trying to figure out what books were, back when their kid had cloth books – cloth pages are a lot easier for a critter with claws to handle. (Turn page. Stare at page. Repeat until end of book. Flip book over and do it again. There must be some reason the humans do this…)
