We Survived

[minus clover]

children now are taught from a very young age that they have all the rights and parents have none. what is not being taught is that with rights comes responsibility. my daughter is almost 21. i sent her to the best kindy (pre-school for you non-aussies) in the town in which we lived at the time. it was run by the lutheran church but didnt push religion. that was back in 1990, and that was when all this "kids have rights too" bullshit started.
i couldnt even tell my daughter off for misbehaving without her yelling at the top of her voice "you cant tell me what to do, i'm going to tell mrs ...." and woe betide if i foolishly asked her to clean her room or similar... "i dont have to do that, mrs ... says i dont have to".
she had boundaries and usually she lived within them. i always knew where she was and who with but things change as they get older.
this child now has such a foul mouth and cant see anything wrong with it... "i'm an f***ing adult, you cant f***ing tell me what to f***ing do" and wonders why i'm now grey and senile... yet she still lets me know where she's going, what she's doing and with whom. she has hit me a few times but i ignore it because to respond would make me like my father, who used to beat the shit out of me because "you're the oldest, you should be setting an example to your brothers..."
hopefully she will be moving out in the next few months...

[Luís]

although I'm still young (17), the things that pisses me off the most is seeing kids disrespect their parents for whatever but still living in their parents house, eating food they paid and so on.

If you dislike your parents so much and if you know so well what you can do because you just turned 18, why don't you go work and live by yourself as well... With rights come responsibilities as well.

[metmum]

I feel I must butt in here, I don't hit my kid but he is well behaved and wouldn't speak to me like that, I'm an adult and if I can't think of other ways to punish him that to spank him then I not a very clever person. There are plenty of ways of punishing children without hitting them, I was never hit as a child either, again my parents used the methods of withdrawing, pocket money, going to friends, going out etc etc.

That saying I have always said if you can't control a 4 year you can't control a 14 year old, you need to make them behave from a very young age, most people seem to think you shouldn't discipline a 3 year old but there are ways to do this. All our family have discplined children (and its hasn;t included hitting them) from a young age and they are all well behaved and well adjusted children.

[MetDream]

I had the crap beat out of me for the slightest infractions when I was a kid by an alcoholic step father. I called the cops on him so often but it did no good because back in the 1970s there was no such thing as CPS. When I had my son, I went to great lengths to get into counseling and such to not repeat the patterns of abuse. Although there were times when he was 2 and 3 years old that I did spank him, spanking was not the rule nor the main source of discipline. I too used time outs, and withdrawing of privileges as the main source of discipline. I consider myself a very lucky parent as my son, now 15, is the most awesome kid any parent could ask for.

I have worked for a CPS agency for 6 years now. I am in the adoption unit now, but did investigations for 5 years prior. It pissed me off to read about CPS workers like the one in Leper's example. Our agency is very family centered and we don't judge parent nor make decisions about their parenting until we have done a complete investigation. I ran into so many families with rotten teenagers who are abusive to their parents. I would work with the parent to try and get them help, including providing in home counseling services by the therapists our agency employs. CPS is a good thing, believe me as a kid I would have loved for someone to intervene and stop the abuse I suffered for years (until I was old enough to fight back and he finally stopped hitting me). It is just a shame that so many CPS workers have swung way the other way and are so judgmental and have given Social Services a bad reputaion.