quietlyradical

The Quora Chronicles – Part 9

Perhaps the beauty of the internet is that it provides people from all over the world to share ideas and to seek advice from one another. Sometimes, however, I have to shake my head in disbelief at the type of questions asked. There seem to be an alarming number of questions from Quorans seeking parenting advice. I say “alarming” not because it is unusual for parents, especially first-time parents, to seek expert advice. Babies don’t come with a user manual.

When I was a child in the 1960s and 70s, mothers often turned to the advice of Dr. Spock, not the pointy eared Vulcan from Star Trek, the other one, Dr. Benjamin Spock, an American pediatrician who wrote a book called Baby and Child Care.

Dr. T. Berry Brazelton

When I became a mother in 1990, Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, and his cable network TV show, What Every Baby Knows was the “go-to” for new moms. (I always thought that Dr. Brazelton had a much friendlier demeanor than Dr. Spock. His toothy grin reminded me a lot of that of former President Jimmy Carter.)

But no matter which camp parents fell into in terms of parenting advice, the common factor was that Spock and Brazelton were both trained medical doctors. While there are doubtless qualified professionals who do post on Quora, there really isn’t any vetting process. So, a parent might be receiving advice from a pediatrician or a nurse, or someone’s grandmother (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing) or, unfortunately, a random internet troll intent on spreading madness and mayhem.

It is for that reason that I am often amazed at the type of questions that parents trust to the Quora community instead of to their own pediatrician (or even a kindly grandmother in their neighborhood or house of worship). Here one question in which the answers ranged from reasonable and considered to, well…down right shocking!

How do you punish a child who doesn’t care about being spanked?

Spanking is a controversial topic these days and although its practice had undoubtedly descreased significantly since I was a child, I realize there are some parents who still swear by it. When my own son was young, I tended to use the time out for routine infractions and only resorted to spanking for the most serious offenses, such as wandering away from me in a crowd, talking to strangers, or running into traffice without looking first. So this question struck me as a bit odd. I wondered, “Who spanks their child to the point where the child become indifferent to it?” Maybe I’m reading too much in to this question, but in my mind it was quite a scary thought.

The question generated 39 answers and many of them fell into the category of using alternative methods: time out, taking about electronics, grounding the child, talking to them. In my own answer I shared a story of one of my co-workers who became tired of telling his 8-year-old to stop leaving his bike in the driveway. The father was finally so fed up that he simply ran over the bike and refused to buy his son a new one until the boy earned the money for it by doing chores around the house. There were a handful of answers, however, that were simply frightening.

Several respondents talked about “diapering” the child. I’d never heard of this myself, but apparently the child is forced to wear a diaper (one person claimed to even use this with a teenager, although how one would go about diapering a teenager is beyond me.) The reasoning seemed to be that the embarassment of having to wear a diaper would prevent the bad behavior in the future. Others said to simply “spank them harder.” One person even went so far as to say, “If the child isn’t crying and begging you to stop, you’re doing it wrong.” Yikes! One mom described using twine to “tether” her child to her own body and then force the child to follow her around as she did household chores. The tether was only removed after the child had spend two hours tethered without complaining. If they complained, the clock would start again the next day. (Good God! Who are these people?)

Now, I realize that some of these extreme answers might not be real. Sadly, the internet is rife with trolls whose primary goals seem to be to generate controversy and incite outrage. However, on the off chance that some of the methods described are real, or worse yet, that some misguided parent is inspired to try one of these dubious methods of discipline, perhaps instead of worrying about violent videogames or the time that children spend with their electronic devices, society should figure out how to encourage thoughtful and responsible parenting, because, to quote the other Spock, the current situation “is just not logical.”