Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Riots caused by insufficiency of violence, MP says
David Lammy MP has a new idea about the causes of the riots. Not enough smacking. Of course, how could we have missed this in all the analysis?
Actually much as I disagree with Lammy, I know how he got here. I heard many people post-riots saying, I can't discipline my children because Your Lot has made it illegal. They don't seem to have understood the difference between discipline and assault.
Tags for Forum Posts: Lammy, discipline
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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I too heard the same sort of views from some neighbours of ours at community meetings in the weeks following the riots. For some, it seemed something like the traditional view: "beating never did me any harm". But the problem arose with the word "beating" as it seemed to include a range meanings: from a serious assault; to what my own parents meant by "smacking". That was a hard slap designed to hurt and which would probably - as the current legislation allows, have left a "temporary reddening" but been "transient and trifling".
It's well worth reading the short Parliamentary briefing.
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P.S. The heading you've given this discussion, Pam, is unhelpful. And unfair to what David Lammy wrote in his book. Your HoL contributions are almost always more balanced and nuanced than that.
(Tottenham Hale ward councillor)
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Permalink Reply by pamish on
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Of course I chose a provocative heading. I want to know what others think.
I hate that weasley word SMACKING.
If you don't think you can rear children to be decent citizens without assaulting them - don't have them
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Hating words and - far more important - hating what some people do to their children, doesn't mean we shouldn't listen to them and try to engage with them. Otherwise we are simply in parallel monologues. Or worse.
It is our duty to bring up our children to love,
honour and obey us.If they don’t they must be punished,
otherwise we would not be doing our duty.If they grow up to love, honour and obey us
either we have brought them up properly
or we have not:if we have
there must be something the matter with them;if we have not
there is something the matter with us.From R.D.Laing Knots
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We all fell out with Laing. That doesn't mean everything he wrote was valueless. Don't you still recognise the repeated patterns; the speech loops he described? Which look like dialogue but turn out to be scripts by Liza and Henry?
We have a friend named Nigel Mellor - a psychologist who wrote a book called The Good, The Bad and the Irritating. It has a chapter on Punishment which suggests effective approaches which don't involve smacking/hitting children. It focusses in particular on children's attention seeking behaviour - but applies more generally.
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Permalink Reply by Seema Chandwani on
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LOOOOOOOOOL!! ironically I smacked my own head reading the guardian article and then hearing him on the radio.. oh lordy!!
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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on
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Insufficiency of violence - this is unfair and I doubt Mr Lammy used those words. Your Lot will mean the PC brigade. In the face of likely politically-correct abuse, it is to Mr Lammy's credit that he's raised this topic.
There's a big difference between assault and discipline.
It is the absence of meaningful discipline, in the home and in schools, that is the cause of lots of social ills. Discipline by parents is a sensitive area. It's a question of getting the right balance between GBH and no physical chastising.
IMO this should be left to parents, on the expectation and assumption that parents love their children and would not wish to injure them.
But to safeguard against the rare case of excess, teachers, social workers and doctors need to be alert the exceptions where this goes too far.
The authorities failed Baby P. Any existing rules against smacking failed to prevent the injury and torture of Peter Connelly.
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Permalink Reply by DavidJ on
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David Lammy is simply wrong on this issue. There is a stack of evidence that correlates the use of physical punishment by parents with poorer outcomes in terms of delinquency and offending.
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Permalink Reply by StephenBln on
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But there is a connection with smacking children and a violent society.
Children learn early on that authority equals violence.. If you want your own way, then use force.. and it's passed on from generation to generation and doesn't work..
It's amusing how people like #Clive are always preaching about the 'absence of discipline in the home and schools', yet continue to promote 'liberalisation' in the business world.. He's just wrong, it should be the other way around.
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It's amusing how people like #Clive ... continue to promote 'liberalisation' in the business world.
Er, no. No idea where you get this notion from.
I favour of a mixed economy, but not laissez faire.
Indeed it is precisely the lack of discipline (i.e. effective, meaningful regulation) of the banks that has led the economy and the state of the public finances to the fairly desperate situation we have today. The banks need a deal of discipline – something woefully lacking thus far. It'd probably need international agreement.
Some bankers need public flogging, such as the unrepentant "Sir" Fred Goodwin, whose knighthood was for "services to banking". The RBS purchase of ABN Amro alone lost the bank £8,000,000,000 (a fraction of the total mega-losses) and every penny of which has been picked up by taxpayers.
Mention has been made of skin reddening. I'm unclear as to what extent is legal. Can the maximum permissible reddening be expressed as a Pantone shade? A slight pinkening of the Goodwin cheeks wouldn't be sufficient.
Lets have effective discipline in the home, schools and especially for the banks and bankers.
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Permalink Reply by Old-Age-Emporium(OAE) on
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"Lammy, who admitted to smacking his three- and five-year-old sons . . ."
No, dear Grauniadista, what you meant was: "Lammy, who said / told me / made clear that he had (occasionally) smacked / slapped his three- and five-year-old sons . . ."
Declaration: I do not have children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren . . . etc. Just as everyone on HOL or Guardian who ever went to school is of course an irrefutable expert on schools, teaching, teachers and inspectors of teachers, my expertise in discipline arises from my having been (incredibly!) both a three- and five-year-old child who was occasionally slapped, even sometimes to the torturous extreme of a slight reddening of the skin of palms, calves or buttocks - followed by a 65-year period of reflection on same.
David Lammy is a sensible man, not a criminal with the need to admit anything. I haven't voted for him since, I think, 2002. I shall certainly vote for him in 2015, or hopefully sooner - unless, of course, David Schmitz joins this oh-so-rationally-right-on discussion and declares himself a convinced smacker, though not-to-the-point-of-skin-reddening, where occasion warrants it. You see, when it comes to discipline I tend to be a single-issue disciple.
While I doubt that the Lammy Boys are over there in the smacking-free zones of Stroud Green, Crouch End or Highgate Heights plotting the level of riots showcased by their ancestral Tottenham, as related in their bedtime reading of Tales from Our Father, still I think David should be on the lookout for snooping social workers: a few well aimed skin-reddening smacks to the cheeks, upper and nether, should scare off that lot.
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