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The Hand Licking Incident

raisingfutureadults.blogspot.com

181–190 of 358 posts

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#181
post #150

I love this story. Little kid logic is so foreign to me now it makes me a little sad. Another example - we have our nephew stay over sometimes. One night, he did not, absolutely NOT want to go into the room he sleeps in. We couldn't work it out. He slept there a bunch of other times, no problem. Tried picking him up to carry him in, but no, he screamed like crazy. After a long, long time, he settled enough to tell us…

I remember, during a thunderstorm, being utterly convinced that a war was being fought outside. I was terrified ...

I remember my father patiently explaining that the Giants Footsteps I could hear outside, as it lumbered towards me with malice, were in fact my eyelashes rubbing against the pillow as I blinked.

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A speech impediment which is cute in a small kid but weird in middle school and socially+career-limiting in an adult. Amusingly enough, I had such a thing in elementary and middle school: I couldn't pronounce "r" or "l", but was convinced I was pronouncing them fine. (No one showed me a recording of my speech.) I was sent to speech therapy and learned some alternate way of pronouncing "r", which I almost never carr…

Hang on. You had a temporary dental appliance that was interfering with your speaking, but were diagnosed with speech impediment and sent to therapy? That just sounds like some sort of oversight.

It's not visually obvious like braces; it's on the roof of the mouth and behind the teeth. You'd have to be looking upwards into my open mouth to see it, and if you're an adult—taller than a child—you wouldn't usually be in a position to do so. Here's a reasonable approximation to what I remember it being:

http://www.gregjorgensen.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/08...

I'll ask my mom what they were all thinking.

Incidentally, I find one other case on the internet that bears some resemblance: "I had a narrow jaw, and I had a palate expander when I was 11. Basically, my mouth was way too small for my tongue in a way that pulling five teeth and doing spacers couldn't fix (we had to do that too, in addition to the palate expander). I had a pretty severe speech impediment (largely -R and -L sounds), and the expander cleared that up (after four years of speech therapy that did nothing). It was amazing! When they took it out, I could just TALK. I used to come home from speech crying because the teacher would tell me I wasn't practicing and wasn't getting better, and I WAS practicing so, so frequently. I just physically could not make certain sounds." https://community.babycenter.com/post/a51272845/narrow_upper...

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#183
post #180

So the teacher, grandparent, and father never bothered asking why he's licking his hands, and his mother only after a lot of drama, including spanking(!!) I get that being a parent is hard and try to hold off my judgements on stuff like this over the internet, but ... I am not wildly impressed by this teacher or their parenting. I'm glad that at least the mother came to her senses later on and decided to treat her ch…

> So the teacher, grandparent, and father never bothered asking why he's licking his hands, and his mother only after a lot of drama, including spanking(!!) No, the mother did ask: "I tried grilling him about why he was doing this so I could find some solution." The article doesn't imply that she asked him only after spanking him, and it seems unlikely that she did. Edit: fixed the quote from the article.

The article obviously states that she only asked years after spanking and abusing to get him to stop. Re-read it.

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#184
post #180

So the teacher, grandparent, and father never bothered asking why he's licking his hands, and his mother only after a lot of drama, including spanking(!!) I get that being a parent is hard and try to hold off my judgements on stuff like this over the internet, but ... I am not wildly impressed by this teacher or their parenting. I'm glad that at least the mother came to her senses later on and decided to treat her ch…

> So the teacher, grandparent, and father never bothered asking why he's licking his hands, and his mother only after a lot of drama, including spanking(!!) No, the mother did ask: "I tried grilling him about why he was doing this so I could find some solution." The article doesn't imply that she asked him only after spanking him, and it seems unlikely that she did. Edit: fixed the quote from the article.

Looks like something went wrong with your copy/paste there, since you copied the same twice. But I assume you meant:

"I tried grilling him about why he was doing this so I could find some solution. He couldn't explain it and the terror in his eyes was disturbing."

That doesn't really sound like asking to me, but more like telling him off while also asking a question somewhere in between.

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#185
Wen I was in Kindergarten, my teacher called in my parents to tell them that I had learning difficulties. My mother asked why the teacher felt that way, her answer: 'He won't sit on the mat with the other children for story time'. My mother asked the teacher, 'Have you asked him why he won't sit on the mat? he usually loves stories at home.' She called me over in front of my teacher. 'Why won't you sit on the mat with the other children for story time?' 'I don't know how to cross my legs' I replied.

Children are people too, sometimes it's okay to talk to them.

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So do you think that if from today all the crimes were depenalised there would be no whatsoever increase in thefts, assaults, murders and all the other crimes? I think that instead we would see a massive increase.

I don't think there would be a very big increase. Most people just don't want to steal, assault, murder, etc. because of their own morality, not because of the law.

That only means there wouldn't be a massive increase in the number of perpetrators. I expect that the set of people who aren't morally against it would be willing to do it more often if the risks went down.

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#187

So the teacher, grandparent, and father never bothered asking why he's licking his hands, and his mother only after a lot of drama, including spanking(!!) I get that being a parent is hard and try to hold off my judgements on stuff like this over the internet, but ... I am not wildly impressed by this teacher or their parenting. I'm glad that at least the mother came to her senses later on and decided to treat her ch…

I am skeptical that the child did it strictly because his hands were dry.

It sounds more like an infantile behavior, like thumb-sucking, that persists in some children well into school age much to the disappointment of their parents.

That said, the correct way to handle thumb-sucking is not to make it into a daily battle, just like the author discovered. It goes away by itself with little-to-no intervention required.

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#188
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are arguing that the spanking AFTER you tampered with a wire saved you. First, you could have died before the spanking. Punishment after the fact never rights a done wrong. Second, at the age of 4, if your parents had just sat down with you and told you that you can die from electric shock, don't you think that would have made a lasting impression either?

I wouldn't trust a four year old to understand what death means.

My kids are six and four, and explaining to them that something could seriously injure or kill them is definitely enough to prevent them from ever doing it. I can't imagine spanking them to try to make a point, but if anything I expect that would influence them to trust my warnings of potential injury less.

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#189
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Young children have a very limited ability to understand cause and effect. It simply isn't possible to explain to a toddler that "if you run out in the road then you might get badly hurt", because their brains still have a limited grasp of "if... then" and "badly hurt". I am strongly opposed to corporal punishment in the general case, but I am willing to concede the possibility that it is a necessary option in cases…

Ok so if they don't understand cause and effect why would they be able to relate the spanking with their "wrong" action?

The grandparent didn't say young children don't understand cause and effect, they said they have a limited understanding. A limited grasp on communication as well. Saying they shouldn't do something does not land as well as an immediate pain response to doing something bad. "No that is bad" has no meaning if it's not associated with something bad.

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh... I can count on a shop teacher's hand the number of times I was actually spanked or swatted when I was a kid, but after talking to my Mom about it, I think she made the right choice the times she did. To give a specific example, once was when I was about five, I had just learned about electromagnets, and was actively trying to shove bare wire into an outlet. Yes, the spanking did make me a little afraid of pokin…

There are plug covers you can buy for Hell, my parents also told me when I was ~4 not to stick anything in the electrical outlets. No spankings were involved. I listened because why wouldn't I? (Well, at least until senior year in college, when I was like "What happens if I strip an Ethernet cord and stick it in an electrical outlet?" I'd missed the exploding-wires demonstration in my physics course, y'see. Did not g…

Wouldn't is a choice; couldn't because your mental faculties were not developed well enough to e.g. suppress the impulse to stick things into outlets is another matter.
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