My Response to Discussion on Law Coming to End Corporal Punishment in Jamaica's Schools

I came across this on dancehallreggae.com and had to add my take because it is such a CHERISHED tradition among Western blacks to spank (including beat within an inch of life) their children despite a lack of lasting POSITIVE results from it!

'Don't flog children' - Law coming to end flogging of children JA

'Don't flog children' - Law coming to end flogging of children
House to debate corporal punishment ban
BY ALICIA DUNKLEY Senior staff reporter dunkleya@jamaicaobserver.com
Thursday, January 20, 2011


PARLIAMENT will next month begin debate on a Green Paper which is expected to lead to legislation abolishing corporal punishment in all public schools, Education Minister Andrew Holness announced yesterday.
The announcement by the minister came in the wake of a Sunday Observer story which highlighted the plight of 11-year-old Tajoery Small who lost sight in one eye from a strap wielded by a fifth-grade teacher.

MORE BELOW:

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/...ildren_8304814

Book by a London judge, child of Jamaican immigrants.
Recounts physical and other  childhood abuse.

THE DISCUSSION:

 Originally Posted by kgn12 

Mi tink dem did dun dat long time. Dat be de case, this law is way overdue. There are many other ways to enforce discipline other than to physically abuse children.

 Originally Posted by MR HYPE 

never saw the use of flogging...

yea it made me more cautious but i still did the same damn things

Actually while I can see spanking as a necessary evil on RARE occasion, it clearly does not work because Jamaicans spank and get spanked regular and the place is getting more violent and more unruly, not LESS...

If it reach the point where you have to spank a child who can understand English...it means whatever you were using up to the point of spanking failed and you need to find another way to get what you want done, or not done, to sink in.

Jamaican schoolchildren

People can argue this but fact is IT'S NOT WORKING di pickney dem a behave badda dan EVA...wutlissness increase an spanking and flinging out nah fix nutten.

So if what you been doing for dog years not working, it's insane to keep doing it hoping something will magically change. Try something DIFFERENT obviously.

That is all.

 Originally Posted by roti_shop 

I know if I had kids I would feel ah way if I found out is flog dem get flog at school...but lookin at it from a different point, in the U.S. the youth seem lost, they feel they run shit because dem aint get brought up, dem get drag up. The amount of times I see the parents of punks who are bullies and all defending their child, telling people: "don't tell me bout mi child, im the parent" and so so so, well you feel di boy dont see dat? Obviously he go feel like he could get away wid anything in life...I'll tell you what, there might be plenty crime in the Caribbean, but me never see child talk back to their parents and grown folk outta road like how me did see it on my trips to the states.

yeah they talk back to EVERYBODY ELSE. You need to use a form of discipline at home that can be used by ANYone who must put up with your child in your absence, else while the cat's away the mice WILL play cause dem know no beatings coming...and the beating beating at home not working if the children misbehave the second you turn your back!

Uniform discipline at home and at school reinforces each other and discipline does not mean spanking alone it means discipline. A routine, and a known way of handling yourself towards your responsibilities, your peers, your superiors...and a known set of progressive consequences.

Jamaican schoolchildren

What is also stupid is telling a kid "don't do that" and not giving them what they SHOULD do the next time xyz situation comes up. Or not giving them a positive motivation to internally WANT to do the right thing or not do the wrong thing...something or some outcome they will want MORE than whatever benefit they were getting from what they were doing/not doing previously.

Jamaican schoolgirl who became parish champion in Spelling Bee...more here.

And nah i didn't read it in a book i thought it through. Different children are different and so i had to think to make a difference with both of mine. I spanked my son and then realized when a teacher tells me he was talking in class or something, i can't tell them to spank him if they already told him to hush up once...so I need to be doing something at home that the teachers can use at school when i am not around. Same with daughter though she just getting into pre-K. But i learned the lesson before she came along. I threaten a spanking but rarely had to do it, and the goal is to get to the point where i never do it.

Taken from a 2007 (well before the new legislation!) article on a child abuse treatment/prevention program.

More time the spanking is less about any discipline instilling in the child and more (or all) about the parent vex they can't figure out how to control their child's behaviour or worse, vex bout something else, bad day at work maybe, and taking it out on the child.

Jamaican schoolchildren

It takes a lot of work to swallow frustration and vexation and get through a stubborn moment without giving the child ONE slap...and sometimes I do lose patience, but i have found more and more what works. For my daughter she likes being thought of as a good girl and she likes seeing me smile. I make a big deal of frowning and sounding mad when it's something i don't like, and making being a good girl sound like being royalty. I get much less fuss and get results asking her if she wants to be a good girl, and when she says yes, tell her she has to put that down to be good or stop running...as opposed to just slapping her the next time she does it, she bawls, my ears burn from the decibel levels, and everybody is tense and miserable...and if she go out nobody can stop her from doing the same picking up tings or running cause they can't slap her!

That's why we have bebe's kids and teenagers who doan tek talking...cause only their parents can slap them silly. That's also why so many guys (especially with no fathers) only respect folks who can BEAT THEIR ASS or KILL them! Cause that's the only people they were taught to respect.

Yeah it bothers me the lack of progress with the spanking thing and how we still blindly hang on to it as the only solution for everything. Cause more and more I see what someone said about this beating into submission ting coming from slavery. We're turning into overseers on our own children and look what happened to them in Jamaica's history: we RISE UP and MURDER DEM! It DIDN'T work den and it NOT working now so take the time to RAISE your child and know that it takes different things to raise different kids even if is both or all your blood!

From A Brief Excerpt on Slavery & Punishment in the Caribbean, found here.

ok so i lied that wasn't all. sue me. lol

Child in Jamaica's flag colours...the black in our flag stands for hardship.
Time to put some hardships we been through behind us!

People Who Fail to Plan Their Business, Plan to FAIL Their Business!

PSA...people if you decide to run your own business, be a professional...don't get mad because YOU decided to charge a rate and set business hours that YOU can't handle! Lack of a business plan, business acumen, and customer service skills on your part should not constitute an emergency and extra expense on MY part! And a little HUSTLE with your FRIENDS as primary beneficiaries is never the same as running a BUSINESS with people who pay for SERVICE according to what YOU stated from start, not your whims and fancies!

Google is your friend: How to Write a Business Plan

Top 10 Do's and Don'ts of Running a Business (note that the business profiles below it include one mother who realized her balancing act meant a tradeoff and she decided to NOT be an entrepreneur...moral of that story RUNNING A BUSINESS ISN'T FOR EVERYONE!

FREE Sample Business Plans

Brought to you by a bad experience with a childcare provider off the Northridge Road exit in the Sandy Springs area of Atlanta trying to work from home and having no clue how to run business in a way that paying customers and not just friends would want to be bothered with!  If you're ever in this area looking for a childcare provider feel free to contact me for the names/locations of a few folks to avoid!

I would warn any parent looking for a home provider to be wary of home providers closest to that exit, because many of them (and I weeded out many by interview before choosing this one) are fly by night operations that are only watching children because they couldn't find a job, not because they actually have any kind of talent at it!  This one has the general skills to watch children, but has zero business skills and an attitude that raising the price fixes everything...in this economy? Worst attitude to have, ever!

And beware of the non-grandma types or non-houseWIVES (i.e., beware of single parents trying to run a daycare as their SOLE source of income!) that are not old enough to be comfortable with staying home! Especially if they have children at all sorts of hours, trying to make money by catering to everybody...they will be too drained emotionally and physically to really handle each child as an individual and not just another source of money!  This one, once I wouldn't allow her to raise the price she originally stated on me more than once in 6 months (and rates are normally good for at least a year, mind you) would keep changing her hours of availability depending on which week or month it was, and had children coming in (regularly, not as a once-in-a-while thing) from as early as 4 and 5 in the morning to as late as 1pm or after.  Most childcare providers have set hours, say 6am to 6pm or 7am to 6pm, or 6pm to 6am, or overnight only, and that is for a reason.

Trying to be everything to everyone instead of finding a specialty and sticking with it, then having times when, being younger than 40, you decide you want to have a life and be able to go here and there during the Monday through Friday daytime hours you SAID you are open for BUSINESS, is a sure way to burn yourself out and take it out on the parents or the children without even realizing it, or to feel the solution is to just keep raising the price and charging more money...when the problem is really a lack of business skills and planning and a lack of time management!

Matter of fact the list of top 10 DON'Ts above has "trying to be everything to everybody" as a definite don't!  Outside of daycare CENTERS who have the economies of scale from the daytime folks to afford to have widely variable hours of operation (and this is only some of them!), the VAST majority of home daycares that try to do this spell trouble for YOU, the parent, even if you use them only during normal hours!  Why? Because they are still draining themselves watching everyone else's kids all over the clock and never having time to themselves to recharge, and it then becomes your problem because they can't handle a normal day like the average provider with set hours can.  They also cannot make a profit off that sort of availability if they are the only income earner in their home, because there is only so much you can charge as a home provider before you are no longer competitive and people find another provider, and guess who it creates an emergency for if they spread themselves too thin?  The parents.

Why would anyone need to go and "do things" or run errands during their normal business hours when everyone else who runs that same type of business manages to get their errands done OUTSIDE of the times they stated they are open for business??

Imagine if we showed up to a Publix whose hours are stated on the door as 7am to 11pm, and at 8pm on a regular business Tuesday, they were rushing people out of the store because they didn't expect people to come after about 7pm more than a couple times a week?

Last but not least, playing favourites with customers doesn't work out for YOU unless you can afford to lose some of your customers.  This provider kept the weird-hours parents hours however they wanted it because they are her friends, and as I was the newest parent everytime she felt a crunch, I had to make some kind of adjustment.  That is not customer service, either you're available when you said, or you're not. Cronyism does not work when you need EVERY penny coming in, not just the cronies's pennies!

A lesson soon learned because after wasting time at work today arguing about this, instead of actually working, I cut my losses.  So now instead of getting the more money or the random time cut-offs she wanted, she has $0 and all the "time" she needs.  Too many options out there in these big bad United States to end up the first negative topic of my blog!

But it's also a learning experience because I researched her replacement a couple weeks ago but was trying to keep my child in one place since she's been there for a while (with things getting progressively more problematic only since she tried to raise the rates a SECOND time barely two months after raising it the first time! Which says to me she is just trying to be as difficult as possible because she wants more money).  Next time I will follow my gut and let something GO when it's starts giving me problems where it's suppose to be easing them...I will not commit more time, energy, and money to it!  Lesson to me also, I HATE long commutes and the commute from work to this woman's place is DISGUSTING...takes me 30-45 minutes to get to work and back home even though I live 10 minutes from the job!  SMH Never again will I suck up something I HATE for months just to save some money...the stress of the commute alone much less this shoddy business management was putting me in a bad place emotionally!  I have two options that are 5 minutes down the road from me in either direction...and a nice expensive daycare center also 5 minutes away if it really came down to it...plus a backup sitter that has had no problems with her stated hours of availability nor ANYthing else regarding me and my child: when the regular sitter had to go out of town for a week for a wedding, the backup had my child for a week with no problems, when I needed a night to myself, she was available JUST as she originally stated, no problem!  So really, there is no need for this stress.

This sitter thought she was doing me a favour allowing me to pay her the money she asked for, lol...and has suddenly discovered I do have the option to just WALK AWAY.