Disclaimer: I was raised by old-school parents. And I thought it was better. This is not what happens to ALL new-school kids. Just an imagined scenario in which old-school benefits more.

I was going about my usual noding when I came across two nodes, the old-school parent and new-school parent. So I will write up the equivalent of the two different types of children.

Old school child

Child does something bad or stupid, and gives the parents a lot of trouble and fuss.

Parent: Why did you do that?

Child: Because it was fun!

Parent: I'm going to teach you a lesson.

Parent spanks child.

Child: Ow! That hurt. I'm not doing that again!

Ten years later, the child may have some grudges against the parents, but is overall a sensible kid.

New-school child

Child does something bad or stupid, and gives the parents a lot of trouble and fuss.

Parent: Why did you do that?

Child: Because it was fun!

Parent: If it was fun, it can't be bad. But it took me 3 hours to clean it up. I better do something.

Parent: Go to your room!

Child: I had fun and I only got sent to my room? Big deal. I'll do it again later.

Ten years later, the kid is a spoiled brat who never listens to his parents and runs wild, consuming lots of drugs and alcohol no matter what the parent tells him/her. Parents lose 10 years of their lives to frustration and anger, and the kid grows up to be a waste of time and a blight on society, running afoul with authority continuously.

The End

BTW, my old-school parents never had any qualms about talking to me about difficult subjects and they always listened to me. And they always encouraged me and built my self-esteem. To reply for the soft-links, yes I was beaten (it was not a brutal beating, it is always a little spanking, and it was for a good reason), but I did not consider that child abuse. Not even close.

Update: I think there is a misconception here. Old-school parents does NOT mean "Because we tell you". It means parents that do not hesitate to resort to physical punishment as a last resort, IMO, and are stricter than new-school parents. Parents who do not give reasons are bad parents, and that is that.

OK, i'm going to have to come back to this later, but this old-school vs. new-school maps onto a sociolinguistic study done in England a while ago that i found fascinating. Basically, it contrasted disciplinarian, top-down familial styles and the children they produced with ones that were more communicative and peer-oriented.

Family 1:
Why?
Because I said so.*

Family 2:
Why?
carefully considered answer, leading to more questions and more answers.

Now, from what i remember, "old-school" children tended to have fewer problems with authority, fewer problems with identity, and less creativity along with a less questioning nature. They excelled in rigid environments where rules and roles were clear and unchanging, and gravitated toward systems with static heirarchies, wherever they ended up in that heirarchy.

"New-school" children were more linguistically inclined and analytical, tended to test better in tests of intelligence, tended to have identity problems and suffer from depression and anomie, and do better in jobs where the challenges required flexibility, interpersonal communication, creative thinking, and allowed them some degree of leeway as far as personal style.

These findings have been filtered through my memories and my own extrapolations at the time. I will have to find my notes and try to determine who did the study so i can verify this stuff. But i have found it a very interesting thing to observe, as i definitely came from the second type of household (the horizontal-structure one as opposed to the vertical-structure one) and i suspect a number of other noders did too.

It should be noted that as with any binary system for understanding social (or any human) phenomena, this is oversimplified and does not apply to anyone exactly.

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*(Old-school families: yes, probably frequently using force to enforce and uphold the rigid power structure. This is a familial-structure thing. The study was a linguistic one but the implication is this kind of parent is ultimate power in the family and determines what truth is for the child, will brook no provocation or rebuttal. But this writeup was NOT A REPLY to the previous writeup and had nothing to do with corporal punishment of children.)

It comes down to either respecting authority because they're bigger than you or respecting authority because they deserve respect.

If you tell a kid why something is wrong than they will realize that they shouldn't do that thing and generally won't. If you just spank the kid, then s/he'll just try to do it without you knowing next time.

(Nice to see other people linking to Soft Linking to Offend. It shows that I'm not the only person against anonymous--or any other--personal attacks.)