A six-year-old girl goes to the kitchen to get a snack. Only, this isn't your ordinary snack-obtaining mission. You can't get caught by the grown-ups, and if you do, you get tied up for days, surrounded by things that scare you.
Sounds pretty sick, huh?
Well, that's exactly what happened to this little girl, and thankfully, someone who knew turned in the bad guys... her family. Mom and Dad were away, and her relatives had been caring for her. What a sweet way to care for her: binding her up and surrounding her by snakes and spiders that scare her.
It's heartbreaking to me as a father that someone would do this to a child. Why, oh why do we think in this country that little children are to be treated horrendously, and as long as you are the guardian, it should be okay?
The mentality that allows spanking, taken a little further, is the same that allows this treatment. Spanking is the single most scary thing that happened to me as a child - and I did dumb things that nearly killed me. Putting a child in line through fear and pain is wrong. It is not part of raising a child to become a responsible, honorable adult.
Stopping violence begins at home with gentle parenting - with any child. Of course some children will offer tougher challenges - we're all different. It doesn't mean that they need to be forced into submission. If that's your thought, you probably have a leader. Turn that around and use that to the child's advantage; don't try to beat/scare it out of her/him.
How can you develop empathy that you've never experienced? You can't! That's how!
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1 comments:
I love this post. Thank you.
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