Pets, kids and discipline

 

There was this discussion going on about disciplining dogs, and that these four legged friends of yours won’t know what you want of them unless you repeatedly show them what you want them to do or what you don’t want them to.   In other words, animals, especially dogs need clear cut guidelines and controls, otherwise they tend to get confused if they don’t know how they should behave to make humans happy and keep patting them on their heads and feeding them.  Properly treated these animals would just keep wagging their tails and letting out their tongues and go “heh-heh-heh-slurp” and drool a little more.  And disaster would be if you, out of your purest intentions or ignorance, let them run free; they’d probably run wild and wreck your home.  That means to say, dogs don’t think.  They basically operate on instincts.  And they need proper control and discipline.  Not just any pointless or senseless whipping as some people seem to suggest.

 

And about kids, God forbid, I’m not telling people to treat kids like dogs, ok?  But kids are mostly at that stage when they still need guidelines and controls to act and think.  Let them run free, and chances are some of the hyperactive ones would just run wild and wreck your home faster than you could pick up after them.  You can’t blame them because they’re kids.  But if you think you could blame some of their parents, you’d be disappointed or maybe surprised.  They’d look at you as if to say, “Hey, don’t you know they’re kids?  What am I supposed to do with them?  Tie them up?  Where have you been?  This is the 21^st century!  You expect me to work them over with a bull-whip?”

 

It’s pathetic.  I’ve noticed how some parents handle their kids and I wondered why nobody started a school for good parenting.  “Ah Boy!  Stop choking that cat lah, and stop yelling like Tarzan.  And Ah Girl will you come down from that window, please?  Aiyoooh…. don’t know what to do with them lah.  And school holiday’s just only started.   They’re already beyond control.  Go and play outside, ok?”  And after repeated requests to “go play outside” they get the drift and stay outside and eventually don’t bother to come home even for dinner.

 

I’ve seen a kid kicked his mother in the shin and the spineless mother just whined to the neighbors as if hoping some one else would do something like disciplining the kid for her.   But no!  Anybody touches a hair of that kid and she’d go after the parents of the kid responsible and threaten them with the law.  Ironically, a recent incident happened right before our eyes that put her son’s face on the neighborhood “who’s who” (Meaning: who to avoid when you go out to play).  Her boy, now a gangling teenager, whacked another neighborhood kid half his size with a racket and broke the kid’s nose.   Other parents went to tell her the news.  She said, “Aiyooh, what to do?  He also beat me sometimes lah”.  That’s exactly what happens when there’s a lack of control.

 

And there’s another set of parents whose precious kid doesn’t even get a tickle for starting a yelling match against them, his siblings or the maid.  But he’d get a thrashing if his test scores come with anything less than all A’s.  Also from the backdoor to backdoor grapevine (gossip lah), there’s the news that their 2 boys get premier class treatment while the girl gets 2^nd class status and the foreign maid is always begging the neighbors for leftover food. 

 

Hey, I’m not judging anybody here.  I'm not throwing any stones.  But I just keep wondering whether these parents’ sense of priorities have been somewhat warped.