The NZ tabloids spoke of the  laws that outlawed child smacking as causing a breed of children who didn’t fit socially into society very well, children who were often self centred and disobedient.

When I found the book by AH Chapman, I reread part of it, and in there he mentions that children who don’t have appropriate physical discipline can turn out to be self centred and unable to fit into society in socially acceptable ways.

So by removing the rights of spanking from a parent, we are deliberately breeding children who may not be going to be able to function properly in society as they grow older.

Another form of child discipline that was endorsed by this well respected psychiatrist:  Scolding “…strong disapproval of the child’s action, often expressed in an angry tone…[sometimes with threats of stronger physical discipline and lasts around]…2 or 3 minutes…”

A parent who scolds their child in Australia is also at risk of being arrested.

On another note, we hear of the child care worker who said that with discipline now so slack in the homes, having children in childcare is placing undue stress on child care workers, as some children are pretty well uncontrollable under existing guidelines

I listened to a psychologist who said one should not yell at children, because it is bad for them, and he then proceeded to list several time consuming techniques that a parent could use instead of scolding.

The first thought that came to my mind, was what parent can spend that much time using those techniques.  He even suggests that if the techniques don’t work, for the parent to do some time out of their own - not the child, but the parent.

Discipline was always suppose to be short and sweet, now it’s anything but that, and what one has to consider, is  that telling parents to do long winded type things to control behavior may not be int he best interests of the child.

And that is the point I want to make here - we are selling our children out for political correctness, and we may be turning them into societal misfits, who will never respect other people nor the greater society.

Our laws are therefore potentially an act of child abuse, that afflicts many children, but because they are the lawmakers, they get to decide whats right and wrong, irrespective of the wisdom of the parents.

I don’t endorse 10 hard smacks, I don’t endorse child abuse, but parents are best at raising children, and the government needs to stop focusing on all parents and start focusing on the ones that are genuine abusers.

Lets face it, the vast majority of us were  smacked or belted as children, and we turned out just fine.  A belting or a smack, or even ten hard smacks was not abuse, the abuse is denying the parents the right to raise healthy children - children are not adults, and should not have the rights, nor the responsibilities of being adults.

Why do I mention responsibilities of being an adult? Well, if children have the same rights as adults, then they also have the same responsibility not to misbehave nor to act inappropriately.

But children are just that, children.

And I’ll end it here with these words again:

Love, Limitations, and Let them Grow Up.

i thihnk i have a hemorroid but its not directly on my bum hole.
its kindof a little bit up from there, i dont even know if its a spot or something terrible like cirvical cancer and im well too embarresed to go to the doctor.  its really sore and i have noticed bleeding from my anus but only a tiny bit when i wipe my bum and in what seems a different area. 

please help me im at a total loss.

thanks.

In Australia, a mother who warned her daughter three times before smacking her, found herself on assault charge.  The child was not physically harmed, but an adult decided it was abuse and reported the discipline to the police, who determined that under current Australian law, it was assault.  Remember - the child was not physically harmed.

Around 90% of Australians were against the authorities for implementing such charges against the mother, yet the law is the law.

In New Zealand, where authorities made smacking and so on unlawful, the will of the people later prevailed and the laws after some years were renounced, allowing parents to once again punish their children.  One of the tabloids claimed that in New Zealand, the renounced laws actually caused harm to the social integration of children into society.

I remember in my university days, reading a book written by Dr. A.H.Chapman, Management of emotional problems of children and adolescents, 2nd edition, 1974, his famous words were : Love, Limitations and Let them grow up.

In this book, the psychiatrist ( who was formerly an Assistant Clinical Professor of Pediatrics and an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Kansas School of Medicine),  firmly believed that hitting a child hard ten times on the bare buttocks with a stiff slipper or hairbrush was both safe and effective to control undesirable child behavior. You would expect to spank your child about 2 to 3 times a week to 1 every several months.  This was written only 32 years ago.

I recall reading elsewhere, that if the parent used a wooden spoon and hit too hard the spoon would just break, and if by some chance a bruise was left, it was just a warning to the parent that they had hit too hard.

Use a spoon now, and it may well be classed as hitting a child with a weapon. Leave a bruise and you are investigated for child abuse, and your record will likely confirm that you abused your child.

So where am I heading with all this?

Well, it’s an historical look at discipline.

Why have the laws changed? Why are children again being seen as miniature adults, with the rights of adults?

If we look at Australia, it was once said around the 1940’s or 50’s that child abuse basically didn’t exist.  But people saw things, people heard things, and their were child victims.

So, how has this changed so markedly over 59 to 69 years, with child abuse stats climbing through the roof.

I think there is a legal aspect, how can you protect an abused child, if parents can smack? What type of smacking leads to abused children? How can the law say one child being smacked is lawful, while another parent doing the smacking is unlawful.  So, government, being the “I have to be seen to be doing something” beast that it is, comes to outlaw smacking.

But when the physical discipline of a child isn’t allowed, how does a parent contain bad behavior - well, up to now, the preferred option was medical intervention of some sort, the diagnosis of attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity, and then the prescription of drugs, such as ritalin, to control the child.  Only trouble that they have found is that such behavior modifying drugs also can cause anything from schizophrenia to sleepiness.

Yes the use of child modifying behavior drugs has soared in Australia in recent years. But drugging your child is an acceptable form of child abuse, if you have a doctor on side.

So the hand or spoon, has been replaced by the drug in quite a few cases.

On the other side of things, when I take my child to school, I see that children are also very easily afraid now a days.  One child broke down crying, because someone had left a hypodermic needle out the front of the school.  Are we breeding children to be afraid?

The reason why that bothers me, is that under the anti-terrorism laws, the very real rights that the Magna Carta was the symbol of, were taken from us.

So we are now living in a time when human rights have been significantly turned back by hundreds of years, and by the will of the government, we are now breeding children who may well be unsuited to fighting oppression.

Originally being against the supermarket ban, where do i stand now?

The end of supermarket bags - the good

1.. Having your own bags means that you have stronger and more durable bags - meaning they don’t disintegrate before you get to the car.

2.. Being larger with a firmer base and rectangular shape makes it easier to use less bags and pack them into the car or van more easily.

The end of supermarket bags - the bad:

1… The supermarkets made thousands in profits from selling people  the bags - you had to pay for them, and the supermarkets made yet another profit from you.

2… Staff tend to over stuff the bags, sometimes so heavy it obviously becomes an occupational health and safety issue when you try to carry them or lift them.

3… When you forget to take your heavy duty supermarket bags with you, you pay 15 cents for a paper or strong plastic bag - the latter of course being more dangerous to the environment than the free ones ever were.

4… Apart from buying the bags, you also have to buy the rubbish bin liners that most of us used the old free supermarket bags for.  So the supermarkets are selling record numbers of rubbish bin liners, many of which look identical to the old supermarket bags, just a bit stronger and more colorful - cant see how this is helping the environment.

5… The strong sturdy bags we pay about $1 for, are made of plastic by the way, strong plastic bags that don’t break down.  Except I’ve found one or two  splitting at the seams, one of the zips on one of the cold goods carry bags has broken, paid about $3 to $5 for it.

6…   Buy more than your bags will carry, and you are forced to buy more bags, and store more bags.  Find a lot of good specials?  Great, but then the supermarket reaps more out of you when you have to turn round and buy more bags to carry your specials in.

7… Cleanliness - yep with the disposable plastic bags this wasn’t really much of an issue, but with people using their own bags, their uncleanliness becomes transferred to the supermarket people who pack the bags, and who then touch your groceries and your bags.  Occupational health safety issue that.

Conclusion:

Overall, my finding is quite negative, as you can see.  Bags are costly, less environmentally friendly, and you end up having to buy plastic bags to line your rubbish bins. Forget to take your main bags, rather frequently actually, and you have to buy more main ones or pay for cheaper ones.

An environmental nightmare with plastics that wont easily break down, consumers pay more to go shopping, supermarkets reap a a great profit and no longer provide the free service saving them money as well.

As the plastic bags are thrown away, an environmental disaster may get unleashed.  Sooner or later, those cheap 15 cent bags and the broken heavy duty bags are going to find their way to the oceans.

I enlisted an offshore SEO company to find links for several of my sites.  The company is big and well respected, and boast about being totally white hat, so I gave them the job.

From the beginning things didn’t seem to be going quite above board.

Sure, there was a slow development of some one way links, which most web masters would be satisfied with, but, as I checked out a few of the links, I started to get worried. 

Oh yes, they were links on bona fide web sites, with good PR for the most part, but one of the links was clearly on a site that had no other purpose than to provide link space.  My link appeared in prime territory on the main index page of the site, then when I checked out other pages, I found that spaces were left for other sites to be linked to, and when I looked at the text - the content - I saw about 10 links to other sites.

So, obviously, this was a site they either owned for putting links on, or they were buying links from the site.

I raised the matter with them, but they never explained a thing about it,  just said they would send the links back for correction, but one month later they still weren’t corrected.

Then there was a lapse of about a month or two, and on my insistence they sent out another list of links as to where they had attained new links for my other two sites.

Well, I checked 2 links, a PR 0 and a PR4, the PR4 looked good, but there was no where to request a link from, which seemed a bit odd.

The PR0 link page - that also belonged on a PR4 domain - was extremely disturbing.  I knew this site, it was a competitor with one of my other sites, and I knew it’s two link pages, and couldn’t understand why anyone would want to link to it - written badly, lousy content, just an affiliate site with no class.

It was disturbing at first because the link page my two sites appeared on I knew had been filled with links previously, but now it was just about 15 links, and mine was two of them.  If that wasn’t enough to raise my eyebrows, one of my sites had a nofollow tag on it, while the other didn’t.

You see, why bother putting a link to one of my sites up in the first place, to just hit it with a nofollow tag ? - why bother adding the link in the first place? - Where did all the other links go that were there before mine?

Am I paranoid?  Have I stumbled onto an SEO company in India, who wants more than to find white hat links for me? They want to own the whole internet?

Think about it, cheap labour to build and write web sites, US$ going in from people like me to build white hat links, they stick my links on their sites that they are making/made, but when I stop paying them to build links, I guess the links disappear that were already built, just like all those other sites vanished from the link page I knew well, and they have used my money to build more websites and to get more links for themselves by going after real links. 

So it ends in the position where the person trying to improve the serps of their web site, has been cheated of the links, and the India company’s web site competing with them takes the lead.

Most likely though, they are buying links, and are just profiteering, and obviously, when the money stops, the links drop off.

Sometimes the serps positions can drop by hundreds, pick up a few hundred places, then drop by twice as much again. It is a confusing, bewildering and scary time.

TTL’s can mean two different things it seems.  TTL can be defined as  the number of hops / routers that your web site is allowed go through, before it is extinguished.  So, if you had a setting of 3, after the web page went through the third router it would be killed off. 

Anyone within 3 hops of your server can see your page, any one after cannot.

Apparrently TTL can also be set to minutes, rather than hops, but essentailly it means when a certain time has passed the site is killed at the router when it goes over time.

Now, you can see why a search engine doesn’t like displaying sites with low TTL in its search results, when many people may not be able to see the site - it looks like the search engine may not be that good, and it frustrates the person trying to access your site, they can’t see it, so they hit the back button and try clicking again. 

Hence during your first month of low TTL’s, your visitor numbers will likely seem to rise to perhaps record levels.  It hasn’t really, it’s just that people are downloading your page repeatedly when trying to get to it.

But why did I refer to TTL as short for Thief Thief Look! ? Because, criminal based web sites use low TTL’s. 

Why low TTL’s?  Because, when you are going to move to a new server, you need to have low TTL’s for the change of servers.

Now, every bona-fide site that changes to a new server goes through low TTL’s for a short time.  Once they get to the new server successfully, the TLL’s are increased again.

BUT, criminal type sites keep their TTL’s low for a quick transfer to another server.  It’s like leaving the car running when you go to rob a bank.

So search engines also look darkly on low TTL’s for that reason as well.

If you are unlucky enough to have had your TTL settings put on low and left there by your host provider, after about a week or a month, you will definitely start seeing your keywords dropping dead around you like flies.

At first you will think the loss of serps  has something to do with what you did on site, so you’ll check all changes, then you’ll check your links, for any that may have gone bad. You’ll make changes because Blind Freddy reckons it’s too many links, too many keywords, but no matter what you do, the serps just keep plumetting.

If more than one site went to the new server, you will find that they too will drop in serps.  Interestingly, they don’t all seem to drop at the same time or rate I’ve found, and it may not be all your keywords that dropping, just some, but the longer the TTL’s are left low, the more keywords become adversly affected.

When a bona fide site is left with low TTL’s it suggest that the move to a new server went somehow wrong, and the rush to fix the transfer meant that the TLL settings were forgot about as a result.

Once you become aware that your sites appear to have been affected by low TTL settings, you need to contact your host provider, let them know that since the change of server you have been losing serps positions greatly, and ask them if they could plase check and correct any and let you know.

Sexting has become infamous at the moment, as the people who are often sexting, are the younger teenagers. Sexting has also become infamous, as once the photos or videos are sent, the receiver can then resend them to whoever they wish, including the parents and friends of the partner, should the relationship sour.

Back to basics:  Sexting primarily involves nudity, not sex, so it should have been referred to as nuding or some such, but I guess the reciever of the sexting may use it for sexual gratification, which then makes the word sexting somewhat spot on.

So there are two sides then - the sexting sender, and the sexting receiver.

The Sexting Sender

By sending nude or semi nude photos of themselves, what can I say:

Is nudity or seminudity wrong?

Nudity is fine.  Most modern societies allow nudists and nudism in specific places, like nudist beaches and camps and in the home. Also, artists are allowed to paint nudes and pay adults, teenagers and children to pose nude while they paint them, and then to have the paintings hang in art galleries.  Initially when the child pornography laws came into being, the art galleries were under threat for displaying such paintings and photos, and at least one photographer - who was later cleared - went to court over his nude photography of young teenage girls. Now, photographers and painters can continue painting and taking photos of nude people of any age, and getting them published, put on display, and art galleries don’t have to worry anywhere near as much.

The bible clearly states that God prefers us nude as well, and that our Heavenly Father objects to people censoring people for their nudity. Just read about King David - he went running and jumping and dancing in a victory parade totally naked - that was in front of everyone - babies, children, teenagers, adults. When his wife censored him, the Heavenly father rebuked her.  In the Garden of Eden, God was happy with us naked - if he wanted us to wear clothes, he would have clothed us at the start.

So, nudity is not the issue per se, and interestingly, neither is the age , as such, of the sexting sender.

So, what is the problem with sexting here?

This is a real hard issue of sexting to hammer down.

What’s the difference between sexting a photo of oneself as a young teenager, to having a photographer take a photo and hang it in an art gallery? Clearly the latter has a much much wider audience and over a time frame that could run several life times.

From working with hemorrhoid questions for so long, I guess sexting comes down to why can a doctor put a glove on and do a cervical exam of a young child or teenager, and not get charged with sexual assault?  If anyone else were to do this to a young teenager or child, it is sexual assault. So we can sort of put the photographer in a similar type boat I suppose.

Likewise, in a family where nudism is accepted, taking nude photos of ones own family members is by and large OK.  Even as a care and protection psychologist, the training to become one involved this very scenario, but with the difference that other families children were photograhped nude while playing games with the nudist kids, that was considered OK, but if the photos were taken and nudism wasn’t the normal routine of things, then there were possible sexual abuse issues to deal with.

Putting all this black, white and grey to one side, I think the real issue with sexting, is that, with young teenagers,  it is done outside parental control (unless you are a parent practising nudity, parents wouldn’t allow their child sexting rights so to speak), and parental control is vital to protecting children and teenagers from themselves. Children and teenagers don’t often look or understand the longer term consequences of their actions.  How the receiver may use their photos or videos, become a source of embarrassment and even black mail when they become older. Understanding how it may affect their relationships in school, with everyone else seeing and commenting on the photos, including the teachers … That’s the real key, I think, to understanding why sexting is so dangerous to young teenagers in particular.

Yes, they are in essence the victim of their own action. AND yes, I believe they are victims.

SEXTING RECEIVERS

Are sexting receivers criminals?

Anyone can be sent anything, so there fore, as it is outside their control, you cant really punish them for the sexting messages they receive.  Also,  most sexting receivers will be younger teenagers themselves, and just as likely to be immature and naive in how they spread the photos and videos around once they get them, so punishing and or preventing people for distributing such material becomes awkward. Again the real issue is the lack of parental control - a young teenager is highly unlikely to go to their parents and show them the sextings. 

Are the sexting receivers victims?

An interesting question.  In a scoiety where nudism isn’t largely practised, then, yes, the sexting receiver can become a victim and maybe suffer distortion in their perspective of normal versus abnormal behavior and expectations of a nude and or sexual nature. It could also generate anxiety, perhaps even an anxiety disorder, as the the expectation of reciprocating sexting photos and videos may be present.  Teenagers are well know for being particularly self conscious of their bodies and how they look.

What if it is an adult who is sexting or receiving sexting?

With other adults, it will be subject to the relevant laws I would think.  I imagine grey areas would exist where nudism of the child and adult typically occur.  Let’s face it though, if children are involved, this becomes very much a concern as there could be predator or pornographer aspects to it, but not necessarily.

Sexting in Conclusion

The critical aspect to sexting is that parental control is totally absent, that sexting can occur anywhere at anytime - in a toilet, in a bath, at school - anywhere where a mobile phone with a camera goes, sexting can go.  Sexting has some unique and potentially devastating consequences to both the sexting sender and sexting receiver.

To go a bit beyond a straight out conclusion, I feel it necessary to add, that the only way to really deal with this issue is to  get parental supervision tied into it in some way, to stop the kids from having access to the camera facility on the mobile phones and or from receiving photos or videos,  such as like a  lock out feature that a parent can disable or enable.

However, some teenagers may appear totally trustworthy, have the camera enabled, and then go behind the parent’s back.

Nothing is fool proof , sexting is here, and I cant see it being totally controlled.

REPLY

Hi,

Yes, straining can cause hemorrhoids, irrespective of how the straining comes about.

Also, if you have real runny poo, that can cause hemorrhoids, as the wiping tends to be alot more, which strains the tissue, as well as abrades it.

Always best to see your doctor for a diagnosis though, that way you know what is really going on.

My suggestions anyway.

All the best

Donald.