Child Abuse Vs. Discipline: The Final Line

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Eng 112 Child Abuse vs. Discipline: The Final Line Children are one of the greatest gifts given to a family. Why would anyone want to hurt a poor, defenseless child? In 2006, about 900,000 kids were victims of child abuse. Society views child abuse in many ways. Today, anything from yelling to hitting children is considered abuse. There are many types of child abuse: emotional, physical, sexual, and verbal. Child abuse has been found to cause severe psychological, behavioral, and physical problems (Long-Term). For a long time, society could not see what harsh effects child abuse has on children. Today, society views child abuse more negatively than in the past. As older folks would say, back in the day there was no such thing called physical child abuse. Physical child abuse was viewed differently by society in the 50s, 60s, and early 70s than it’s viewed now. I asked my dad, Willie Nelson (41 years old), who was born in the late 60s early 70s, “When you were growing up, how society viewed physical child abuse?” He responded: “Hell, back in the day, there really was no such thing as physical child abuse. I mean there probably was, but it was not a big deal to discipline your child as it is nowadays. Back when I grew up, if you were disobedient at your neighbor’s house they could beat you. When you got home your parents beat you for being disobedient at the neighbor’s house, and when you went to your grandparent’s house, they would beat you. The saying back in the day was it takes a whole neighborhood to raise good kids. It wasn’t child abuse it was called discipline when I was growing up.” My dad was raised during the 1960s and 1970s. He was saying that discipline was the name given to child abuse back then, and that society understood that if they wanted to have good kids in the near future, disciplining them was the only way. In the past, children

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