There have been a couple of viral videos going around featuring five year old girls behaving much, much older than their age. It’s actually amusing to watch. But some adults are wondering what these kids have been exposed to, for behaving the way they are in these videos.

I’ve seen both and the only thing that bothers me about it is in wondering what it was I did when I was five years old! Seriously. I don’t think it’s easy to judge these kids. They’re just being adorable, I guess. This is only about a fraction of their life and who they are.

The first video is of this little girl who has the makings of a make-up guru. She knows her make-up brushes really well and I find that amusing because I learned about the importance of having different make-up brushes when I was 35, not five years old!

I’d be happy to see more of her make-up videos, that’s for sure!

This next video is of a five year old saying she will never marry a guy if she doesn’t have a job first. The way she says it with conviction makes me hope that she keeps that good sense even when she’s a lot older.

Are you bothered by how these five year old kids are behaving or do you find all these cuteness part of growing up?

This is the story, published yesterday in the Schenectady Daily Gazette, of a man whose 13-year-old son was out of control. Stealing, fighting, bullying, hitting girls… lots of really awful stuff.  This kid was going down the wrong road.  His parents are divorced, and the boy was suspended for stealing things out of teachers’ purses and attacking another boy with a ruler. 

So, when the boy was suspended, the dad picked him up from school and spanked him with a belt.

“I was just trying to be a parent,” Fisher said. “He’s 13 now. I’m trying to raise him to be a man. I couldn’t just sit back and watch him going down the wrong road.”

Four hours later, after the boy was returned to his mother’s house, the police came and arrested Fisher.

Of course, the anti-spanking crowd is horrified by this.  “When kids are spanked, they learn to resolve their problems by hitting,” these folks say.  But it sounds like this kid already knew how to hit all on his own.

The crux of the problem is the fact that the boy got his hide tanned with a belt, not just with an open palm.  Parents will almost never get arrested or charged for infrequent, open palm spanking. 

We do spank our kids occasionally, though only for one offense (lying), and only a few swats with an open palm.  It happens very seldom, but when it does, it makes an impression on them.  But I’ve also seen what happens when spanking is a first resort, not a last one, and that’s no good, either.  Those kids get so inured to it that they still do whatever the heck they want.

Americans are very conflicted about spanking as discipline.  It seems to me that if it is rare and it is a spelled out consequence, it can be effective.  But using a belt seems over the top to me.  Belts, brushes, wooden spoons, or other objects, hurt far more than a hand, and they humiliate more, too.  It’s hard to imagine a good outcome for that situation.