Little Derp Knight

Every year, I edit clips from the newest volume into… this… to honour the best RWBY video ever created.

“Ah, Perry the platypus!”

“What an unexpected -“

“WAIT, WAIT, WAIT!”

“You’re trapped!”

“By societal convention!”

“Look! We’re in a fine dining environment. Everyone knows not to throw a scene in a fancy restaurant!”

“That’s right. You’re trapped. Sit down.”

i must make…

b e a d l i z a r d

B…

One gently squeezes my hand between both of his palms as he says “squish.” I reciprocate. When he looks like he’s feeling sad or lost, I ask if I can squish him, and he will show me where I can squish him. Sometimes it’s almost like a hug, but most of the time, it’s just a hand or an arm I press between my palms. Then he squishes my hand in return, says “squish,” and moves on. He will come ask for squishes now, when he recognizes that he needs them.

Another boy smiles and sticks his chin out at me, and if he’s really excited, he’ll lean his whole body toward me. The first time he finally won a game at circle time, he got so excited he even ran over and bumped chins with me. He now does it when he sees me outside of school too. I stick out my chin to acknowledge him, and he grins and runs over and I lean down for a chin bump.

Yet another child swings my hand really fast. At a time when another child would be seeking a hug, she stands beside me and holds my hand, and swings it back and forth, with a smile if I’m lucky. The look on her face when I initiate the hand swinging is priceless.

Another one bumps his hip against mine when he walks by in the hallway or on the playground, or when he gets up after I’m done working with him. No eye contact, no words, but he goes out of his way to “crash” into me, and I tell him that it’s good to see him. He now loves to crash into me when I’m least expecting it. He doesn’t want anything, really. Just a bump to say “Hi, I appreciate you’re here.” And when he’s upset and we have to take a break, I’ll bump him, ask if he needs to take a walk, and we just go wander for a bit and discuss whatever’s wrong, and he’s practically glued to my side. Then one more bump before we go back into the room to face the problem.

I verbally express affection. A LOT.

My husband… doesn’t. I don’t know why. For the longest time part of me wondered if it meant he loved me less.

At some point I told him about a thing I had done as a kid. Holding hands, three squeezes means ‘I Love You’.

Suddenly he’s telling me I Love You all the time.

Holding my hand, obviously, but also randomly.

taptaptap

on my hand, my shoulder, my butt, my knee, whatever body part is closest to him, with whatever part of him is closest to me

All the time.

More often than I ever verbally said it.

It’s an ingrained signal now, I can tap three times on whatever part of him, and get three taps back in his sleep. Apparently I do the same.

It’s made a huge difference for us.

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/jademerien/ Twitter https://twitter.com/JadeMerien

Tumblr has made and official statement on twitter about what’s going on:

We’re committed to helping build a safe online environment for all users, and we have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to media featuring child sexual exploitation and abuse. As this is an industry-wide problem, we work collaboratively with our industry peers and partners like NCMEC to actively monitor content uploaded to the platform. Every image uploaded to Tumblr is scanned against an industry database of known child sexual abuse material, and images that are detected never reach the platform. A routine audit discovered content on our platform that had not yet been included in the industry database. We immediately removed this content. Content safeguards are a challenging aspect of operating scaled platforms. We’re continuously assessing further steps we can take to improve and there is no higher priority for our team.

Please please please, for the love of everything, stop spreading fear in our community. They are not purging your blogs for having NSFW content. If your blog gets deleted and you didn’t have any of the above mentioned content, or something that could be percived as such, then please contact Tumblr Support to regain your blog. They can be contacted via the form here.

You weren’t.

What my mother actually hit me with was a thick leather belt cut into strips. She called it her cat-o-nine-tails. And she hit hard enough to leave welts on my back and my ass that lasted for a week. If she was in an especially mean mood–which happened a couple of times–she walloped me with the buckle end. The buckle was huge and outsized with sharp edges  and had a long tongue that left gouges. If I got cut or gouged during the spanking, I was not supposed to bandage the wounds or to ask my aunt to bandage them. I found that out after asking my aunt for such help once because I didn’t want my clothes sticking to the wounds. My mother threw a shit fit that is perhaps better left to the imagination. Truthfully, I don’t remember what she said; I only recall her unholy rage and her conviction that I deserved it.

That was the norm when I was a kid. Every kid that I knew–boys and girls–was hit. Few parents of my friends “spanked”  with hands. I can recall several mothers sitting in the kitchen of a friend’s family and boasting over coffee about how many yardsticks they had broken against their daughters’ backs or legs. Fathers talked openly, even proudly, about “belting” their sons with actual belts. 

This wasn’t seen as abuse, although every kid I knew hated being hit and hated their parents for hitting them. Some of us begged our parents not to. Others tried to run away. Still others had anxiety attacks whenever their parents got angry. None of it mattered.The euphemistic “spanking” was continually presented to us as good, if strict, parenting. And after all, weren’t there days that kids were completely unreasonable and nothing else would work? And you couldn’t really expect adults to talk to kids as if they were people, could you? That, we were told,would be a waste of time. The best thing to do was simply to admit you deserved it and accept the spanking. And not to cry afterward, because crying was for babies. (My mother’s policy was that if a blow from her belt made me cry, she would hit me even harder until I admitted that there was nothing to cry about and stopped.)

I stole the belt belt one summer day when I was ten. I wrapped it around the inside of a garbage can and concealed it behind three heavy bags of trash. My mother put it out for the garbage men the following morning and never knew it. She spent months looking for it; I saw the signs when she searched my room. But it never occurred to her that she herself had thrown it away, and since she assumed that she’d get it back eventually, she never bothered to replace it. And I, of course, never told her; by that time, I felt that I was justified in doing whatever I had to to survive her silences and rages. 

“Spanking” didn’t teach me or my friends to behave, or to be better disciplined, though for years I believed both because thinking of it as normalized physical abuse was unbearable. It taught us that adults were irrational and untrustworthy, and that even the best of them wouldn’t step in to prevent cruelty or injustice. It taught us to repress our tears and to believe that we deserved to be beaten (the word we used among ourselves to describe spankings). We learned to conceal our words and thoughts and actions from people who were supposed to love us purely for our own safety. We found out that our parents were, in many respects, no different than the bullies our own age that we loathed.

I don’t believe that those lessons benefited my generation one bit.

When I was a young child and did something stupid, I was either spanked with a belt or had the SHIT slapped out of the back of my hand. Each time, it was done only once, MAYBE twice if I fucked up particularly bad like cursing at my parents, disrespecting my grandmother/grandfather or other shit I vaguely remember doing. I’m 22 years old now and looking back, I sincerely have to thank my parents. Yes I was talked to, I was told the rules and the consequences, and when I broke them -anyway-, I got punished. It got the point across REAL quick, and I never did it again.

I know that it was NEVER done out of malice or some sadistic desire to hurt a kid, it was done to teach me a lesson so I would grow up and actually be respectful.

Spanking does more harm than Good

Experts at the University of Michigan and University of Texas looked at decades of research from 75 studies involving more than 160,000 children.

“We found that spanking was associated with unintended detrimental outcomes and was not associated with more immediate or long-term compliance, which are parents’ intended outcomes when they discipline their children.”

  What Happens When A Country Bans Spanking?

Now a new study looking at 400,000 youths from 88 countries around the world suggests such bans are making a difference in reducing youth violence.

“We found [spanking] linked to more aggression, more delinquent behavior, more mental health problems, worse relationships with parents, and putting the children at higher risk for physical abuse from their parents.”

How Spanking Affects Later Relationships

Because my argument is that spanking kids DOES hurt them. It has long term impacts.

Like, if a kid is old enough to understand when you talk to them- you need to learn how to talk to them. T hen you don’t have to hit them.

If a kid ISNT old enough to understand when you talk to them, no matter how you do so, then they won’t understand why you are intentionally hurting them. 

And again, hitting kids causes long lasting psycological damage. 

Like I am not a model parent, I made bad choices that led to my parenthood and yes I lose my temper and sometimes discipline poorly but I also fully acknowledge that’s my failing as a parent and both I myself AND /my/ child that /I chose/ to bring into this world are in therapy to stay ahead of my failings and learn how to be better in spite of my failings as a person who is responsible for another human being staying alive and growing to thrive.

All I see from the posters above who condone pain as a learning tool are people who do not understand how children learn. Children do not have those decision making skills the way adults do. They don’t understand potential abstract consequences. A human’s frontal lobe of the brain (you know, the one that regulates impulse control, decision-making, planning, response inhibition, etc.) isn’t fully developed until around the age of 25. TWENTY-FIVE years old is literally when you could consider an average person mature enough to reliably make “good” decisions and understand them fully, yet you’re telling me that a child needs to “learn their lesson” through pain because they repeatedly make a mistake or do something wrong?

Children have to be TAUGHT these skills, and even then their ability to perform them consistently is lacking without tons of practice. Scaring someone into not doing something doesn’t teach any lesson other than to fear whoever/whatever doled out the punishment.

A child is GOING to do the wrong thing over and over. IT WILL HAPPEN. As the adult, it is your job to teach them what is right/wrong and safe/unsafe. OVER AND OVER. If they are not getting it, then teach it again. Teach it in a different way. Act out potential scenarios with them. Discuss boundaries and consequences. Explain why you place restrictions on their actions out of love and concern for their safety. If they are very young and cannot engage in conversation, then your sole responsibility is to keep them from danger and harm.

Having the expectation that you can tell a child to avoid something a couple times and they automatically won’t do it is unrealistic and, frankly, concerning. If you seriously can’t fathom teaching the same exact thing to a child multiple times without losing patience for it and hitting them, then check yourself at the door because parenthood is not for you. Children will make mistakes and you will, too. But you’re the adult in the situation. You’re the one that has to be in control of your emotions and responses.

Children’s brains construct so much from what they experience. If you are using pain as learning tool, it is teaching them something. But it’s not to never do those things again. Instead, you are literally altering their brain chemistry. Pain alters the brain’s anatomic structure and has serious long-term effects on emotional perception, memory, learning, and so much more.

If you tell your kid not to do something that might get them killed, and they do it anyways, watch your fucking kid better what the fuck is wrong with you.

I was smacked every now and then as a kid myself by my mother, and my father threatened me with the belt a couple times when I was with him for the weekend. But that was only AFTER I didn't follow instructions the first fifteen times or I was being a smartass to them.

And, yes, I do have a little bit of a mental issue, but it didn't come from the physical punishments. It came from being constantly grounded in high school (by a step parent, mind you) and unable to go outside or do any kind of activity I found fun, either alone or with friends. It came from being dropped off at college almost a month and a half after graduating and suddenly I wasn't considered "grounded" anymore, because I didn't have any adults to tell me what I could or couldn't do.

And, yeah, most of my issue started after I fell and got a slight head injury that I never got treated for towards the end of my first college semester, but that's a story for another time.

My point is, beating kids IS bad. And I don't think it is appropriate to lay hands on a child that isn't at least of the age to be enrolled in Kindergarten. But once they're able to leave the house to be without their parents for however many hours school is now, they need to be able to at least behave. And if they constantly deliberately disobey and could potentially endanger themselves, then yes, tap their bottom or the back of their hand. Maybe they'll actually pay attention to what you have to say. I know I did.

And before OP or anyone else goes off and says "oh you shouldn't have/be around kids then" or "you'll have CPS called on you for abuse", just shut up.

I raised my stepmom's kid, ok? For three to four years, I taught him through patience and play. But after those years, when it came time to do things and he was trying to be bad or not listen, I'd tap the back of his hand. Not enough to sting or leave any kind of redness, mind you, but enough to get his attention. Yeah, sometimes I'd go a little harder with the tap, but that was only if he didn't stop what he was doing after the first few times.

And guess what?

He's started high school this year with no mental or behavioral issues, getting good grades, being socially active, and now he's volunteering at an animal shelter on the weekends.

Sometimes disciplining kids is necessary for their benefit. A couple taps or smacks here or there won't be a bad thing. It's only a problem if punishment is a constant occurrence.

Also, if a kid is going to jump off a swing, they will either learn how to properly land without injury, or not to do it at all. Don't be a freaking hovering parent for stuff like that when the child is old enough to swing by themselves. Unless they're doing something stupid like trying to do a flip. A sprained ankle would be bad enough, but don't let the child break their neck or collarbone.

Adults: *create a space for other adults*

Minors*: *come into that space* 

Minors: this isn’t a safe space for kids!!

Adults: …..uhh no, it’s not.

Minors: why are you personally attacking me personally?

Adults: ….????????………… 

Minors: I know you want to fuck children

Me: *looks at fic with one character that’s in his 40′s and another that’s in his 50′s, with no children in sight* 

Me: ………please get out of my house

(I still get a lot of responses to this post calling me a pedo and I am t i r e d of this bottom-of-the-barrel quality discourse)

Minors: that’s not appropriate for children.

Adults: yep! that’s why it’s tagged as explicit and has a warning for mature content and also is tagged for various sex acts in case you’re not into that.

Minors: that type of content makes me uncomfortable.

Adults: we totally get that but that’s why the tags and warnings are on it.

Adults: look you even have to agree:

This work could have adult content. If you proceed you have agreed that you are willing to see such content.

Adults: so if you’re not into that type of thing then you can just skip over it.

Minors: it make me uncomfortable.

Adults: ……then… don’t… read it?

Minors: no. 

Minors: you should stop writing it.

just as I promised in one of the previous posts, this is somewhat of a relaxation project where I don’t go into too much details, just having lots of fun. 

here’s a Cerberus, he’s a good boy(s) :p

here’s some of Hades/Persephone chemistry, like I stated on twitter, this is why I can’t write romance. I just can’t help myself not to make silly jokes XDDD

and more… XD