I rewatched the videos because I cannot believe some of the responses that people have. I was double checking my own thoughts and impressions by watching it again.

While dirtyrascal7 may be an well adjusted person, I can count numerous other people who are not, including 2 cousins who still live at home with their mother and they are both over 35, are not well adjusted, not respectful, and definitely not mature adults.

I think the child should get suspended, from what I heard this is not the first time she has done this. The child should be suspended, child welfare should be notified. The polices should be warned, not sued. If mom desided to sue the school I hope the Asst. principal counter sues. But I bet all that will happen is the teacher will be suspended the school will fork over a cool mill. and the police will have to issue bonds to pay for toilet paper.

I agree wholeheartedly. If it weren't for the whole 'illegal because there are molesters and not-nice teachers' thing.

I think the handcuffs were an amazing idea. No, she wasn't actually being subdued (she wasn't a threat, obviously), and no, she obviously wasn't going to actually be arrested. But does the child know this? No. And does the child need to be brought -harshly- back to reality. Hells yes.

If I were there, I would have cuffed her, escorted her to the police car, not be very nice about it, let her know she was in -serious- trouble. Maybe even bring her back to the station. Phone the mother from there. Obviously, the mother needs a hand raising this child.

Tell the mother that a situation escalated at the school, and that the child would have to be picked up from the police station.

On a related note, I sincerely believe that until a certain age (defintely under ten) parents should be held accountable for the actions of their children. No, its not fair that if a child throws a fit and breaks something, the parents are blamed. But it might make parents a little more likely to teach their children not to break things, and not to be punk-asses.

Perhaps the mother should be grounded, and have a police officer sit her down in a chair and sream at her face until she cried. Tell her to grow up, and learn how to be a real parent. How to raise a real kid.

Gah.

Their solution didn't immediately bring it under control - they had to wait for the cops to get there.

And I frankly dont care if someone gets sued. I care about doing what's right.

And I did offer a solution. It would have fixed the problem before it happened. Kick her ass out of school once it becomes obvious she's an uncorrectable behavior problem. And if you can't kick her out, ship her over to the district's "special" school. Most districts have 'em. It's where they stuff the little hellions who won't respond to normal discipline.

If she'd been out of the building permanently, she wouldn't have had the opportunity to do what she did. I call that a better than immediate solution.

Why is it wrong by virtue of the fact she is five?

Ok, since your "solution" would have required them to travel backwards in time from when the incident happened (which I'm pretty sure most public schools don't have the funding to do), what would you have suggested they have done at 2 p.m. on March 14th, that would have resolved the situation at hand more quickly, and avoided any further violence, injury, or damage to public/private property?

You're not getting me. Had they been acting responsibly, they wouldn't have had to do anything at 2 p.m. on March 14th. The school is still at fault.

You all are saying the school's hands are tied. While I agree that idiotic suehappy parents have made it so touching a child, even to stop her from killing another kid, means the school will be out tens of thousands of lawsuit dollars, that does not mean a school's hands are tied.

The problem is that the school's administrators were lazy slobs who didn't do their jobs, so they wound up in a bad situation.

It's like a guy saying "gee, my hands were tied, I had to kill the bear before it killed me" after marching straight into its den, capturing its cub, then waiting 3 hours for the bear to return. Sure, at that particular moment there's no choice but to kill the bear, but had this guy not made multiple dumbass moves before the bear got back, he wouldn't have found himself in that situation in the first place.

The school neglected to take care of the problem when they had the chance, then found themselves in a bad spot in which they had no choice but to call the cops. The fact that at that point they had no choice does not excuse them from blame for backing themselves into that corner in the first place.

And once the cops got there, they HAVE the right to touch the kid. If three big cops can't stop a kid from swinging at them without having to resort to clapping the kid in irons, then they need to consider a desk job.

It's a bad situation all around. It could have been prevented in the first place, and once it happened anyway the cops acted like the kid was a street thug who could actually do them harm rather than a little 5 year old girl who, while being unable to control herself, does not have the physical capability to hurt them.

^Does your suggestion and bear analogy work for every child that has been a problematic student? Just ship them off and let someone else deal with them?

I thought the situation was handled with perfection. Seems to me that the cops simply acted on their previous threat, which resulted in negative consequences for the girl. Negative reinforcement.. a psych 101 staple! Had the cops NOT done what they said they'd do.. I can only imagine the kind of license that would have given her to act a fool the next time.

Yes, my suggestion works for every child that's a holy terror in class. Schools are not supposed to be babysitters, and their job description does not entail reining in someone's hellspawn. They're there to teach the kids that are there to learn. Any distraction from that mission should be eliminated. Easy as that. To allow asshole kids to continue to disrupt classes is not fair to the rest of the kids who are there to get something out of going to school.

By the way, your psychology is wrong. That wasn't negative reinforcement because the cops introduced a stimulus. Negative reinforcement is the removal of stimulus.

No negative reinforcement is punishment of some sort, not removal of stimulus. Positive reinforcement is rewards, and encouragement. This is what I was taught in EVERY Elementary Education class.

Also the number of cops used was in an effort to restrain her without injuring her. She resisted them putting the cuffs on her. One firmly held one arm, one the other, and the third put the cuffs on instead of slapping cuffs on hard enough to click them closed and being rough with her.

I can only interprete this as a pandemic loss of scale, of perspective. This is a five year old child having a tantrum. Suing for millions of dollars in this case is as inappropriate as using handcuffs on a small child is.

When I read the responses in this thread, again and again I feel myself I must check... we are talking about a five year old child . I am reading people saying "she started it" or "she hit the teacher, she had it coming", and... we are talking about a 5 year old.

Anyone who believes that it is an appropriate use of police resource to send three officers to deal with an upset 5 year old who has broken an ornament and had a tantrum has a perception which I can reconcile my own too. Anyone who makes arguments about cause and effect, about consequences and actions... and we are talking about a 5 year old girl... I simply have no conception of where you can be coming from.

Clearly the lawsuit is opportunisim... the police officers responsible should be dismissed immediately, the school should apologise to the parents and child, and we should just get on with things. Do we really want to live in a world of SWAT teams being called into kindergarten classes? It is like a nightmare come to life.

I totally agree, Strange-o.

That's a shame, because shakran is correct. Negative reinforcement is the removal of a stimulus. You (or your class, perhaps) are mixing punishment and reinforcement.

The main issues I see here are that the girl was calm by the time the police arrived. She didn't, as was inaccurately stated by a previous member, fight the police when they came in the room.

The teacher was filming the student. The student knew she was on camera and we don't know, without a careful psychological evaluation, how much of an effect that had on her actions. She might have been reinacting what she's seen on numerous television shows or she may have been acting for the camera on her own. Either way, the camera should have not been rolling during her tantrum, especially once it became clear it was having an effect on her behavior. Even adults act ridiculous in front of lenses. This area of human psychology is probably ripe for study if it hasn't already been done.

The teacher shouldn't have stood there and tried to calm the child down once it became clear that was acting as a stimulus for the behavior. The child was begging for, and receiving, attention. The introduction of all the postive stimulii (attention from the teacher, attention from the camera, attention from the police) reinforced her behavior. She got exactly what she desired and none of this, in any way, will reduce her behavior in the future. I wonder if the whole lot of you recommending parenting classes along with physical violence would be surprised to find that child development classes would reiterate what I just wrote and explain how your spankings would actually reinforce the behavior--not reduce it.

The mother couldn't come to her child's aid. We don't know why, but we can assume she was at work rather than at home doing drugs (which I've heard/read in various parts of online/real-life venues). The child was well-dressed, well-groomed, and even if it was a dual-parent home, it's not unreasonable to infer that the mother was at work. My mother couldn't just leave work when a problem erupted at school. Anger directed at schools or mothers for how children are raised is better directed at the socio-economic milleiu that demands these kinds of realities.

What could have been done?

The same thing that institutions around the United States do with children experiencing behavioral problems: give the child positive attention or remove attention.

1. The teacher could have left the room. Plain and simple, the child was reacting to the adult. She was tearing things off the wall. She wasn't holding a gun. The worst case scenario is that she would get up on a desk and fall off. Besides that being absurd, a child certainly doesn't lose sense of balance simply because she's angry, children fall off things all the time and don't end up in the hospital.

2. The adult (and even the adult holding the pointless/repulsive video camera and filming the event which was later released to the public) could have and should have grabbed the child and given her a hug until the child calmed down. My wife does this all the time. It works. The woman was very large and certainly capable of wrapping herself around the child without being hurt by the girl. The girl's arms weren't even long enough to wrap around the body of the woman--that is, she wouldn't have been able to even swing her fists if the woman had grabbed that child in a huge bear hug. The child would have calmed down in around 15 minutes--but certainly less than the hour it took with the adults amping her up by their interaction with her tantrum.

She wanted attention and she received attention. It's up to the adults to determine how they want to mete out attention--through love and restraint or antagonism and violence.

And for all of who claiming to interact with young children on a daily basis, if you disagree with what I wrote, all you have to do is try it once. It's not like that's going to ruin your child's upbringing. Just one time you might consider grabbing your reacting child and holding him/her very tight and explaining over and over that you love him/her. Don't worry, I love you. Yes, don't worry, your father is here. I love you. I love you.

See what happens when you do that. It may take longer than a swift kick or smack on the behind, but perhaps the delayed gratification of feeling good about discipline, about stopping the behavior will pay off in dividends in the long run as you see the behavior decrease over time.

Ok semantically it was negative STIMULUS not reinforcement. Negative reinforcement is one TYPE of negative stimulus. BOTH are educational tools. Also if it was withholding stimulus then you could counter that she was withheld from continuing her current behavior by the handcuffs.

As for wrapping herself around the child. In order to restrain an autistic girl in a day care that I once worked the parents had to sign a release form allowing the teachers to hold her. There have been cases of teachers being sued for simply holding a child and restraining them thus.

Judging from the mother's reaction to such restraining measures as were taken she likely would have sued the school for leaving the child unattended or allowing her to fall off of a table. If removing all attention from her is what will work then what is the mother making a big deal out of it and suing the school for? That's only gonna prolong the attention she receives from it all. Her mother is acting inappropriately for suing the school for this.

You make an excellent point Smooth. Not just kids, but adults too, tend to magnify their actions when a camera is around. I've lost count of how many stories I've had to back my lens off on because my presence was agitating the people more than they would be if I weren't there. I did a protest once, rolled up in my unmarked newscar, everyone's calm. The minute I pulled the camera out of the back, they went nuts, yelling, screaming, threatening each other with violence and death. I put the camera back in the truck and they calmed down instantly. Needless to say I didn't do the story - not only would it have been unethical to report on the yelling and screaming as though they were doing that when I rolled up, but I won't let the presence of my camera cause a riot.

Wouldn't be surprised if the kid was monkeying for the camera a bit here too.

Not to mention that the teacher was stupid. Now that the school has painted themselves into the corner I talked about earlier, this is a no win situation for them. No matter what happens, they're probably getting sued. Providing video evidence was moronic.

Also, is no one questioning why the teacher is filming small children?

"world gone mad" perhaps, but this would certainly be investigated by the police in the UK

as pointed out in the article.

"self-evaluation"

Why are you continuing to dwell on this as if the child didn't have an understanding of her actions? And to what level would the behavior have to escalate before it became unacceptable because as you put it, she's a five-year-old child.

At some point these "children" have to held accountable, the constant justification and exoneration is how the entire planet has ended up in a cesspool of unresponsible young adults becase when they were a five-year-old child someone told them that their behavior wasn't their fault because they were a five-year-old child.

Of course distinctions need to be made, but even a two-year-old should be helped to understand that there are consequences for their actions. I honestly think we'd be better off if we stopped blaming the police, or the camera, or the girls mother, and held this girl, a five-year-old child, accountable for her actions! She is capable of compreshension, of reasoning, of understanding, that's WHY she was in school to begin with, after the previous outburst she had been warned what would happen and the police officer simply followed through, and I admire him for having the courage to not cave simply because she's a five-year-old child.

I stand by what I said earlier, if this were my five-year-old (and yes, I do have a little girl that just turned 5 last month) I would hope that that this situation never occured, but if it did I would prefer that the officer be consistent in the punishment and put her into handcuffs and perhaps make a point with her that I'd been unable to get across.

I don't know where your wife teaches, but even when I was in school, and that's been more than 15 years now, teachers were not allowed to have direct physical contact with the students pretty much under any circumstances. Even for emergency situations like CPR or choking there was only one teacher authorized to administer the treatments because of the necessity for physical contact. It was policy at the school to limit liability because of the litigious nature of society, a rule designed under the "avoid the very appearance of evil" thought process and I wouldn't doubt that this school has a similar policy.

Personally I prefer this method of deterrence, however there are times that it's simply counter-productive. You said yourself that often this behavior is simply a method for getting attention, so how do you justify giving additional positive attention as a viable recourse in deterring the behavior? Unless my logic is seriously off here, if doing something gets you more of what you want, why wouldn't you not only continue to do it, but only amplify the behavior?

And shakran, your solution still doesn't provide a method quantifying which of these students should be shipped to the "last chance" schools where they are in more than effect simply babysat or flunked out. Are you suggesting that any kid that talks in class be automatically shipped out to these schools that have a very limited available enrollment and then just forget about it? All that does is shift the lawsuit another direction as these parents then claim that it's the schools fault for being negligent and simply pushing the children off on someone else. When are we going to stop passing the buck and start supporting the people that stand up for something, stand up for these teachers rights and give them and the other students that this girl wasted their time and energy an equal respect and stop treating this little girl as a victim and glorifying the behavior?

I was just pointing out that in the UK this women would be called a potential paedophile and face definite police investigation. I think such a designation is totally illogical without far more supporting evidence.. but thats the way it is here, every society has its blind spots I guess... I was just trying to point out if this had happened in the UK, the media perception would have been entirely different.

I'm sorry. I had thought it obvious that there's a marked difference in behavior between a kid who talks in class and a kid who tears up the room and tries to hit the teacher.

The kids that get sent to last chance are the kids that do not respond to the disciplinary methods in the regular school. If the kid talks in class, you tell him to stop. If that doesn't work, you punish him somehow. You continue to escallate the punishment until the point is reached that you can't escallate it any further. And then, yes, if the talking is that disruptive and he won't stop no matter what you do to him, he's shipped out.

Either give the school the power to discipline for real (grabbing kids who are fighting would be a good start, court supported community service rather than suspensions/detentions would be a great way to go) or understand that, since parents as a group have sued the schools out of that ability, the schools will have to ship problems elsewhere.

But you've just defeated your own arguments! This disciplinary methods very likely involved this type of escalation that she hadn't reached suspension/explusion on, even outright fighting rarely results in suspension/expulsion for a first offense, so why shouldn't this girl still have been in class for the second occurence, having been given a chance to hopefully correct the problem.

I do want to say though that I agree with you otherwise, so much so that I intend to give written permission to my childrens teachers to intervene and/or punish if necessary if I ever get a report of my children misbehaving in school where I feel that my kids need to gain respect for their teachers. I'm not saying I condone them beating the crap out of some kid, but giving them the option to pick them up, haul them out of class, and either spank them or put them alone in a corner somewhere would go a long way for building a healthy respect that I really feel is lacking.

Thank you, Smooth.

I just had a short talk with my lady who teaches 3-6 yr old children with hearing/speech impediments. Her school allows the teachesr to put 'problematic' children in a padded room that has an observation port...I kinda thought it was funny, but really, i think it is a great idea. The kid and everyone else is safe from harm and you remove hte audience for the child.

liquidlight, you raise some very important questions.

First of all, I will preface this by stating that I am not a clinical psychologist. While I was conducting my undergraduate education in sociology, I took numerous social-psychology and human development courses. I am currently in my second year of a Ph.D program for criminology, law and society. I do, however, have personal experience in that I spent a large part of my youth in institutions for troubled children as well as sites for criminally deviant children (and that bled into my adult years, aka, prison).

My wife, however, is working toward her Master's of Family Therapy. The information I am providing is gleaned from my introductory level pschology and human development courses and her advanced material.

Any information provided here should not be taken as the advice of an expert, but from a personal experience of what works and what doesn't supplemented by both of our education.

My wife works as a therapist in a juvenile shelter. In fact, she works in a place not dissimilar from where I spent most of my youth. Their rules are not the same as public schoolteachers, but they are also not supposed to touch the clients as a general rule. However, all of the counselors know the importance of love, physical contact, and the absense of them children have felt in their lives. Furthermore, this situation was not ordinary. I notice a number of people, yourself included, keep referencing the spector of a lawsuit. The threat may be real, but the school is still being sued. A lawsuit doesn't matter so much as liability. I ask myself whether, as a member of a jury, I would find the teacher guilty of hugging a disruptive child or handcuffing one. I would sympathize with the teacher on the former, the parent on the latter. I doubt the parent would sue a teacher for hugging her daughter to calm her down, but we don't know. Those rules were incorporated to reduce sexual molestation. I think common sense is in order here. No jury will find a teacher guilty of an offense if she hugs a disruptive child and tells her she loves her.


You ask me how can I advocate providing positive stimulation as a means to reduce negative behavior?

What we have to realize here is that both responses, the teacher hugging the child and the police officers cuffing her, serve as positive responses to her behavior. You are correct in stating that positive reinforcement will likely result in more behavior, but that logic applies to the police actions, as well.

What we need to consider is the fact that children model from their environment. When we meet violence or disruption with violence, they learn violence is acceptable and appropriate responses to things they do not agree with. When they associate love and kindness with disruptive behavior, they will begin to use those kinds of behaviors.

Over time, the love and kindness route will reduce the amount of violent outbursts a child expresses as a means to obtain attention as she learns socially acceptable methods to ask and obtain it. That is, she learns to ask for a hug when she wants one instead of throwing a tantrum.

Or she can learn that every time she feels the need for attention, she simply becomes violent and will receive all the violence (or attention) she desires and more.

Of course, she is only a young child. She is not sitting there calculating her needs versus responses. It's our responsibility as adults in our society to rear children in ways we think are beneficial for our society. But if we remove violent interaction from the classroom, and from the home, and the child is still acting violently, we need to start peering around and find out just where she is picking it up from. Children do not have inherent behaviors, they learn them.

I couldn't agree more with the last statement, that children learn what we teach them and I appreciate that we have different outlooks on this.

I should add to my arguments that I was rather severely physically abused by my father for most of my childhood and that experience has given me more than a slight hesitation in using violence to solve a situation. I say that because I don't see the police behavior or the handcuffing as a violent reaction because of the way that it was performed, they didn't add the emotion into the action that typically would accompany violence.

I would hope that handcuffing anyone would be unnecessary, but having also done my own stint in official corrective institutions I can also speak from experience that for some people all the love and all the non-interventional measures in the world sometimes aren't sufficient and that's the basis of my position. Because of my home life growing up I ignored or discarded the consequences of certain things, until I reached a point that an external stimulus forced me to re-evalute my behavior. I wasn't getting this at home, and though I don't have evidence to this fact, I would say that this girl isn't getting those lessons either.

Well, either you didn't watch the entire video, or you "selectively" missed something, because I'm pretty sure that letting a child frolic about in a room with broken glass (that she broke) is probably not the best course of action. And I'd be willing to bet that the "ignore it, and it will go away" attitude is what caused this in the first place.

A teacher fondling a student and telling them "I love you"would never involve the police being called and someone being handcuffed. :rolleyes:

To be fair to smooth you're being awfully subjective about some alternatives that should be approached objectively, and deserve equal consideration as possible opportunities, though I wouldn't say necessarily for this little girl.

On the contrary, I am being just as objective as they are to the actions that were taken.

liquidlight,

I agree with your sentiment. There are a variety of methods to address our childhood outbursts. As adults or even adolescents, external punishment is a quite different matter than when we are still in our development stages, in my opinion.


However, police interaction coupled with arrest is a violent expression of the state. That's why I mean--not that they were physically abusive. I think you would agree, upon reflection, that restraining someone against his or her will is violence upon the person and the person's freedom. If we link freedom to the core of one's identity, we would have to admit that restricting that freedom, even for cause, is violence upon the very existence and meaning of a free person's identity.

mrkilxx,
Not only did I watch the entire video, I showed it to a class full of univeristy students last night. You may think that leaving a child alone in that room is unacceptable, but that's no reason to discard my point unless you believe that was the only room available to place her in.

Ignoring it and it going away, whatever else it may have done, was not a factor in this situation as evidenced by the police officer's own statement that he had been involved in previous incidents. In fact, that singular statement bolsters my point that police intervention is having the opposite effect people in here think it would have.


In regards to point 2, rather than rolling your eyes at my statement, you would do better to reread it and realize that was directed at parents in this thread. The first sentence clearly distinquishes, to my mind, between restraining a child and "fondling" one. Why would you malign my point to reflect that of a pedophile? That makes very little sense to me and doesn't really add to the discussion, in my opinion.


EDIT: liquidlight, I want to point out that I don't classify violence as necessitating emotion. I would probably classify violent+emotion (in the way I think you are conceiving of emotion in such a circumstance) as abuse. I don't find that surprising given that you associate abuse with violence as a result of your upbringing. I don't want to speculate too much on that, however, I'm not trying to be offensive at all and I suspect you can gather that given our childhoods being seemingly similar.

But a smack on the bottom is violence. I could use the term "force" if that clarifies my position. That we can model non-force rather than force for our young children. But like I said, I'm not an expert, just giving an opinion because so many people asked who was going to step up to the plate and offer an alternative.

I think the experts have actually a more detailed guide for when to use force and when not to. I also think you might reconsider whether the force inflicted upon you by the state stops your deviance now, or did you learn another method to handle yourself?

I guess what I mean by that question is I conceive of the incarceration period as a cooling off period, but nothing more. I didn't learn much from it, anyway. The way I walk my life now is a product of what I learned from positive influences in my life, not imprisonment. I wonder if you feel the same way upon reflection.

But that's not what you said. Putting the child in isolation is completely different than leaving her in a place that she could cause further damage to public/private proprty and/or herself.


You are absolutely right. I don't believe the school or the police ignoring her is the problem.

Simply because someone who shares your side of the discussion already hinted at it. And yet you failed to admonish them, which in itself is very telling.

It's wasn't the time incarcerated that I learned from, it was the act of the incarceration at it's inception that taught me a new consequence, though your reference to a "cooling-down" is quite accurate. Once I understood that incarceration was one of the consequences I began to reassess what I'd been doing and came to several conclusions and adjustments to what I felt was acceptable behavior. Granted most of this were things that I learned about myself and not from the incarceration. On that note though that's why I've advocated supporting the action, in the hopes that it would be the particular catalyst much as it was for me in allowing this child to learn as much about herself as anything else.

I also think that you and I would define violence differently, for instance, I don't include things like spankings as violent unless done with a malicious intent. As you put it I much prefer the use of the word force as it seems, at least in my head, to be much more accurate.

Damn, what the child did was pretty bad. But, still I dont think she should have been handcuffed.

Assuming the news articles out there about this story are accurate, no I didn't defeat my own argument. The kid had been a holy terror many times before. The kid's mother had called the school and said they were not to lay a hand on the kid or she'd sue them. Those two elements should have been enough of a clue to the administration of the school that this kid was not manageable - in part because the kid is a little shit, and in part because the mom is threatening legal action if they DO discipline her. If a kid is not manageable, then the kid should be shipped out.

The school allowed themselves to be held hostage by the mother. They acted as though the mother is allowed to tell the school what rules it's allowed to set. In reality, it should have been the other way around. The school sets the rules, if the mom/kid don't like the rules, they leave. Easy as that.



Furthermore, back to the original question as to whether the handcuffing was necessary - the kid was sitting down and not going nuts when the cops got there. Why did they handcuff her? There was absolutely no reason for it.

[QUOTE=MooseMan3000]Alright, just to clarify a few things that obviously didn't get through.

1) They're campus police. They weren't arresting her, they were cuffing her so she didn't do any more damage.

2) The cops weren't AFRAID of her. They used three people to cuff her in order NOT TO HURT HER. Of course one person could do it, but that would involve throwing her on the ground, holding her arms behind her back with one hand and cuffing with the other. That might be painful for her.



Of course she deserved it. This is the second time that the administrators have called the campus police on this child. She was informed clearly that it was going to happen, and she persisted in being a little shit.Technically, she COULD have been arrested, because she purposely destroyed private property, but they didn't feel that was necessary. They were just going to remove her from the building and keep her there until the mother arrived and they could speak with her - perfectly reasonable.

More importantly, the mother is to blame here. The teachers at this school are obviously very lenient in doling out punishment - that tantrum went on for at LEAST the 6 minutes of the tape in the class, and the 5 in the office, probably longer. And all the teacher did to her the entire time was tell her to stop. "We're not allowed to destroy the room." The mother complained that the principal treated the child too harshly... I don't believe that for one god damned minute. If this video is representative of the incident the mother was talking about, she needs to get a fucking life.

The child hasn't been taught how to behave, and she has never been taught to respect, well, anything. She needs some tough love, and since the mother obviously isn't giving her any, the school has to step up. End of story.


I agree with this, handcuffing her was to avoid any more outbreaks and to calm her down.

So you're going to have the police "give her a talking to," after the last occurence when she had been warned that the handcuffing would have been the outcome? Why shouldn't she have been handcuffed? It's obvious from the points that you raise that she isn't going to police herself, her mother certianly hasn't been doing, and has apparently forbidden the teachers from doing it.

You're advocating that the police should have backed down and reinforced to this girl yet again that she can be a holy terror and whatever else she wants and get away with it because the worst that is going to happen to her is that people are going to give her a few idle threats.

Removing her age as a factor, since I'm relatively sure that we can all agree that this child knew precisely what she was doing and continued to do so with intent, if I were told that a particular behavior was going to land me in cuffs I'd be inclined to listen, then if I did it again most people would call me an idiot for ignoring the fact that I had been warned, this situation is not much different.

That's part of the problem these days....a lot of parents I see don't follow through with their "threats", and the kids stop respecting or even believing their parents.

Well see Liquid, there's a problem. First off, most police forces require the cop to have a reasonable suspicion that the individual being handcuffed presents an immediate threat of serious physical injury to the cop or to others in the area if they're not arresting them.

This kid was sitting at the table. She wasn't tearing up the room. She wasn't hitting anyone. She didnt' go nuts when she saw the cops. Not only that, but all the kids had been cleared out of the room. There were only adults, much larger and stronger than her, in the room. There is NO WAY those cops had a reasonable suspicion that she'd hurt them or anyone else in the room.

Handcuffing the kid was ridiculous. Plain and simple. There was no reason at ALL for it. The kid was under control at that point. Had the kid started going crazy again, then cuffing would probably have been justified.

Lemme ask you this. If you're in a room sitting quietly, would you be real thrilled if 3 cops burst in and cuffed you, not to put you under arrest, but just to restrain you? Of course, you would (or at least, you should) be pissed. You don't NEED restraining. You're not threatening anyone, you're not doing anything.

The cuffs are for one of two reasons. Restraint, or arrest. They're not arresting her, she doesn't need restraining at that point, there's no excuse for cuffing her.

I am advocating that the police should not have abused their handcuffs with the kid. I am advocating expelling the kid. The kid should learn that there are consequences, but that does not mean we have to make unreasonable consequences for the kid. When my kid colored on the wall I grounded him. I did not tie him up, because to tie him up would have been unreasonable, and frankly would have been child abuse. He learned that there are consequences to his actions, without the consequences being absurdly over the top.

right, but that's for YOUR kid. Obviously this child's parent does not show that there are consequences for such actions. If you don't make your own solution, someone else will make it for you.

You've summed up everything I wanted to say better than I could say it. How this is "controversial" is completely beyond me. They weren't roughing her up, she wasn't slammed on the desk, they weren't arresting her. They were handcuffing her because she was out of control and destructive, and a potential danger to herself (and other students, previously). And by this point, perhaps handcuffing is the only language an out of control five-year-old can understand.

I'd love to send the mother a good book on parenting.

EDIT: This whole thing is really such a shame. Her parents must be worthless -- children at that age are primarily shaped by their family life, which must be total shit. Now she's been hardened by police presence and interaction, and has already been handcuffed at age five. If this doesn't shape her up a bit, she's gonna go downhill from here.

My point was that there are appropriate disciplinary measures, and there are way over the top disciplinary measures. I don't tie my kid up because it would not be appropriate. And if the cops came to school and handcuffed my kid even though when they got there he was sitting quietly at a table, you'd better believe I'd sue the hell out of them. But don't worry. Junior would still face bigtime consequences at home if he ever did anything that required the school to call the cops. He just wouldn't get clapped in irons.