Discipline helps girls too!

Someone finally gets around to studying whether or not bad parenting tends to create mean girls and finds out that lo and behold, it does!

"The initial causes of violence are found in the early learning experiences in the family, which includes weak family bonding, and ineffective monitoring and supervision," its report said. "The exposure to and reinforcement for violence in the home, including physical abuse, has a tremendous impact on the potential for later adolescent female violence."

So basically what they are saying is that young women, like young men, tend to become nasty, violent hooligans when their parents won't lay down the law with them from an early age. This should only come as a surprise to you if you are a hippie idealist who believes that children are born basically good, wholesome and innocent, the way they tend to naturally treat one another without parental supervision notwithstanding, naturally.

In Jones' view, it is the adults responsible for guiding girls to adulthood who are at least as much to blame as the girls themselves.

"Kids will be kids, but adults have to be adults," Jones wrote in his report. "Sadly, in this saga, I was struck by the reticence of many adults to accept the role of being the grown-up.'"

The very language that many adults use today reveals a distinctly juvenile attitude toward a lot of important things like family life. There are too many people who put their own "quality of life" before their significant other or their children. With numbers like these on how few women would stay in a relationship for their kids' sake, it's not hard to wonder why Jones found it hard for people to accept responsibility for their kids. These aren't even stats for abusive relationships either.

It's not like the government makes it any easier on parents, though. With legislative geniuses like this who by a pitiful application of the transitive property of equality equates spanking children with animal abuse, it's no small wonder why some parents are recalcitrant to be tougher with their kids:

But Lieber is optimistic that lawmakers will find her proposal hard to resist. For the record, she does not have children and says she was not slapped as a child. But she does have a cat named Snoop, which her veterinarian told her never to hit.

``And if you never hit a cat,'' Lieber said, ``you should never hit a kid.''

Speaking as someone who grew up around a lot of cats, loves cats and knows cats... this is a bunch of crap. Spanking never hurt a cat, nor did it ever hurt a child. Cats, like children, need to be disciplined and believe it or not, but cats that are routinely disciplined and held in check are well-behaved animals just as consistently disciplined kids tend to behave well.