Lisa’s Response to Debi Pearl’s Prayer for the destruction of her enemies

Lisa has said very well what I have had neither the time nor energy to write so I am going to give her comments the exposure they deserve. In response to my post regarding Debi Pearl’s public prayer asking God to destroy her enemies, Lisa said: I read the article, also, and I was appalled.…

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Considering Adoption Reform

Whatcom Mom had an interesting comment which I would like to highlight. I’m hoping the readers here will have some ideas about improving adoption home study practice, based on what we have learned from the deaths of Hana Williams and Lydia Schatz and injuries to their siblings. So you know where I’m coming from. I’m…

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Quotes from To Train Up A Child

When quoting from To Train Up A Child (written and published by Michael and Debi Pearl), we should be careful about paraphrasing. We are being accused of misquoting. Here are some quotes from the first edition of the book, which is found online here. I got the page numbers  for the 1st edition (1994) from…

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Amy’s Arguments

The philosophical underpinnings of these kinds of “Christian” behaviour “training” models do not sit well with biblical theology. The more I read about Ezzo and Pearl’s behaviour modification techniques the more I am reminded of Behaviouristic psychology (the works of Skinner, Watson, Pavlov etc) Fundamentally, behavioural psychology advocates the use operant/classical conditioning for behaviour modification…

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Danielle’s arguments

“What is “wrong”, IMO, about going strictly from a training point-of-view is that children are *NOT* dogs, mules, mice, etc. (Some could pointedly argue you don’t even need to train dogs with all this “pain”.) There is a future. We do not just need our children to be manageable *today*, we hopefully want them to…

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Kathy Thile’s Arguments

“The Pearls believe that training is a separate thing from teaching and discipline. They start very early using a switch to inflict pain…to train babies to avoid things the parent wants the baby to avoid…just like a behavioral psychologist might use electric shocks and rewards to train rats to navigate a maze. In my opinion…

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