For those of you who read my blog yesterday, I made a correction after a reader commented. I invite you to go back and read Karen’t comment. On my dashboard I can see how many people visit my blog on any given day. Yesterday I had more visits than ever before. Chris had mentioned it on Facebook, which is probably the reason.
Karen, my visitor, made a really important point. I’d used the term “child abuse” in a loose manner. My mistake was a serious one so I corrected the whole paragraph.
One of the problems with blogging is that I am my own proof reader. I have been revisiting my blogs for the last year and doing some editing as I go. I can’t believe some of the things I have written. Some sentences have been so confusing it is no wonder a person might never return. But mistakes in sentence structure or spelling are pretty forgivable. Misinformation or misquoting can be harmful. I will have to work on that.
Your humility is noteworthy. But I gotta stick up for you, mom. Karen wasn’t right.
I think Karen took what you said, reworded it in an extreme way, and then addressed the extreme. People shouldn’t do this, but they do, especially on blogs. She read into your post and interpreted it incorrectly. You weren’t saying children were at fault for seeking abuse, and you weren’t aluding to horrifying examples like intentional cigarette burns (not even close).
But, that’s how she received it. And dealing with responses like that is part of blogging. It helps clarify and discuss and learn about challenging subjects.
Clarification is a better response, not changing the blog post. I kind of want to go back and ready the original paragraph, but it has been changed. I remember what you said was noteworthy and quite good. That’s why I forwarded it along to my audience, and that’s part of sharing good and worthy ideas. I think your blog is one of the best undiscovered secrets in the blogosphere, so keep writing about topics worth sharing.
I think the use of the word “abuse” in my original blog needed to be changed. In today’s world it even has clinical meaning. It is true that Karen took it to extreme but I would never want to be giving real abusers excuses. Remember that among my students were the inmates at the local jail. Even spanking took on a whole new meaning in my jail class than it had in my classes in the schools.
This is the first time I have changed a blog. Thank you for passing it on to others and I will write more parenting stuff. I don’t think the corrected paragraph changes the message of the blog.