Alyce LaViolette found Jodi Arias to have been abused by her parents. Janeen DeMarte found Jodi to be immature. Putting the two together, I considered a correlation between
immaturity and abuse. Below are just some personal musings on the subject related in context to the Arias trial.
We know individuals mature at different ages depending on things such as life experience, health, environment, intelligence, education and psychological factors. Maturation is a cradle-to-grave process with no empirical value we can assign to it for comparison. Still, we each have an opinion as to whether a specific behavior is either mature or immature as compared to the person's chronological age.
As to abuse, I can tell you I was raised by
loving but strict, bible-thumping grandparents. Much emphasis was
placed on honesty, responsibility and respectability -- qualities
children don't easily understand or appreciate. The primary teaching tools used on me included a hand to the butt, the belt, the flyswatter and the switch. I also recall getting a bar of hand soap rubbed on my tongue once or twice. Should I add Tabasco sauce was used to get me to stop sucking my thumb? Oh and what about the time they used a child's harness to keep me in bed? Is anybody feeling sorry for me yet? I didn't think so.
Did I hate being disciplined? Naturally. Did I sometimes blow it
out of proportion to my friends? Oh, yeah. Did I play the victim? Yep, guilty. But, in all fairness, the bulk of my childhood issues were caused by my own hoof and mouth disease -- you know -- leaving the house
without permission, not coming home at the appointed time, engaging in
back talk, saying a "bad" word, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Not even mature adults like being told what to do, but we adapt and conform as we mature. If we mature, we learn to "take 'No' for an answer." If not, bad things happen.
People like Alyce LaViolette would say I was abused by my grandparents. But I honestly don't see it that way at all. I had a normal childhood as we defined it in the 50s and 60s. Bad behavior had consequences and we expected that. Now I'm not saying
it was ever, in any way, normal and customary to truly abuse children, just that nobody got all worked up over a wooden spoon. Nowadays, a parent may get reported for simply keeping a child in timeout for too long.
You get where I'm going with this, right?
P.S. I said in other posts that I am an abuse victim and that is true. However, lest you think otherwise, the abuse had absolutely nothing to do with my childhood or my grandparents.
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