Talk:Tough love

Scope
What's the scope of this article? If it's just the "expression", fine. Or else, I'm thinking of citing some couplets from Tirukkural that exhort this "virtue" by saying "a good friend is someone who's tough with you when needed." -- Sundar \talk \contribs 12:55, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

I think this article needs to at least admit to the terms use by abusive parents/spouses as a means of justifying physically or emotionally damaging acts. I hear the term more in this context than in the one defined, and was surprised at this articles portrayal of the terminology. 75.159.70.161 (talk) 23:53, 26 March 2014 (UTC)Ribs


 * @75.159.70.161 The fact that you had to resort to your interpretation and there is no clarity in the article seems to be a problem. Ybllaw (talk) 14:25, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

Discussion
The External links are obviously biased. I think an interesting discussion would be secular vs religious tough love programs and the driving ideology dominating the facilities that are suffering the highest abuse rates. Facilities that are used as nationalist Christian training camps are obviously dysfunctional. But that isn't the purposed of tough love. Tough love is acceptance of the principle that HELPING a person destroy themselves and others is behavior in need of social intervention.

75.15.132.113 01:57, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Speaking as someone who has survived 2 of these programs, I can assure you that it's not just the Christian training camps that are doing this. Read the news links for yourself- most aren't religiously affiliated. If you'd like some cold, hard facts about how many children/teenagers have DIED in the care of these facilities, check out this site. http://www.caica.org/NEWS%20Deaths%20List%20of%20Names%20-names%20omitted.htm Facts don't really lie, I've yet to see any positive reports about centers like WWASPS that weren't proven to be planted by employees. With the CAICA site, it's nice to put pictures of the deceased children with names and statistics about how they died. Maybe then you'll slightly understand. 76.185.121.215 10:02, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Edit to add: the vast majority of the deaths were either in state-funded, non religious programs, or WWASP centers and CEDU clones- definitely not religious programs. The closest thing they have to religion is convincing parents that it helped their children, even after they commit suicide upon leaving the program.

Quote from a hanged boy's mother: "Without the program, Corey would never have had a vehicle for his power and his 'highs.' ... I KNOW I did everything I could for Corey, and I don't regret for a moment that he was involved in this program. ... I only wish Corey had been less successful at concealing his pain and his morbid sense of failure.

"Many others manage to survive — BECAUSE OF THIS PROGRAM AND THE HELP IT GAVE THEM." source: http://www.denver-rmn.com/news/0702core5.shtml —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.185.121.215 (talk) 10:12, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

Yeah. this article doesn't really seem to get the point. "Tough Love" boot camps aren't true examples. Tough love is a last resort option, generally to try to force someone to turn his/her life around. The example of cutting off a drug addict's parental money because nothing else has worked is indeed a prefect example of tough love, because if the addict is not cut off, he will just keep wasting the money on drugs. In this case, cutting the addict off is unquestionably the right thing to do. If that doesn't work, the case is hopeless anyway. Another example is kicking someone out of the house who is just sitting around, doing nothing and not even trying to get a job, because why should they, they've got free food and a roof over their heads. It is not being mean to someone to prepare them for the real world, that's just abuse. 74.211.60.178 (talk) 15:43, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Context
The "Tough love" boot camps sentence and it's citation is clearly taken out of context in an attempt to reach a conclusion not made in the NIH report. A more complete view of the data below reveals the bias the wiki author and the cited article is bringing to the discussion.

Six programs addressing arrest or violence precursors were classified as “effective with reservation;” that is, they only had internal rather than external RCT replications. Those programs include: Big Brothers Big Sisters (e.g., reduction in hitting); Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care (e.g., reduction in incarceration); Nurse Family Partnership (e.g., reduction in arrests, crime); Project Towards No Drug Abuse (e.g., reduction in weapon carrying); Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies (e.g., reduction in peer aggression); and Brief Strategic Family Therapy (e.g., reduction in conduct disorder, socialized aggression).

Safety, however, is much more difficult to assess because the intervention literature does not report systematically on safety (side effect) issues. Among the most important safety issues to be considered is the hazard of “contagion.” When young people with delinquent proclivities are brought together, the more sophisticated can instruct the more naïve in precisely the behaviors that the intervener wishes to prevent. This provides a substantial objection to programs that aggregate violent youth rather than providing an individualized home and school-based treatment program. Even when treatments are individualized, contagion is possible. For example, clinical interventions may facilitate interactions between clients on the way to and from program activities as well as on program premises (e.g., “hanging out” at the clinic, using common public transportation, creating friendship networks as the result of having met in the treatment program).

The evidence indicates that “scare tactics” don’t work and there is some evidence that they may make the problem worse rather than simply not working. One of the hazards of the juvenile court system is the impact of having a record on the child’s subsequent life course. Such evidence as there is indicates that group detention centers, boot camps, and other “get tough” programs can provide an opportunity for delinquent youth to amplify negative effects on each other. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reviewed evidence that indicates that laws increasing the ease of transferring juveniles to the adult judicial system are counterproductive and lead to greater violence in the juveniles moving through the adult systems without deterring juveniles in the general population from violent crime. In other fields, it has been shown that identifying children as being at risk has its own hazards. Labeling a child as deficient in some respect may lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Researchers must be certain that similar problems do not happen here. Ineffective programs may not harm the participants directly (although some do) but they may have an important toxic effect nonetheless; namely the “opportunity cost” of funds misspent on an unsuitable program that might have been spent on an effective one.

The juvenile violence literature does not pay enough attention to secular effects and ecological change and their consequences for life trajectories. What, for example, is the impact of an intervening economic recession, the dismantling of a housing project, or the gentrification of the neighborhood? There is little in the juvenile violence literature that rigorously addresses such questions. Because secular change is so significant in modern life, this becomes a significant problem for longitudinal studies. That is, the life circumstances when youngsters enter a study may have changed so greatly by the time they enter the age of risk that the findings based on one cohort no longer apply to the new generation of youngsters. This is an argument for employing accelerated longitudinal designs in epidemiologic studies; that is, entering cohorts of different age (e.g., 1 year, 5 years, 9 years) at the beginning of the study so that after a follow through of 4 years, one can have a sample extending from 1 to 21 (instead of waiting 21 years).Cdw1952 (talk) 01:23, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Phrase Origins
I looked into the origins of the phrase a little. I haven't been able to find enough on the following sources to know if they have the same meaning. Ideally someone would read Milliken's book to see who he might have borrowed the phrase or concept from. Sondra.kinsey (talk) 16:29, 9 December 2016 (UTC)


 * jeepers... Milliken's book is about school dropouts... Nothing to do with families' turning their backs on family members' and any perceived faults. See https://archive.org/details/lastdropoutstope00mill/page/n13/mode/2up?view=theater

Knitwitted (talk) 13:16, 10 July 2022 (UTC)

Possible Earlier Sources
 * Claude and Fanny Usher "Tough Love” (around 1900) (see this review)

Tough Love and Hierarchical Families
This article is all wrong. Tough love was initially meant as a synonym for real love, which is based on equality. It was contrasted with family love, which is very often based on unequal roles, dominance and submission. Fractalzen (talk) 1 November 2012

Where is the line between "though love" and setting boundaries?
"The term has been appropriated to justify authoritarian parenting and boot camps for teenagers which Maia Szalavitz characterizes as abusive. The American National Institutes of Health says that 'get tough treatments do not work and there is some evidence that they may make the problem worse'. Szalavitz believes 'tough love' encourages unnecessarily harsh rules, 'brutal confrontations', and a presumption that pain produces growth"

As here is said "unnecessarily harsh rules" and "a presumption that pain produces growth". But doesn't then specify when a "harsh rule" becomes "unnecessar[y]", nor does it specify if "pain" doesn't "produce growth", what the actual effect of it is. How do "Szalavitz beliefs" add anything here? Wikipedia is not a forum. Ybllaw (talk) 14:32, 22 February 2024 (UTC)