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Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by eric3579.

Teaching kids to work through emotional pain... with physical pain?

I'm in two minds about this.

I'm glad they are supportive of kids and teaching them to face adversity and the inclusion of the parents is even better.

On the other hand, I'm not sure about making the kid cry in front of the rest of the class. I'm just not actually sure that's helpful.

Also, eh, religion... but whatever works for them I guess.

I think he didn't make the child cry but the child did begin to cry and then he helped walk the child through and make sense of the experience.

Fair point.

Will make a good slave which have learned to suffer and endure pain uselessly. Dignifying suffering is a road to nothing but more of the same.

Better men than you disagreed:
Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.

Good role model? More like psychological abuse from a jedi wannabe.

What's the point of this test? To see if the kid can break a board the wrong way?

How about he teaches the kid the correct punching technique first, so that the kid won't break his hand.

Punching has got nothing to do with pain or strength, and all about technique.

You kinda missed the whole boat when you still think the lesson had anything to do with learning how to punch better or harder. This wasn't a scene from some movie where the kid needs to go on to take out the bully with his fists or win some tournament to save the day. The entire point was about life being hard, and painful and needing to be able to get through that without hiding from it. Breaking a board wasn't at all the important bit.

Life is a road of suffering. Most things worth doing require suffering and sacrifice. If you don't learn how to overcome hardship, it's likely to overcome you.

His kung fu will be strong.....yours will not. He'll make your eagles claw look like a chicken!

Breaking the board is the important bit, but how you break it is even more important. Learning how to punch correctly takes time, effort, concentration, discipline etc, you learn about yourself and about life's challenges in a natural way. It's not something that can be forced fed into you in this contrived manner, because the pain of persistent effort and burden of continual concentration in your mind is much greater than any temporary physical pain. Truly challenging yourself is much harder than any task someone else can set for you.

Otherwise, what is the lesson here? Life is hard, so don't prepare, and then use brute force to make up for it later? Life and martial arts are both about applying the most elegant and effective solution that fit the problem, not about brute forcing your way through things.

So really, the instructor has failed at training both the mind and body here. If he wants the child to believe in himself that he can punch, then teaching the right technique will give the child that confidence in much better way. The child would have never doubted his ability to punch well in the first place, as he overcame life's challenge long before it even was a challenge.

And the person who has never suffered, whose back is against the wall weeping in pain, struggling but unable to cope? What is that person's fate? Freedom? I think not.

I heard the kid say that he didn't trust his left hand and he was pulling his punches -- not doing as he was trained in the fear of the moment.

I thought the leader did a terrific job with the kid.

I loved his acceptance of the tears. Paraphrasing what @aslo said elsewhere, jokingly, it is the scars that cry. (I paraphrased badly, by the way.)

We have to redefine what it means to be a "man." So much toxic masculinity out there.

Not a fan of hitting on the father, though. That was weird.

Now we need to talk to our girls like this. Be a woman. This is what it means to be a woman.

Good stuff. I loved this.

Here is the exchange that broke it open for me. So fricking good. Even thought it was a "joke."



@aslo
Yeah, that's the scar tissue talking, let it go big guy, it's okay to cry... ; )

@transmorpher said:

So much cringe. I can't handle it. Not so much the people, but the editing. And definitely the cheery acoustic kickstarter music at the end. It hurts.

They all should have prepared better for the test TBH. Inflicting pain on purpose or through bad technique is not a great idea.

Most of the "pain" for the dad is from keeping his watch and his ring on. Fairly unprofessional overall.

Good job to manoeuver through all the psychological obstacles, but meh training IMHO. That said it is better to have a good person as trainer, than an exceptionally able bad guy.

Also martial arts dont make you a slave, they make you a servant and you get to choose who or what to serve.

The message is morally unambiguous - life is tough, don't give up, all those other feel good messages. No one worth mentioning disagrees with that.

The context in which it is delivered is morally ambiguous because it deals with things like fighting, training through pain, stuff like that.

Some kids benefit a lot from tough love and painful life lessons. Believe me when i say some kids are ruined by it. I assume this gentleman understands that and probably doesn't treat every kid the same way.

Wisdoms like "to toughen him up", "make a man of him", "for his own good" and the like can remind people of how their own abusers or bullies would excuse their behaviour. Obviously this video has nothing to do with that kind of thing, but you can understand how it might be more obvious to some than others.

That all probably sounds strange if you've never been bullied or treated like that, but yeah, that's what the video brought to my mind.