To spank or not to spank
Here’s a Yahoo article that says some recent research indicates that spanking leads to increased mental illness. But this Slate piece says Yahoo’s wrong:
Despite the Yahoo headline, and many others like it, the study, published in Pediatrics in early July, does not actually link spanking to mental illness. In fact, the study has nothing to do with spanking at all. Canadian researchers asked 34,000 adults how often they had been pushed, grabbed, shoved, slapped, or hit by their parents or other adults when they were children. The authors explain that they were trying to assess the long-term effects of regular harsh physical punishment, which, they write, “some may consider more severe than ”˜customary’ physical punishment (i.e., spanking).” Ultimately, the researchers reported that adults who have mental problems are more likely to say they were pushed, grabbed, shoved, slapped, or hit by their parents than healthy adults are.
And spanking itself? As the Slate article says, “the research on spanking is messy and controversial.” Read the whole thing; it contains a pretty good discussion of why spanking is inherently difficult to evaluate.
As for my opinion, here it is (and this was true even before I read the Slate article): I believe that a little mild spanking when a rule is violated and the nature of the infraction has been made clear to the child causes no lasting harm. But the problem is that spanking is a practice that can easily escalate. The temptation is great, and parenting is stressful, especially with a defiant child (the ones most likely to get spanked).
A good parent tends to spank in a manner that doesn’t hurt a child in any significant way, and it can help the child learn the rules, especially important ones (don’t run into the street!!). But a good parent doesn’t usually need that tool; he/she can almost always control a child well without it. Whereas an ineffective or abusive or bad parent is almost never able to spank that way and then spanking can easily segue into an angry show of arbitrary anger, raw power, or outright abuse.
I agree that a spanking can be an appropriate punishment, or even a “show stopper” for bad behavior. It is when parents strike in anger or rage that the physical action ceases to be discipline and instead becomes terrorism. Yes, terrorism is a strong word but that is what causes the distress and damages childrens’ psyches.
Ah. Childhood “correction” …and really, training.
I have a little story.
My first marriage, our second home was a rental in the woods (really: up a steep – though paved – mountain road, and in a cabin in the middle of a, well, field …”field” because mowing it was more like “the harvest” lol …though perhaps “meadow” would have been more apt? …with a picturesque barn needing a new roof in the back).
The cabin had wood heat. With a cast iron wood stove. In the middle of the living room. The small living room. (With a beautiful view of aforementioned meadow out the huge picture window.)
Wherein the young couple (my ex- and I) lived with …our, hmm, about 18 month old at that time, if my memory serves (it was almost 40 years ago: the specifics do dim after a bit).
That stove was dangerous to grown-ups, let alone babies.
And our toddler was very bright, and very curious. And adventurous. Oh, he minded pretty well. But he was fearless.
Ah, but that forbidden stove. That the adults used to open and shove stuff (i.e., wood) into. And what was “hot” supposed to mean, really?
Well. There was a half wall divider between the kitchen and the living room. A wall that adults could easily see over, into the living room, but that crawling tots rarely looked up to the heights thereof to check for watching eyes.
So, one weekend morning (da’s day off, and mom’s morning shift at the local breakfast house), in one of my frequent glances over the divider to see what my suddenly quiet toddler is doing (as I’m making our breakfast), I see him looking furtively around, but mostly looking at the forbidden stove.
The stove which I’d inadvertently let cool down a bit on the chilly winter morning (I hadn’t fed it for awhile). But which is still hot. Hot enough to hurt, probably.
…but not damage, I surmise.
“Time for a learning experience,” Papa (me) thinks (especially as Mama ain’t there to give me grief over it).
So the little hand raises and quite deliberately touches the stove. And jerks back …and the – loud – crying commences. Real tears. Not mad crying. Hurt crying. Sincere tears.
And it did hurt. (I touched the stove, after, too, when he wasn’t looking. Ouch.)
Papa walks in and picks up crying son, and (after examining the hand: no damage, just pink) heads to the ice box and commences to doctor the boy.
No anger. Just soothing talk, asking him if he’s okay, and what happened, and all cold ice cubes and cold running water to take away the sting. And the tears.
Which don’t take that long to dry up (oh he hurt right enough, but he wasn’t damaged).
…while explaining that that was what “hot” is, and why baby must never ever touch the stove when it’s hot.
And intent and intelligent little eyes still brimming a bit, watched me patiently “fix things” on the Owie hand, and clutching on tight with the free hand. But totally understanding (you can always tell when they understand).
And a couple of hours later, when the stove was completely cool, demonstrating that it was okay to touch the stove, because it’s not the stove that hurts: it’s the hot that hurts.
And we never, ever had a problem with Shawn and the wood stove again.
(Yeah, I caught hell from both mom and sister-in-law – Shawn had “two moms” lol – when I told them about it later that day. But both could see he hadn’t been hurt, and both also noticed the immediate change in behaviour …and his respect for that stove when it was hot. And the new word. “Hot-owie.” I had parenting cred’ for a few months on that one.)
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I guess my point in relating this vignette is: he didn’t need spanking, or yelled at. Or protected. He needed the chance to learn. Some lessons are painful. As a parent, you have to judge those times. Sometimes …perhaps often …”failure” is really more accurately described as “experience”.
If you define spanking as a swat with an open hand to the butt, almost all children have been spanked, and most grow up just fine. Confusing that type of spanking with blows to the face or head, a closed fist or violent shaking is intentionally misleading.
Spanking should never be more forceful than what Mr. Frank describes and it should be used only when a young child is persistently disobedient. None of our children ever needed more than 2 spankings in their early years.
Davis — smart. But precisely the thing the spanking is supposed to impart — the pain-as-learning-tool element.
Your job as a parent is to protect your kids from errors they will suffer permanent damage from, not temporary damage. The universal purpose of temporary damage is to teach caution… and you let it do its job despite the maternal instinct to stop ALL “owies”. And that, for one thing, is why there is a need for the paternal influence and the problem with our modern nanny state attitude of maternalism all the way all the time.
Spanking is, ideally, for when there are no reasonable “temporary damage” issues. Like running out into the street without looking. Yeah, it’s possible for a child to suffer only mild damage when hit by a car, but there’s really no way to impart “temporary” damage for sure… so spanking is called for in its place, to properly associate minor, survivable pain with an error-action instead of forcing them to be crippled for life as a result of an error-action.
I grew up with a grandmother who occasionally thought a “switch” was a good idea. And boy, it did sting. But I’m still here, unscarred, and with one hell of a lot more common sense than most of the idiots out there who never got “switched”. My mother occasionally used a belt, since she lacked the strength/body-mass to do any “swatting”, and my dad wasn’t around… Never that hard, no blood or other significant damage — just a strong stinging sensation and enough residual tenderness to make the memory stick. And I’m pretty sure I deserved it every time, looking back to the ones I happen to remember. It wasn’t that many, but they did happen once in a while.
Spare the rod and spoil the child. And that’s why there are so many spoiled brats these days masquerading as “adults”. And many of them are in political office.
>>>> almost all children have been spanked, and most grow up just fine.
Actually, a lot of them haven’t. There are a lot of environments where such an action, done in the open, will result in a call to CPS.
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From a local college newspaper editorial, about 15-20-odd years old now.
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“Graphic illustration of what the hell is wrong with this society: a college male yells at a group of college females, calling them ‘water buffaloes.’ They tell on him, he gets put on probation, he is threatened with suspension and he is forced to take a ‘sensitivity training course.’
Sensitivity; I hate that word.
Sensitivity is no longer an admirable quality. It is something forced upon everyone. Laws are being altered to force people to become ‘more sensitive,’ and those who are not have to fake it to avoid arrest by the New Age Police.
This is the outcome of a generation of sissies, and I tell you, it makes me sick.
All kids until now had a set of rules. If somebody called you a name you didn’t take a shine to, you grabbed him and beat the tar out of him.
These were simple rules. It was a model of frontier justice, and every kid understood it. [As Bo Diddley said, ‘You don’t let your mouth write no check your tail can’t cash.’]
And it worked.
Sure, there were kids who ran and told, but they always got their tail kicked sooner or later…
But somewhere along the line, these bonehead hippies decided to instill new values in their kids; ‘ALWAYS run to the teacher and squeal, NEVER stay and fight.’
So instead of learning to stand up and fight, learning to say when, kids learned to be finks and crybabies.
Of course not every single parent taught this to every sinlge kid, but it was a pervasive philosophy that slowly crept across popular conciousness. Teachers taught it in school. Babysitters reinforced it, and slowly it became the generally accepted path for childhood.”
And now, the end result is more lawsuits than ever. There’s lawsuits over name calling and emotional damage because some wimp gets their feelings hurt. So when someone calls someone a name, they get reprimanded for not being sensitive. But he does not need to be. Everyone needs to quit complaining and
toughen up a little.
Those women from the original example should have grabbed that guy and beaten the bejesus out of him. If you can’t handle name-calling without running to school officials, you clearly missed out on part of the maturing process.
If someone is telling ‘nigger’ jokes, he should get his butt kicked. It would teach him decorum, as well as letting everyone know what kind of person he is.
But instead children are taught to tell ‘nigger’ jokes in private. That way they can be racist while everyone thinks they are sensitive.
… Fortunately, I was raised in a throwback community, cut off from fancy-shmancy eduactional improvements. If some kid took my basketball, I hit him and took my ball back. If he didn’t cry, we’d play together and end up friends.
If I called a girl stupid, she’d round up a bunch of her homegirls and make me look bad in front of my friends. Then I would learn that she was not to be trifled with.
What parents today don’t realize is that kids are incredibly resilient and perceptive. By raising a generation of kids where parents are afraid to hit them because it constitutes abuse, we have a generation of teens who think they are above punishment.
My mom used to smack me with a wooden spoon. It hurt like you wouldn’t believe.
… That’s what we need more of — my mom whipping kids with a wooden spoon.
There is no such thing as a fine line between discipline and abuse — there is a big, fat line, and every kid knows it. Sure, that spoon hurt, but was it abuse? Hell no, it was a lesson, and it worked.
In no way does telling kids what to think open their minds. … Kids have to sort things out on their own. It has worked that way for centuries. But now we have established a culture of blame, and we teach kids no matter what they do, it is not their fault — someone else is responsible.
There is now a generation of immature, self-involved brats with short attention spans and no sense of discipline.
And one day, they’ll be in charge.”
– Nathaniel Hensley –
“adults who have mental problems are more likely to say they were pushed, grabbed, shoved, slapped, or hit by their parents than healthy adults are.”
Okay. Well, we certainly need to assume that adults with mental problems are accurate about their memories of their childhoods.
And, of course, people with mental problems are far more likely to have sought counseling. One of the very first things most counselors do is inquire about parents to see if they can locate the source of the problem. Surprisingly, parents often turn out to be fingered as the problem which usually is a great relief to the client who might worry that they were somehow to blame. It’s nice to have someone to blame.
Note — I have no reason to doubt that having parents beat the crap out of a kid might increase the chance of mental problems. My point is that the study has a causation issue in the methodology reported. We don’t know that the reports of beating are accurate. And we have several factors which raise the possibility that the subset in question would be expected to report more beating, even if it didn’t occur.
[see e.g. false memory of sexual abuse is far more likely to be claimed by someone in counseling than from those who haven’t seen a counselor.]
Jeez. Neo writes “Whereas an ineffective or abusive or bad parent is almost never able to spank that way and then spanking can easily segue into an angry show of arbitrary anger, raw power, or outright abuse.”
Ineffective or abusive or bad parents are just flat ineffective, abusive, and bad. And all the social workers on earth and anti-spanking laws and “remedial” social engineering will not change that.
Don Carlos: actually, sometimes abusive parents are helped by therapists, social workers, etc. I’ve seen it happen. Some people do respond favorably to alternate suggestions and demonstrations of how to control and guide kids’ behavior without being abusive.
There are times when spanking is most definitely called for. Here is an example from my own childhood that still makes me feel ashamed to this day.
When I was in grade school, I bullied another child. I did not make a habit of bullying other kids, but there was this one child I bullied, and pretty relentlessly. It was shameful and to this day I’m deeply ashamed of it. But one day my dad caught me in the act.
My father rarely got physical with me at all, but on this occasion he let me have it and I mean he left me have it GOOD. Looking back on it now, it seems to me that he did EXACTLY the right thing. The punishment for my actions was so severe because my actions were so very, very wrong. The hiding I received communicated to me the wrongness of my actions with an emphasis and an immediacy that was richly needed and that could not have been conveyed in any other way. It also made me feel a profound sense of shame in relation to my father that no scolding could have replicated, and that was really pivotal in my understanding just how badly I’d behaved. Suffice it to say that I NEVER, EVER bullied another kid again!!!
Not only is spanking sometimes permissible, there are times when it’s the only appropriate course. Some forms of misbehavior are just so bad and so wrong that spanking is the only proper response. That’s just my opinion, of course, and fortunately I think the occasions when spanking is called for are very rare; but they do occur.
“As the Slate article says, ‘the research on spanking is messy and controversial.’ ”
Messy and controversial, only because a desire to rebel against God’s thoughts is involved. The denial of the fact that children left to their own devices will incline to evil rather than good is behind the anti-spanking doctrine.
It goes with saying, as many posters above wrote, that physical wounds and lashing at anger (even just verbal) aren’t within the Biblical bounds of the rod whose sparing would spoil the child. But to assume a child is nothing but a small adult is wrong, and to assume a natural human inclination toward good–as opposed to the truth of having to struggle to be good–is to set oneself against our Creator’s truth.
Neo: You have revised “almost never” to “sometimes”. I remain dubious, especially given the great flock of social workers and other well-intended types, all of whom are getting middle class incomes, many of them in gov’t jobs, for “sometimes” results. I suspect “almost never” is the more likely.
Don Carlos: oh, I have plenty of dubiousness about the efforts of social workers and therapists to really change behavior. The old joke about the lightbulb wanting to change is operative.
However, it’s not just “almost never” that people change in this respect. It is indeed “sometimes.” One of the reasons is that in terms of parenting, especially parents who are abusive, many of those who are abusive but not sociopaths or severely mentally ill (and the “abusive but not sociopaths or severely mentally ill” group is the majority of them) are actually upset about their treatment of their children and are looking for an alternative way but just don’t see it, or what they’ve tried hasn’t worked. If they try something different and better and it works, they are pretty motivated to apply it.
A mind—and behavior—is a very difficult, but hardly impossible, thing to change.