Is Spanking an Acceptable Form of Discipline?

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Believe it or not, parents are becoming less violent as time goes by. This should give us some hope.

Psychohistorian Lloyd de Mause puts it like this:

    "The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of childcare, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, terrorised, and sexually abused."

The study of the history of parenting reveals awful truths about the collective experience of our species over time. There was a time when practices such as infanticide and child abandonment were not only prevalent in many cultures, but were regarded as socially acceptable.

It has only been a very short amount of time that we have rightly named violence toward women "domestic violence," and violence toward children "abuse." As recently as a few decades ago, these behaviors were largely regarded as private family affairs, and as such, not subject to the scrutiny of public morality.

Spanking is a tool of parenting that is squarely in the path of this evolutionary trend away from violence. It is a practice that disrespects and threatens the most vulnerable members of our society. After all, if we strike another adult in order to change their behavior, it's called "assault." Hit your partner, it's "domestic violence." Hit a child? ...well, that's called spanking.

In the last couple of centuries, all kinds of violence has been challenged. Arguments were made in favor of slavery and torture that would be regarded by most modern people as heinous.

I'm not trying to equate spanking with slavery. But it illustrates the point that the defense of violence has, over time, been trumped by the advance of nurturance and empathy. It is possible to envision a time when spanking has gone the way of other antiquated violent tools of parenting, when parents are informed and equipped with other ways of regulating their own feelings, so that they can guide their children toward the kind of future they imagine.