Is Spanking an Acceptable Form of Discipline?

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John Rosemond says that parents have employed spanking for thousands of years. That doesn’t make it right. Many barbaric punishments that were once accepted in society – the thumbscrew, the rack, burning at the stake, capital and corporal punishment are no long allowed. Wives can no longer be beaten by their husbands. Some “traditions” in society exist only because of ignorance of better techniques.

Corporal punishment is the intentional infliction of pain to stop or prevent misbehavior. Rosemond objects to calling spanking "hitting." The dictionary definition of spanking includes the word “hitting.” Spanking is hitting, plain and simple. John Rosemond says that he and many people he speaks to were hit and they turned out OK. It is hard for us to acknowledge that people who loved us physically hurt us. This stems from a phenomenon known to psychologists as “identification with the aggressor,” the “Patty Hearst Syndrome.” Even dramatically abused children will often state they love their parents.

Most people who were hit by parents can remember the incidents as if they happened yesterday, so burned into the psyche are these experiences. This is not the kind of memory we should be giving children of growing up.

Rosemond says that social science research shows kids today are more violent. That is untrue. Youth violence is down according to the U.S. Surgeon General Report on Youth Violence. Violence against teachers is down at about the same rate as the paddling use decline. See link below for more information.

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I didn't say that because something has been around for centuries, millenia even, makes it right. If you're going to argue with me, perhaps you should strive to comprehend what I'm saying first instead of simply reacting with a knee-jerk. I'm saying that hundreds, if not thousands of years is enough to know that spanking is not harmful. Overwhelmingly, people in my generation were spanked as children. I rarely talk to someone who reports emotional harm as a result. The research of Diana Baumrind and Robert Larzelere, both impeccably objective individuals, confirms this. Baumrind has found that children who are occasionally spanked...and I have repeatedly, in books and in my newspaper column said that occasional is the only acceptable level...score higher on scales of well being than children who are never spanked. But liberals don't care about facts. For them, the only thing that matters is how they FEEL about an issue. They FEEL that spanking is barbaric, inhumane, and so on blah blah blah, so they want activist judges and legislatures to step in and ban it. They believe government can and should solve what they have concluded is a problem, and I contend that would set a very dangerous precedent that would ultimately advance a socialist agenda concerning the family. To wit, that the child is essentially a ward of the state; that parents are merely caretakers who, like foster parents, must conform to certain specific child-rearing standards in order to continue in that capacity.

As for repeated use of the terms “hit” and “hitting,” this is nothing but propaganda that permits absurd comparisons to isolated, non-scientific phenomena like the “Patty Hearst Syndrome” and hyper-emotional contentions that spankings are "burned into the psyche." I remember being spanked. I also remember going to the beach with my mother. Neither memory is "burned into my psyche." This is emotional language. This is how these people compensate for the fact they have no facts with which to support their arguments.

Youth violence is down is it?  This is a clever rebuttal indeed. What's the baseline for that remark? Youth violence may be down from, say, 2000, but it is not down from the 1950s, when I was a kid and nearly every kid was spanked. I never heard of a child hitting20his parents, and I’ve never, ever spoken to any one of my generation who hit his parents or reported knowing someone who did. Today, children hitting their parents is a hidden domestic abuse epidemic. I went to a rough high school in the near western suburbs of Chicago. We had gangs in the 1960s, but we did not ever have a teacher even so much as physically threatened by a student. Furthermore, youth violence statistics are usually based on conviction rates, and because liberals have made it almost impossible to convict violent youth, conviction rates are down; therefore, they say, without legitimacy, that youth violence is down. The polite term is "hogwash."