Spare the Rod

The debate on corporal punishment and where it stands today.

“My father liked me, when I wasna being an idiot. And he loved me, too — enough to beat the daylights out of me when I was being an idiot.”

— Diana Gabaldon, Outlander

“He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.”

— Proverbs 13:24

As a foster and adoptive parent, the idea and reality of corporal punishment (the enacting of ANY kind of physical punishment, in this case on children) has been on my mind, off and on, for a long time now.

I’ve been a parent since I married my wife and became a stepfather to her son in 2001. He was a big boy, always in the 99th percentile for his age, and tended to act out physically quite often. He had reason to, moving back and forth between his mother and biological father’s house on a weekly basis throughout his elementary school years. My stepson’s mother and biological father didn’t get along well during that time, either, which contributed to a confused sense of loyalty, frustration, and anger. This made him a challenge to live with at some times. He could be rough, he would talk back, he would lie to gain advantage over one parent. He would put an occasional hole in a wall. I was a young parent at the time, uneducated in child behavior, and yet I understood why he was the way he was. I tried to relate to him and find common ground, and over time things calmed down, he came to respect me and I grew to love him.

I never once spanked him. I never felt a need to, an overwhelming anger to lash out. Oh, I was angry at times, but I knew from experience that corporal punishment only seemed to work from the perspective of the punisher.

My father spanked my brother and I when we were younger. He’d grown up in a 9-child Catholic family, first on a tenant farm and later in near-poverty as his own father went from job to job. Spanking, for him, was almost part of a “child-rearing assembly line”: Child born, child weaned, child potty trained, child starts school and starts to work/help out around the house/babysits younger siblings, child misbehaves, child is spanked, etc. It was just one of the expectations of growing up in those circumstances.

Mine wasn’t anywhere near a nightmare of a childhood. Spankings were a once-monthly thing, whenever my brother or I really did something bad, and not a daily ritual. My experience came nowhere near what I might consider abuse-level. I always knew I had royally screwed up and why when I got a whooping.

The thing is, getting spanked hurt. It made me angry rather than repentant. It precipitated under-the-breath mutterings of “I hate you and I wish you’d die”. And I’d often just repeat the same behavior that got me in trouble, a few months later, because as most young kids the memory of punishment tended to fade far faster than the desires to do whatever it was that got me spanked in the first place.

And it wasn’t just my father, either. In third grade, I, goaded along by a couple friends, drew a very inaccurate but highly detailed picture of a naked girl, parts labeled, and put it in said girl’s classroom mailbox. She, of course, knew who’d done so and we were summarily sent to the principal’s office where I had to lean over the principal’s desk while he spanked me with a wooden paddle across my buttocks. Three strikes and I was out. I never did that again, but I probably wouldn’t have, anyway. I saw how upset the girl was (tears and all), and I realized before the paddle incident that I shouldn’t have drawn that picture.

While I was never left with any physical scars, I know I had a few psychological scars during that time, and I sometimes wonder if I would be any different today had I not experienced corporal punishment as a child.

Corporal punishment seems to be on a steady decline among American households. A survey reported on in this 1999 article has 72 percent of parents spanking their kids. An ABC News poll from 2002 has the percentage at 50 percent, while a Columbia University study from 2013 has the overall percentage down to about 48 percent. An interesting finding from that same study also shows that spanking incidence seems to drop as children get older as well, going from 48 percent to about 40 percent between the ages of 3 and 5.

The 2014 news story about Minnesota Viking running back Adrian Peterson’s admission that he used a wooden switch to punish his own child brought corporal punishment into the spotlight for a short period. Using a paddle or a switch, in this case, is usually considered more serious and tends to be frowned upon even by some people who only spank in the traditional sense, using an open-palmed hand.

According to several sources cited on ChildTrends.org:

…use of corporal punishment is linked to negative outcomes for children (e.g., delinquency, antisocial behavior, psychological problems, and alcohol and drug abuse), and may be indicative of ineffective parenting. Research also finds that the number of problem behaviors observed in adolescence is related to the amount of spanking a child receives. The greater the age of the child, the stronger the relationship.

One of the contributors to the fact that fewer parents tend to utilize corporal punishment on children as the child ages is that, to them, spanking seems to be the only option. A 2 year old is difficult, if not impossible, to actually reason with. Their frame of reference for any given situation is mostly nonexistent, because every situation is new or very rare. The parent becomes frustrated with this lack of communication and understanding, and submits to this anger via use of physical force. As a child approaches school age and can communicate on a slightly more equal basis with the parent, these frustrations ease, if only slightly, resulting in a higher tolerance on the parent’s part.

More from ChildTrends.org:

Positive child outcomes are more likely when parents refrain from using spanking and other physical punishment, and instead discipline their children through communication that is firm, reasoned, and nurturing. Studies find this type of discipline can foster positive psychological outcomes, such as high self-esteem and cooperation with others, as well as improved achievement in school.

During my training with our Department of Social Services, when my wife and I were in the process of being approved as foster parents, there were few hard rules we had to follow. Most had to do strictly with the safety of the foster children. One was simply “no corporal punishment whatsoever”. We were taught that a parent should never practice punishment — that what a parent should only ever practice is discipline. While many dictionary definitions of discipline actually include the word “punishment” as the method used to inspire obedience, what social services departments refer to as discipline is the focus on positive reinforcement rather than negative repercussions.

Spanking is currently legal in all 50 states, usually with the caveat that it only be used in a “reasonable” manner without intent to harm, which is subject to interpretation by prosecutors. As far as schools go, 19 states still allow them to spank children with wooden or fiberglass paddles. Internationally, 52 countries have now banned spanking completely, including Greece, France, Israel, and Brazil. The first to do so was Sweden in 1979. Canada may be next.

What about the United States? In the near term, it is very unlikely that corporal punishment will be made illegal at a federal level. The people of the U.S. take pride in freedom of all kinds, and that extends to the modes with which we choose to raise our children. A “good whoopin’” is something that has been ingrained in our culture for centuries, tied in large part to the powerful masculine-centered ideals that still hold the greatest sway over us. We’ll have our guns if we want them, we’ll let people smoke and drink themselves to death if they want to, and, sure as can be, if you want to spank your kids you can.

Hopefully this attitude will change enough one day to allow more reasonable minds to prevail.

Thank you for reading and sharing!