I was reading through a livejournal community for mothers and the discussion of spanking came up. It seems ridiculous to me that so many parents are in favor of spanking, and seem incapable or perhaps unwilling to think about discipline in a different way.
People who justify spanking were often spanked themselves and argue that spanking is more effective with children than scolding or time out. I disagree – and I’ve been spanked, hit, scolded, sent to time out, grounded, etc. People miss the point with punishment.
Spanking, or being hit, by my parents or my older sister – whoever was watching me at the time – only succeeded in making me angry and viewing my parents/sister as unreasonable people whose aim was to make me feel smaller than them. I didn’t think they were teaching me a lesson. I thought they were inflating themselves.
In junior high, my younger sister and I often described our father as a tyrant, as unwilling to listen to us, as not valuing our thoughts or opinions. Spanking isn’t dangerous because it teaches your kids to hit – it’s dangerous because it teaches your kids how it feels to be hit, to be out of control, to be unable to express their hurt or frustration at being degraded. It’s dangerous because your kids lose respect for you.
My parents didn’t hit me much, especially as I grew up, but they also weren’t really successful in disciplining me after that point. If they yelled at me to accuse me of bad behavior, I laughed. I laughed because they were out of control. I laughed and I laughed until they hit me or approached me differently, calmly. I was an irritating teenager to deal with, but it was effective in changing the way my parents dealt with me.
I don’t blame my parents for hitting me, and I don’t think it left any lasting scars on me, at least, none that weren’t solved in some therapy sessions. But I would never hit my kids. I’d like to never yell at my kids unless they were in imminent danger. Those actions express more about your personality than they do about your kid’s behavior.
Punishment should always be followed with a logical explanation. You call home because otherwise your parents worry. You do chores because we all live in a house together. You don’t hit your sibling because hitting is bad, and we have better ways to communicate. You share because you’d want someone to share with you. Etc.
I should also point out, that a lot of the parents said time out doesn’t work once kids get older. It always worked for me. My parents would sit me in a corner of the living room, facing them and not the tv or anything else. They would go about their business, ignoring me, watching tv and reading and doing chores. It always made me feel pretty embarassed, but it also made me think about how my parents must feel, because I was watching them wind down after a long day of work.
I think we get to a certain age, if we ever grow up (and some people don’t), where we start thinking of our parents as humans. At that time, we can forgive them for whatever they might have done that hurt us, but also alter our behavior to take them and the rest of our families into consideration. Not because we’ll be punished, but because we respect them and respect the family, as a unit. If you think of your children as autonomous human beings and treat them accordingly, I think you gain their respect more quickly. There are three different kinds of parents – the parents children fear, the parents children adore, and the parents children respect. Kids who respect their parents turn out better on all counts.
As for Christian obedience wife spanking… just admit you’re into the BDSM, you god-fearing men and women. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. He/She/It didn’t say you couldn’t get a little freaky while procreating. Seriously, though, more evidence for my any-self-respecting-woman-doesn’t-belong-in-an-organized-religion file.
K.
The contents of this blog entry may not reflect the views of the Webmaster of Doom, Michael.
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