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Sat 5 Jun, 2004 07:25 am
To spank or not? Let the town vote.
By Marie Ewald | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
BROOKLINE, MASS. – It happened years ago, but Deborah Lindeman recounts the moment as if it happened yesterday. Her mother, chastising her, hit her so hard that she left a hand print on her 11-year-old's thigh. Stunned, they both cried for 25 minutes. "We review our lives as parents with some pain, I know we all do," says Ms. Lindeman's mother, Susan Goldstein, who also has a clear memory of when her own father hit her with a belt after she had crossed a street without looking both ways. "I don't like power as a way of solving problems.... We just took it for granted."
Corporal punishment as a means of discipline has been entrenched in US culture since Colonial times. Attitudes have evolved over the years, but Thursday night the town of Brookline, a suburb of Boston, faced possibly the most radical public shift in approach to the divisive issue. Its citizens were scheduled to vote on a controversial resolution that encourages parents and caregivers to refrain from corporal punishment of children. If passed, Brookline would be the first US town with such a resolution, says Jordan Riak, founder of Parents and Teachers Against Violence in Education in Alamo, Calif.
"These kind of things tend to start at the local level and rise to a more global level, and I suspect that they're reaching for legislation that would make [spanking] illegal," says Julaine Appling, acting director of the Family Research Institute of Wisconsin, who supports judicious spanking and worries about infringement on parental rights. "It sounds very precedent-setting to me."
Mr. Riak attempted to make Oakland, Calif., a "no spanking zone" five years ago with a similar resolution, which failed by one vote in the Oakland City Council. National press jumped on the story, but it was largely treated as a joke, even as Riak felt the resolution would have helped reduce the city's high rate of domestic and street violence. Some studies have shown a correlation between spanking and antisocial behavior.
Oakland wasn't ready for the resolution, Riak says, but he'll try again if the Brookline resolution succeeds. "As a rule, social reform generally doesn't begin in places that most need it. That's why Brookline is the right place to do it," he says. "That sets a standard for other cities to follow. It has to be made socially safe or acceptable. I have many people watching the Brookline experiment [who] are ready to launch similar resolutions in their own cities."
Brookline boasts a well-educated citizenry and independent-minded voters, town Selectman Michael Sher says. The night before the vote on the resolution, he predicted a lively debate but said the outcome was too much of a tossup to predict.
Lindeman, a Brookline resident and mother of two, calls the resolution a "no-brainer" - simply a sensible recommendation, though she shares skepticism with other parents about how such a resolution could be enforced.
Elizabeth and Kai Leissner, however, feel less comfortable having the town weigh in on their child-rearing practices. They don't believe in spanking their own two children, but they also believe in the freedom to choose. "Every situation is different, and [government] can't say what's right and wrong," Ms. Leissner says. "Soon they will decide that I'm not able to give soda to my kids?"
Ron Goldman, who submitted the resolution with the backing of child-welfare organizations, says he has no intention of undermining parental authority, and characterizes the resolution as a nonbinding "suggestion."
"There's a reason for social concern about what goes on in the family because it does have social consequences for all of us," Dr. Goldman says.
"What's done to children, they will do to society," he adds, quoting American psychiatrist Karl Menninger.
Aside from the role of the government, the resolution opens debate about the role of the parent and the use of spanking. Is striking a child a human rights abuse or a legitimate means of discipline? Research offers no clear answer.
Goldman, an engineer with a doctorate in psychology, cites a 2002 Columbia University analysis of 88 studies on spanking that links the practice to aggression and mental-health problems in children.
On the other side, Dubose Ravenel, a member of the Society for Developmental Behavior Pediatrics with a practice in High Point, N.C., points to analysis that regards the use of spanking as part of "optimal child raising."
Dr. Ravenel says the large number of studies makes it "silly" to draw a meaningful conclusion without studying them in depth, yet policy is often made based on a superficial reading of the data.
Analysts point to the rise of popular psychology - and the focus on the child's individuality - as a major contributor to growing criticism of spanking.
And not just in the US. A dozen countries have national policies condemning corporal punishment - Germany, Israel, and Denmark among them. Sweden was the first to do so in 1979.
Goldman is hoping to make history with his petition, but if public awareness in Brookline is the only outcome, he says he'll be satisfied.
Comment.
I think there's a big difference between a slap on the butt and a beating, either with hands or a foreign object.
Cav
There are laws regarding abuse of children however, no spanking is IMO a little overboard.
I would agree with you there, au. I was spanked as a kid, and grew up just fine. Kids today need a little discipline, IMO.
One thing I think about however is how many child abuse cases go unreported, as the children are too scared to tell anyone. For example, the mother in this story who hit her kid so hard, and then dredged up memories of being whipped with a belt by her father, that's abuse, and the abused tend towards growing into abusers. I do not consider a spanking abuse. In fact, some ladies like it quite a bit. :wink:
I'm on the same page doglover. I'm not talking beating a kid's butt into submission, but to ban it altogether, including that tap on the behind really is PC gone too far.
I agree with all three of you. I spanked my son on occation when he was little, but never hard enough to actually cause him pain and he has turned out just fine. This law is going to get out of control where parents will become victims of the already abusive system.
Parents are completely losing their rights to raise their own children the way they see fit. I am totally against abusing children, but I am also against such extreme measures of the governments control on families.
There is also another factor to keep in mind as well. Many children love to get even with whoever pisses them off, which includes their parents and this just gives them another tool to control thier parents.
This is not a good thing at all!
well since we are counting I agree with all four of you then
It's went way way too far...not in Europe luckily, so maybe I'm not in position to moralize about other continent
but it does seem pretty un-democratic, to say at least...
Montana said one really important fact - almost every kid will go as far as he or she can, and sometimes all kids will be extremely naughty (not to say mean because they don't understand it completely) and you just have to discipline them.
But, of course, we are talking about mild kinds of spanking, not abusing.
Not to mention that this kind of law would do absolutely nothing positive - it will give opportunity to particularly nasty kid to sue his or her parents and real victims of abuse will still remain silent because real victims are too afraid.
You simply have to make difference - as doglover mentioned, if child wants to touch a hot stove and you spank his or her fingers you are abuser??
Spanking to control children is always abuse. A light tap to get the child's attention in a dangerous situation is not spanking.
Likewise, when is a little sex with children not child molestation?
Parents who use violence against their children always justy it just as child molesters do.
Adults who were molested or abused as children always are in denial; they always blame themselves. Only when they are in therapy are they able get rid of the guilt and see their parents as they really are.
little sex with children is always child molestation, but if father is taking bath of her 4 year old naked (obviusly) daughter that is not sexual harrasment - and relation between abusing and mild spanking (or taping, whatever, I am not sure in english terms) is same as relation of molestation and that - because, oh, he is man, and she is girl, what is that teaching her? That it's okay to be naked in front of males? And while he is bathing her he is certainly touching her over all body - Oh, geee...let's call exorcist!!!!!!!!!!!
Children need to be disciplined sometimes, and if someone thinks that it could always be solved with talking then he or she never had kids and therefore lacks moral ground for talking about that subject.
Because if it's not okay to spank, let's say, 5 year old when he or she is particularly bad and nasty (and all of them sometimes are) then what is okay? To send 5 year old alone in the room? Isn't that psychical harrasment then? WHATEVER punishment one choose someone can moralize that it is wrong for child.
It is absolutely true that children that are abused will grow up thinking that abusing is okay.
But children that grow up without any discipline will be even worse members of society. If I HAD to choose I think Hitler was more likely without any discipline as a child and not abused. My point is not (I am sorry that I have to mention it, but unfortunately I feel that I do) that abusing is okay, or that abusing is better then no discipline at all - my point is that it's same - and that latter is just another form of abuse.
Things are not black and white, and there is huge huge space of situations and choices between being Ghandi and being abuser. Every parent knows that very well....
Amen to that MyOwn! Very well said! ;-)
I second Montana. What's next? Talking sternly to your child when they misbehave will be construed as 'verbal and emotional abuse'? Please.
The scary thing is that it's actually going that way Cav. I know I wouldn't want to have another child because of all this government control. Screw that!
I know most of you have already heard my story and how I was accused of neglect for refusing to drug my child with Ritalin, so I'll just say that I'm thrilled that my son is now grown and I don't have to deal with the government abuse any longer.
Funny thing is that my son has grown to be a fine young man, even without the Ritalin. In fact, he's 17 and doesn't do any drungs at all :-D
This world has gone mad!
uh, it's better not to start with governments forcing use of many drugs for kids.
Vaccination is perfect example.
No, I am not one of those die-hard against vaccination guys, but I am covering Health as journalist for 7 years, and if I could choose again my child would never get most of vaccines. Not all, but most of it.
Best example - polio. Polio is eradicated from western/northern hemisphere, and in those parts of world there are more cases of post-vaccinal polio then polio for decades now (actually, number of non-vaccine related polio cases for decades is exactly - 0!). So, who is earning money on that? Thirty or fourty years ago benefits of polio vaccination were bigger then disadvantages - today - no chance! It's pure poisoning of kids because of something that doesn't exist anymore.
Oh, how I hear you there. When I lived in Mass and my son was in school there, there was a line up all the way down the hall outside the nurses office right before lunch so they could hand out the various pills the kids were on, most being Ritalin. One of the kids told my son that he crushes 2 Ritalin and snorts it before school sometimes.
Those vaccines creep me out as well. I had no choice but to have my son vaccinated or I would have had yet another medical neglect charge hanging over my head.
I don't even want to know what things will be like in another 10 years. Yikes!!!!
I've already told my son what to expect if he ever has children. Granted, my hell was in Mass and it's nothing like that here in Canada where I live now (thank God), but you never know.
It's funny that hitting people in prison is abuse, but hitting a little child is discipline. Discipline is learning not punishment, and I wonder what children learn from being hit.
It used to be thought that you could do anything to a young child, because he wouldn't remember it as an adult, so all kinds of abuse and neglect was justified on that premise. Now we know that the younger a person is when neglected or abused the more it affects their life; it's the disconnection from the abuse that affects them. People have to go into therapy to remember the past abuse and connect with their pain to end their neuroses. It's the not-remembering that causes the neruosis, not the remembering.
MyOwnUsername wrote:uh, it's better not to start with governments forcing use of many drugs for kids.
Vaccination is perfect example.
No, I am not one of those die-hard against vaccination guys, but I am covering Health as journalist for 7 years, and if I could choose again my child would never get most of vaccines. Not all, but most of it.
Best example - polio. Polio is eradicated from western/northern hemisphere, and in those parts of world there are more cases of post-vaccinal polio then polio for decades now (actually, number of non-vaccine related polio cases for decades is exactly - 0!). So, who is earning money on that? Thirty or fourty years ago benefits of polio vaccination were bigger then disadvantages - today - no chance! It's pure poisoning of kids because of something that doesn't exist anymore.
Unfortunately, there are sporadic cases of polio in the USA, where parents haven't had their kids vaccinated against the disease.
Polio has disappeared from most the Western countries following vaccination programs begun in the 1950s.
Figures from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show there were 1,920 confirmed cases of polio reported by laboratories in 2002, up from 483 the previous year - if vaccination would be stopped, we will shortly have this deadly disease back again. (10 of my birthyear died in my county in the 50's.)
MyOwnUsername wrote:Children need to be disciplined sometimes, and if someone thinks that it could always be solved with talking then he or she never had kids and therefore lacks moral ground for talking about that subject.
I get antsy about legislating what other people do in this situation, but as the parent of a 3.5 year old, I had to disagree with this statement. Never spanked her, never will. Useless.
http://www.askdrsears.com/html/6/t062100.asp (especially #5 and #10.)
#10:
Quote:10. SPANKING DOESN'T WORK
Many studies show the futility of spanking as a disciplinary technique, but none show its usefulness. In the past thirty years in pediatric practice, we have observed thousands of families who have tried spanking and found it doesn't work. Our general impression is that parents spank less as their experience increases. Spanking doesn't work for the child, for the parents, or for society. Spanking does not promote good behavior, it creates a distance between parent and child, and it contributes to a violent society. Parents who rely on punishment as their primary mode of discipline don't grow in their knowledge of their child. It keeps them from creating better alternatives, which would help them to know their child and build a better relationship. In the process of raising our own eight children, we have also concluded that spanking doesn't work. We found ourselves spanking less and less as our experience and the number of children increased. In our home, we have programmed ourselves against spanking and are committed to creating an attitude within our children, and an atmosphere within our home, that renders spanking unnecessary. Since spanking is not an option, we have been forced to come up with better alternatives. This has not only made us better parents, but in the long run we believe it has created more sensitive and well-behaved children.
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