The Great Spanking Debate

To spank or not to spank, that is the question. the great spanking debate has been again restarted with a meme on Facebook. The meme suggests that because of spanking I now suffer from, “respect for others.” Someone has taken offense and it has caused an all out war on FB. No one is putting down any differentiation between spanking your child and beating your child. There is a vast difference.

Let me say here that as a parent... I can't win. If I spank I am guilty of abuse, if I can't control my child's possibly lethal misbehavior any other way I am guilty of criminal neglect. As a parent society and popular opinion as usual leaves me nothing to play. I am basically damned if I do, and damned if I don't.

Now if you are asking, “Did you spank Sarah?” the answer is Yes. Yes I did. Not often, but when her behavior could possibly endanger herself or others I did. And here's the screwy part... she lived.

I am going to give you the story of when Sarah was spanked... she was three years old. What she was doing at the time was throwing rocks at moving vehicles, and nearly causing accidents. I could have tried reasoning with her, but she was three and so fun was more important then my angry voice. I had also the option of “time out” but she indeed knew her way back to the front yard. I could have tried “remove and distract” but eventually the behavior would have repeated itself as she didn't understand, neither could she foresee the consequences of her behavior. Certainly I could have waited for her to grow out of it, but I seriously doubted that the passing cars had that kind of time. The point of a spanking is to show that your behavior will hurt, that the consequences will cause harm and pain. Had I simply let the scenario play out and allowed her to see what happens when you cause a car crash I'd have been liable, in jail for criminal neglect and more than likely had a very messed up little kid on my hands.

Let me point out here that if as a parent you don't control your child, than as a result your child controls you! Let me also say that spanking a child's rear is not child abuse. Beating your child bloody is another matter entirely. As a parent it is indeed my responsibility to teach my child that he/she has the power to do great harm and to also teach her that if she doesn't stop to consider who the harm comes to, then it comes to her. A spanking hurts a lot less than prison or even having the crap beat out of you by a peer because you never learned that with the power to do harm comes the responsibility not to.

For those of you who say that this is abuse, I believe it was Burkowitz (Son of Sam killer) who's parents never beat him or spanked him in any way. Instead his mother locked him in a closet when he reached puberty until he didn't know his own name. Now that is abuse. We can't of course throw the dice and guess that had he gotten a good spanking he might have been upstanding when chances are scientifically that he was predisposed to having been a killer for whatever reason. My point is simply this, there are much worse things in life than a quick, light slap to the bottom. Some of those things are so sick and dark we can't even guess at them. While that is tragic and horrid it does not give me as a parent an excuse to let my kids run rampant in the streets simply because Face Book will not look favorably upon my parenting skills otherwise.

That's my side of it,

Angel