Random-ish thoughts on spanking, culture, religion

“I don't believe in beating children. It is my opinion that firm guidance, positive reinforcement and discipline, which involve teaching critical thinking and actively teaching empathy as well as obedience, go a long way. High yet reasonable expectations are something kids overall will strive to live up to. They want to do and make their parents proud. Sometimes they will fall short and that's ok because that too is a learning experience that can provide an opportunity for growth. Beating doesn't do achieve that, it simply instills fear, anger, resentment and encourages sneakiness and/or timid behavior and in some cases outright defiance.

I think people often overlook that in the scriptures when the rod is compared to a shepherds' rod that a shepherd doesn't use the rod to beat his sheep but to gently guide them. There is also the oft misunderstood issue that Proverbs is in reality just what the name says, proverbs or wise sayings of the times. That should be kept in mind when interpreting and implementing the advice because well times are not the same as when it was written. I certainly don't see people running to implement all the aspects of Proverbs 31 10-31. Wives simply aren't in charge of planting vineyards and making fabric much these days. Context matters.”  A question was posed about beating (spanking) children and it’s relationship to religion among other things that was my answer.

Since I read it more thoughts about it keep circling around in my head. It’s a question that comes up fairly often in my life because I have children and it’s such a staple of the Black community’s child rearing practice that I don’t participate in. I’ve been called upon repeatedly to defend my position or simply spoken to (or about) in derisive or dismissive tones while having scriptures quilt quoted at me along with predictions that my children will likely end up unruly hooligans. I am not only doing a disservice to my children but also letting down my race and apparently directly disobeying God by not resorting to violence as a means of disciplining my children.

I have wondered at times where this vehemence comes from, why are people so heavily invested in how I choose to raise my kids? I was relatively young when I had my first child just 21 and there was no shortage of people willing to tell me how much I was spoiling him by holding him too much and responding to him when he cried and as he got a bit older, not spanking or popping him. Now I didn’t have any peers who had children at that point and I’d read of zero parenting books and the Internet wasn’t a thing. I was winging it but I knew I wasn’t going to raise him to fear me. It simply felt wrong for me. It was mixed in with my personal experience of being spanked as well as how I thought about it logically. I know plenty of people who’ve said “I was spanked when I was a kid and I turned out great!” to which I respond “good for you”. That is their experience. I was also spanked as a kid and I turned out great. In spite of being spanked not because of it.

As a child raised in the black community which included attending a black church I cannot count the times I heard growing up that you have to beat your kids now or the police would beat them later. Along with spare the rod spoil the child. Between the two sayings the underlying attitude revealed the feeling that anyone who didn’t spank their children was seen as trying to be white and/or unloving to their children. In that light my decision to not spank my children was not made lightly. I didn’t set out to alienate myself from everyone I held dear nor make myself the subject of ridicule. But when the choices were that or do something that I personally felt was harmful at worst and ineffectual at best, it wasn’t much of a choice.

I remember quite well the feeling I had while being spanked, anger being one of the top. Resentment being right there next to it, fear not of my parent’s disappointment in me but of pain which only served to make me more adroit at not getting caught at things that would warrant a spanking not dissuading me from them altogether. It also caused a test of wills that even if it was only one sided in my own head resulted in a loss of respect for loss of control at the one hitting me. My parent’s thought that they were helping me be a better person when what I was learning was that I could not be authentic with them. If I made a mistake they were the last people I would go to and I would never let them into my inner world. How could I these are people who would inflict violence upon my person and compound it by laughing about it later and telling others about it compounding the humiliation. I am admittedly a very sensitive person and have always been but I’m hardly unique. People don’t like being hurt and people don’t like being humiliated. Children are people, which seems to me to be a part of the issue, adults so often don’t recognize the innate personhood of children.

Spanking has simply never made sense to me. Most people would look at you like you as if you were talking gibberish if you suggested they walk up to every co-worker they were at odds with and swat them. Or that when they saw any random adult acting the fool they should take up whatever implement they felt appropriate and beat them with it for their own good. Pretty much everyone knows that would be illegal and most would think silly. Yet it’s the way we are taught to deal with our children? I fail to see the logic. On the one hand I’m forever hearing how kid’s brains aren’t fully developed until their early 20s which makes them prone to more impulsive decisions and on the other hand the community in which I came of age thought the best way to deal with this was to beat it out of them. Last I heard hitting someone wasn’t going to make their brains develop any faster.

Bringing scripture into the argument always frustrated me because there was this triumphant smugness of “God says so, so there!” and yet any scriptures about not provoking children to wrath, and being holy parents those are fully ignored. That’s not even dealing with the issue of taking things out of context. I was taught that we should follow the 10 commandments but we didn’t have to keep kosher because we weren’t under the law and only the New Testament really applied to us as Christians. Yet the favored verses that get quoted most often to show that God wants even decreed parents to beat their children were in the Old Testament. As for honor your mother and father, the New Testament does have verses about honoring them but there is that verse about children obeying their parents in the Lord that people so often drop the “in the Lord” part of (Ephesians 6:1). Blind obedience is not being called for here. I was raised in the church, I can pick and choose verses to suit my needs just as well as anyone else. My point is that in making such a deal of gathering verses where hitting children is the order of the day and ignoring verses where temperance, mercy and godliness is called for on behalf of the parents it shows a distinct lack of care about the children. It goes from a religious edict in the way to deal with children to a scriptural pass to treat children cruelly without interference.

It’s easy for people to look at news reports of spankings or beatings gone beyond the pale and say that’s abusive I would never do that. Or to look at teaching of people like the Pearle’s which include hitting actual babies with implements to “train” them and shake their heads at such craziness while still advocating for popping a child on the butt or the occasional spanking until they are old enough to reason with. I don’t get that though, if a kid isn’t old enough to be reasoned with then how on earth is hitting them going to convey all the nuances of teaching a lesson? I know that as people learn and grow they change; this is something I sincerely hope we as a community learns, grow, and changes our minds about sooner rather than later.