I was not usually spanked as a child, save for the occasional newspaper lashing. Instead, my parents either sent me to time-out to think about what I’d done or gave me a lecture about why what I did was wrong.
Let’s look at these individual reprimands. The first, hitting with a newspaper, is how someone would punish a dog for getting into the trash can or drinking out of the toilet. It is also a common way parents discipline their kids. You would never send a dog to time-out or lecture it for chewing up shoes.
Children should not be punished the same way we punish dogs.
As comedian Louis C.K. said, “Here’s the crazy part about it: Kids are the only people in the world that you’re allowed to hit … They’re the most vulnerable and the most destroyed by being hit, but it’s totally OK to hit them.”
Hitting someone else is dehumanizing because it is an attempt to establish physical dominance over that person. By hitting a child, the punishment is tantamount to sheer governance by fear.
The fact is a child can make no answer to being hit. Children cannot possibly retaliate because the adult will always have the upper hand in physical strength.
To the child’s question of “Why should I behave?” the adult asserts, “Because I’m much stronger and larger than you are, and I will hurt you if you don’t.”
I don’t believe the thought process reflects that level of animosity in most cases when adults discipline their children. Spanking, for most parents who utilize it, is a shorthand method for deterring bad behavior.
It makes logical sense from an objective perspective. Spanking is an example of positive punishment, a form of operant conditioning. For example, if a child behaves badly and the caregiver reacts by presenting a punishment, then the bad behavior will likely decrease due to the presence of a punishment.
However, to reiterate my point, we should not conflate the punishment of children with the conditioning of animals. As developing human beings, kids are extremely complex beings with still-forming personalities and should be treated as such.
According to the Washington Post, a study conducted in 2012 suggested that physical punishment can lower a child’s IQ and reduce the amount of gray matter in the brain, responsible for sensory perception and learning ability. Another study, conducted in 2013, revealed that abused girls may cause the release of hormones that can trigger early puberty.
These and other studies suggest that the damage of spanking and other forms of corporal punishment stretch much further than bruising or tears.
Though it may be a simple and easy-to-employ solution, spanking reduces children to machines that ought to produce a certain output in response to an unwanted stimulus. Spanking might also be a way parents endeavor to exert control over the growing individualization of their children—a flawed reason, if any.
When parents hit their children as punishment, children don’t only think, “OK, I won’t do that again.” They dwell on the pain they suffered at the hands of the only people they’re supposed to be able to trust. They wonder why their parents would hurt them on purpose.
An occasional smack on the hand may be one thing, but the application of recurrent spankings should be examined more closely. This sort of chastisement may ward off instances of bad behavior in children, but it only does so in providing another example of what can be considered “bad behavior.”
Where should we draw the line between spanking and child abuse? Perhaps we shouldn’t. If every such encounter between a child and an adult is one blow away from being considered criminal, what makes it acceptable in the first place?
Some people proudly proclaim, “Yes, I hit my kids. They deserve it. They’ve got to know how it is, how the world works.” And, unfortunately, they’re learning that the world works under an archaic “survival of the fittest” mentality.
They hardly deserve it. Children, by definition, have not lived long enough to be able to discern right from wrong. Why should they be physically harmed for being ignorant?
