Spare the rod

It has not been a good week for American football. Following hot on the heels of the Ray Rice domestic violence story which I wrote about a week ago, a new story broke about another footballer, Adrian Peterson who has been charged with child abuse after spanking his four-year-old son with a tree branch (a “switch”) on his bare buttocks and legs. After the child returned home to his mother, she took him to a scheduled doctor’s appointment; on seeing the cuts and bruises, the doctor reported the case to child protection services.

According to one report when he was interviewed by the police over the charges:

“Peterson went on to reiterate again how much he loves all his kids, and only ‘whoops’ them because he wants them to do right. Toward the end of the interview, Peterson said he would reconsider using switches in the future, but said he would never ‘eliminate whooping my kids… because I know how being spanked has helped me in my life’.”

This incident has not only sparked a heated debate about whether or not spanking or hitting is an acceptable way of disciplining a child, but has also thrown a light on the way children are raised within African-American culture following Petersen’s repeated assertion that what he did was considered normal practice among black families. Countless talk shows debating the pros and cons have been taking place all week, while opinion articles have delved into what it means to be raised with the fear of God put into you every time your father unbuckles his belt. I think what has flabbergasted public opinion the most is the matter-of-fact way Peterson spoke about his disciplinary methods, as if he cannot see what is so wrong with giving your own child a good wallop to get him to behave.

Physical punishment can cower children into obedient submission but also teaches them that when they are angry or lose control, the only way to handle it is to resort to a raised fist

Many have joined the fray, including Hall of Famer Chris Carter who spoke about his own upbringing in this short clip.

Taken within the context of Malta, this is an all too familiar scenario of how most children were raised in the not-too-distant past. Ask anyone over the age of 50 and they will tell you that corporal punishment at home (and at school) was considered not only OK but even necessary to “whip kids into shape”.

Parents took no nonsense and children knew better than to talk back or misbehave because they were aware that the consequences would be a punishment involving spanking. In the more extreme cases, it was taken as a matter of course that children who disobeyed would be beaten severely and (strange as it might seem to us now) it never occurred to anyone to interfere, because there was an unspoken consensus that parents had the “right” to discipline their kids as they saw fit.

More often than not, the same disciplinary measures were being used by families in the same neighborhood and for all intents and purposes it seemed to work, as children grew up with a certain degree of respect tinged with fear towards their parents. It was not uncommon for adult children to still continue to “fear” their elderly parents even after they had long left the nest and set up their own homes.

Is a slap on the hand OK? What about a smack across the behind? At what point does spanking cross the line over to child abuse?

Many decades, and reams of psychological studies later, we now know that physical punishment brings with it an inevitable backlash. It might cower children into obedient submission in the short-term but it also teaches them that when they are angry or lose control, the only way to handle it is to resort to a raised fist. Ask anyone who was beaten or hit as a child and they will tell you that (try as they might) it is very hard not to fall back into the same behaviour with their own children. Many parents do try and break the cycle of violence and in some cases the extent of the hitting is diluted with each generation, but the learned instinctive reaction is there, and it is often very, very hard to break.

In other cases, new parents who have vowed never to hit their children because of their own unhappy childhood, tend to go to the other extreme; they try too hard to appease their kids with more liberal methods of childrearing methods such as “time outs” and holding endless discussions with the child over his bad behaviour, when really, let’s face it, a sharp verbal rebuke is often the only thing which will halt a child in his tracks when he is about to smack another child over the head with a blunt object.

Childrearing is not and can never be democracy because the child will often put himself or others in danger and only an immediate intervention can halt a precarious situation. It is also not a good idea to let a child know that you are uncertain of your own status as a parent - yes, you are in charge of them, and they have to know it. Children are notorious at sniffing out any waffling or hesitancy and will exploit your weakness until they make you weep at your own inadequacies.

So while the punishment meted out by Peterson can never be condoned, the debate over what constitutes acceptable parental discipline which has arisen from this incident is a necessary one in today’s topsy-turvy world. Surely it is not ideal that we have obnoxious, arrogant and out-of-control children who are now calling the shots, threatening their parents that they will dial 179 at the mere hint of a punishment.  We also need to define what we mean by the word ‘spanking’ and whether it is ever acceptable: is a slap on the hand OK? What about a smack across the behind? At what point does spanking cross the line over to child abuse?  

It is a thorny issue but as with everything there should always be a middle ground rather than veering from one extreme to the other.