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To Spank or Not to Spank
Chapter Eight of Help! I'm a Parent
by Bruce Narramore, Ph.D.
S everal years ago I received a phone call from the program chairperson for the National Association for the Prevention of Child Abuse. She was looking for a psychologist to debate the organization's president at their upcoming national conference. The topic to be debated was, "Is all physical discipline child abuse?" Their president believed it was, and they were having a tough time finding a psychologist who would take the opposing side and advocate the use of good old-fashioned spankings. I took up the challenge.
The president and I staked out our positions in front of about two thousand social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and other professional and lay workers. She argued that many parents severely abuse children through spanking, that spankings don't work, that they are cruel, that they give children models of how to solve problems with violence, and that they are a remnant of our unsophisticated past and no longer necessary in our enlightened age.
I agreed that many parents abuse children under the guise of spanking, but I also argued that physical correction doesn't have to be abusive. I reminded my colleague that children can be equally abused emotionally through verbal blows like "stupid," "clumsy," and "idiot." Then I pointed out that there is a difference between firmly but calmly giving a child a swat and hitting a child in anger. And I added that young children don't have the abstract reasoning ability to understand more sophisticated, verbal forms of discipline. Young children think concretely. They understand a simple no and a spank on the hand or the bottom much better than a lengthy dialogue on the inappropriateness of their actions. You can't sit down and tell a fourteen-month-old, "Sweetheart, let's discuss the philosophical and psychological implications of throwing your toys at your sister."
When we finished our debate and turned off the microphone, my opponent turned to me and said, "I hadn't thought of it that way. You almost convinced me." Other conferees commented, "I've never thought about the possibility of spanking a child without being angry." One mentioned, "I'd never thought about the fact that preschool children have almost no abstract reasoning ability."
Is Spanking Child Abuse?
The professional mental health workers mentioned above had seen so much abuse and heard so many horror stories, that they unthinkingly accepted the argument that all spanking is abusive. I can understand their reasoning. In 1990, over two and a half million reports of child abuse were filed in the United States.1 That's enough children to populate an entire city larger than Denver, Phoenix, or Atlanta every year! While some of those reports may be exaggerated, and others were for sexual and emotional abuse, the single largest number was for physical abuse. And many of those happened under the guise of physical punishment. By discouraging all spanking. Social activists and health professionals hope to eliminate these cases of abuse. They also warn that since children learn by watching their parents, children who are spanked may learn to use physical violence to solve their own problems. It is a fact that children who are abused have a much greater likelihood of growing up to abuse their own children.
Abuse in Christian Clothing
Several years ago I read a newspaper article about a Christian couple whose children had just been removed from their home because of excessive and severe corporal punishment from their parents.2 The abuse came to light when the couple's twenty-year-old daughter ran away from home and told a counselor how her parents punished the children.
 Any time spanking is done out
of parental anger, rather than love
for the child, it is abusive.
According to the police, the children were forced to expose their bare bottoms to be spanked with a thin bamboo stick every time they needed correction—which was often several times a day. Each correction was four or more whacks on the bare bottom, and police investigators said their backsides "looked like shoe leather" from repeated punishment.
The children were punished for even minor infractions of family rules, like wiggling during story time. The parents were supposedly following the teachings of two Christian authors who wrote:
My obedience to God to train my child requires that every time I ask him to do something, whatever it is, I must see that he obeys. When I have said it once in a normal tone if he does not obey immediately, I must take up the switch and correct him enough to hurt so he will not want it repeated.3 The authors go on to tell their readers that since some children are well-behaved they must be punished for small infractions in order to teach them obedience.
Another article told of an American evangelist who teaches parents to "break their will," "blister their bottom red," and to spank week-old babies. He tells listeners that girls might not need spanking until three weeks of age but boys will need to be punished physically from the time they are a few days old!4
 Continued on Page Two
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