The End of Spanking?
Spanking is so passé. At least the Council of Europe (a 47-country body that promotes civil liberties) hopes it will be soon.
The group has launched a campaign to abolish parental “smacking” the world over by 2009. That’s quite an ambitious goal, and, it seems to me, a strange one. Whatever your views on spanking, wouldn’t it be better to use a concerted, international movement to target child sex traffickers before setting your sites on parents who favor corporal discipline?
A recent article “Spare the Rod, Say Some” from The Economist heralded the campaign and the proliferation of anti-spanking laws across the pond as evidence that spanking is headed for the history books.
“A consensus against hitting children is clearly gathering momentum in the developed, law-governed parts of the world. Also growing is the belief that a light parental cuff and serious forms of child abuse are points, albeit quite far apart, on the same spectrum. Some parents may still insist that their right to dissuade a toddler from doing very dangerous things is also worth protecting; but they are losing the argument.”
As the article repeatedly points out, soon the only wealthy country where parents will be permitted to spank will be the United States, which the writer portrays as the last backward bastion for practitioners of the barbaric practice.
At the risk of offending European progressives, I’d like to put in my vote for keeping spanking legal. I think it’s just gotten a bad rap. Maybe I believe in spanking because I myself was spanked as a child. My father always did it in love and never in anger, which I think is the key for defending the embattled discipline.
Most of the arguments against spanking turn out to be straw man fallacies. They lump all manner of physical abuse—cuffing, slapping, shaking and battering—in with the practice and then attack it. But of course, any honest treatment of the subject will differentiate between cruel mistreatment and loving, restorative physical discipline. Christians who believe in spanking as a legitimate form of punishment should make the distinction clear. After all, the same Scriptures that instruct us not to “spare the rod” also command us to love our children and to not “exasperate” them.
The Economist may be right. Spanking could soon be under fire, even in the United States. But wherever the practice is still lovingly carried, I believe children will be better for it.
The group has launched a campaign to abolish parental “smacking” the world over by 2009. That’s quite an ambitious goal, and, it seems to me, a strange one. Whatever your views on spanking, wouldn’t it be better to use a concerted, international movement to target child sex traffickers before setting your sites on parents who favor corporal discipline?
A recent article “Spare the Rod, Say Some” from The Economist heralded the campaign and the proliferation of anti-spanking laws across the pond as evidence that spanking is headed for the history books.
“A consensus against hitting children is clearly gathering momentum in the developed, law-governed parts of the world. Also growing is the belief that a light parental cuff and serious forms of child abuse are points, albeit quite far apart, on the same spectrum. Some parents may still insist that their right to dissuade a toddler from doing very dangerous things is also worth protecting; but they are losing the argument.”
As the article repeatedly points out, soon the only wealthy country where parents will be permitted to spank will be the United States, which the writer portrays as the last backward bastion for practitioners of the barbaric practice.
At the risk of offending European progressives, I’d like to put in my vote for keeping spanking legal. I think it’s just gotten a bad rap. Maybe I believe in spanking because I myself was spanked as a child. My father always did it in love and never in anger, which I think is the key for defending the embattled discipline.
Most of the arguments against spanking turn out to be straw man fallacies. They lump all manner of physical abuse—cuffing, slapping, shaking and battering—in with the practice and then attack it. But of course, any honest treatment of the subject will differentiate between cruel mistreatment and loving, restorative physical discipline. Christians who believe in spanking as a legitimate form of punishment should make the distinction clear. After all, the same Scriptures that instruct us not to “spare the rod” also command us to love our children and to not “exasperate” them.
The Economist may be right. Spanking could soon be under fire, even in the United States. But wherever the practice is still lovingly carried, I believe children will be better for it.
posted by Drew Dyck at 7:58 AM
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