Having parenting skills is like having a tool belt. As a carpenter, you wouldn’t use a hammer for everything you did if your belt was filled with other tools. It is much the same with parenting. While many parents use spanking to solve their problems, the result is often pure frustration.
During the time that you are taking this course, we ask that you do not use any form of corporal punishment. The reason for this request is that it is too easy to fall back on these habits rather than using the new methods being taught in this course.
Below are some researched arguments against corporal punishment::
- It is unnecessary. There are nonviolent disciplinary alternatives, which are even more effective and pose no risk or harm to children.
- It confuses discipline with punishment. Discipline is used to teach, while punishment is used for control and retribution. Young children do not commit crimes that require a punishment reaction. Their mistakes call for a corrective disciplinary response only.
- It validates fear, pain, intimidation, and violence as acceptable methods of resolving conflicts between adults and children.
- It preempts effective means of communication and problem solving. As long as it is a viable option, little effort will be made to learn nonviolent alternatives.
- It confuses the issue of love and violence, teaching that violence can be an expression of love. True love is expressed in much healthier ways.
- Since all human behavior is symptomatic, it merely controls the symptom while aggravating the cause of the personality disturbance in your child.
- It is dangerous because it can escalate into battering.
- It increases aggressiveness in your child and promotes vandalism in the school and on the street. Violence perpetuates violence.
- It can result in permanent physical, mental, spiritual, or emotional harm to your child.
- It reduces the ability of your child to concentrate on intellectual tasks, thereby inhibiting learning.
- There is a higher rate of juvenile delinquency, depression, and suicide among children who are corporally punished.
- The children develop less conscience (i.e., when corporal punishment is used, right and wrong is an external control from the parent rather than an internal decision to control one’s behavior; also children will rebel against this from of punishment simply to rebel instead of developing their own consciences).
- There is a higher incidence of violence among siblings in households where corporal punishment is practiced.
- Initiative and creativity are decreased and a sense of powerlessness, alienation, and being “turned off” are increased.
- Children who are physically punished tend to achieve a lower level of academic and economic success as an adult.
- Corporal punishment does not teach the skills necessary to become successful.
Reasons 1-10 have been taken from Spare the Rod by Phil E. Quinn, with special permission from the author.
Reasons 11-16 were modified from a lecture given by Murray A. Straus, based on research he conducted at the Family Research Laboratory, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 03824 (603)-862-2594. Explanatory notes are parenthetical and provided by Kathryn Kvols to further support Murray Straus’s points.
