# Corporal Punishment - Yay or nay? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [October 8, 2008, 9:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corporal-punishment-yay-or-nay/467075 "2008-10-08T21:51:54Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 8
**Author:** ![jormundgondir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/dfb087/32.png) [@jormundgondir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jormundgondir)\ **Post date:** [October 13, 2008, 12:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corporal-punishment-yay-or-nay/467075/141 "2008-10-13T00:20:50Z")
I’m in the “don’t beat your kids” camp, but I can also recognize that a corrective swat on the butt is a very different thing from a beating. I think it’s disingenuous to use the term “spanking” to encompass all forms of corporeal punishment, and personally prefer to break it out into degrees of severity, “swat”, “spank”, “smack”, “belt”, “hit”, “beat,” etc. I was never spanked. Beyond that, all I have is rambling personal anecdote. When I was a kid, “spankings” involved getting beaten with a thick leather belt: for my older siblings it would sometimes get worse, say, beaten with an electrical cord or a broomstick over the back or boxed about the head. Beltings might not have occurred as frequently as I remember, but from my child memory I’d wager it was a weekly event for me, and likely some kid in my family got it almost daily. They stopped pretty much when I was 8 and my parents divorced and my older siblings split; I suspect my parents worried which side we’d come down on if there were to be a custody battle and started playing it sweeter. I don’t think I ever learned a useful lesson from a beating, since they were administered arbitrarily and usually in anger or frustration, often stemming from things completely unrelated: my mom had 5 kids, was widowed young, her new husband was an alcoholic who she had a poor relationship with, and her oldest son was indeed a bit of a hellion. She grew up in an abusive family herself in the deep south, and old ways is right ways, i guess. What I did learn from the beltings was to feel very conflicted about my mother: I loved her in the way that a kid always loves her mother, the memory of some infant kindness, but I was also constantly terrified, since the beatings were so erratic, non-causal, angry and brutal. Sometimes she’d make our dad administer them, he was usually gentler about it though. When I was nine or ten, we were helping to clean up the playroom where we had grown up: as we were painting over the walls which had been our canvas as toddlers, I was shocked to come across a message I had written when I was perhaps four years old, tiny words in crayon which said plainly “I HATE DAD.” I felt instantly the frustrated and perplexed rage I had written it in years before, and also remembered that when I wrote it I was actually angry at my mother, but so fearful of her that I didn’t dare scrawl her own name, and substituted my dad’s even in that private act of catharsis, petrified that she’d catch me expressing the emotion. The helpless fury and despair that another poster mentioned before really rings true to me. Later on in my childhood I realized what _other_ kids were experiencing when they got a “spanking” from their parents, and it was very different from the beltings around my house. It felt almost quaint, and I realized I wasn’t from one of the good families. In my teens I learned that other kids had it a lot worse, but it was hard to feel grateful, given the psychological trauma was done when I was too little to know better. I think Charles Dickens said something about how you spend the rest of your entire life trying to recover from the things that happened to you before you turned seven? At this stage in my life, at 36 years old, I still feel complete conflict, resentment, and the pent-up rage of a 4-year old toward my mother. we “get along” nicely enough, since she’s moved on in life and developed the strange revisionist history that so many parents do as they grow older, and I’ve decided it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie. But I will still never trust her, cannot ever be frank with her, am still completely on edge whenever I have even the most casual of dealings with her, and SO don’t intend to ever discuss these things with her. I just feel lucky that I was young enough to avoid the worst of it: my older siblings are much more damaged than i am. I also remember ways in which my mom hurt my feelings terribly as a kid, just making tiny little comments that she would never remember and probably thought nothing of at the time, but which were utterly soul-crushing to me. Now I have a little kid of my own, and I think about these things more often, and hope to do my damnedest not to fuck up this kid the same way me and my siblings got fucked up. I’m glad that I waited until I was older to have a kid, since I’ve had more time than most to try and process through my damage instead of having it well up from inside and manifest itself in bad ways for me to rationalize as well as I can… I see younger parents doing that a lot (not necessarily younger in age, if that makes any sense), hitting or yelling at their kids because they’re angry or distracted or impatient or somehow otherwise feels “appropriate” in ways I’m not sure they have considered from a rational perspective. I’m trying to parent from a self-aware place, and part of that means I hope never to hit my kid or otherwise react in an unjust or unduly negative or irrational way, and heaven forbid it scale into a pattern if I ever do. I’m also trying to remember that kids are sensitive systems, and that even if something doesn’t feel like a big deal to me, there’s no telling how that little mind is going to integrate it. Anyway, while I can respect those of you who use a mild spanking as a calm instructional tool to capture a child’s wandering attention when a lesson is urgently needed, I also believe that there is a vast continuum both in the character/severity of the spanking itself as well as the scope of motivations behind it. ---
**Author:** ![erislover](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/71e660/32.png) [@erislover](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/erislover)\ **Post date:** [October 13, 2008, 7:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corporal-punishment-yay-or-nay/467075/142 "2008-10-13T07:31:57Z")
> [@Heffalump\_and\_Roo](#): > > Too funny. > > So now you’re incredulous that I pointed out your use of a fallacy? 😃 No. Here is what I said: > [@erislover](#): > > I’m sorry, I’d love to debate this point, but I am fundamentally incapable of supposing, even for the sake of argument, that humans as a whole are child abusers. I’m sure you don’t want to put it that way, but I am unable to even fathom what your point is if I don’t interpret it this way: we’re prone to child abuse across the board, so we should not spank. This is just… I mean, I don’t even have words to describe my level of incredulity. What point would I like to debate? This one: “In most cases, because of all the emotions involved, generally people are working in the gray area where it’s much too easy to swing toward the worse polar extreme.” That’s an interesting comment. It seems worth debating, or at least it did until the last few posts. In no way was my comment meant to end the debate on this point. However, in order to understand the rest of your post (what followed that), it seemed like I would have to assume _your thoughts_ were that people are basically all abusers at heart, something I find indescribably stupid. I expressed my dismay at this. I expected the response would be, “No, you don’t understand, etc” but instead you seek to point out what you perceive to be shortcomings in my response. If you do think that way, I really don’t have anything to say. Your worldview is so radically different from mine that we have nothing approaching a common ground at all, in which case there really is no debate to be had. If you wish to consider that some kind of fallacy on my part, be my guest, I will not stand in your way. > [@](#): > > Perhaps you should have said in your first post that you’d love to debate but all you have is an opinion. That might have worked. Worked for what? ---
**Author:** ![erislover](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/71e660/32.png) [@erislover](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/erislover)\ **Post date:** [October 13, 2008, 3:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corporal-punishment-yay-or-nay/467075/143 "2008-10-13T15:08:35Z")
> [@Zoe](#): > > Parts of our culture that were once considered the norm can change to such an extreme that the next generation finds that norm unfathomable… > > When I was growing up, it was not unusual for parents to use a belt or a switch on children. And it may not have been all that unusual to slap them. No one thought of it as abuse. But we’ve been made more aware of the harm that slapping and whipping can cause. Well I think the physical harm that _spanking_ and whipping were always clear. Slapping to the head, as you indicate, had effects that were not as well known. > [@](#): > > We also don’t really know the full physical or mental problems of the growing child that we might be hitting. Some injuries or illnesses are dormant for a long time. We might be aggravating a problem. Should we hit a child that is genetically predisposed to depression (and, therefore, low self-esteem)? How much do you hit him? How often? But this is either already answered, in that we have the entire history of the human race to work with, or is an argument from ignorance. We don’t have detailed answers for most anything. Should we use corporal punishment less? Well, that depends. “Less” compared to what, and what are we replacing it with? Public shaming? Shaming in general? I’m not trying to appeal to some tradition when I say I have no problem with spanking, I’m appealing to the evidence all around us. We’re all here, we’re all pretty much ok, we’re not all in jail for abuse of each other, we’re not all disfigured or retarded. Do we have to spank? Maybe we do, maybe we don’t; maybe some should spank more, and others less; maybe we _should_ institute public shaming. There’s a lot of ignorance and a lot of maybes. What are the criteria we will use here in evaluating them? > [@](#): > > What happens when the parent ignores the rules for hitting and continues to whip the bare flesh of a seventeen year old girl when the parent is in a rage and her daughter is depressed? What happens when we misdiagnose depression? (Though it seems that hitting teens is much more frowned upon nowadays, unless you’re a Florida teen with a myspace page…) > [@](#): > > Once you start hitting, it’s hard to draw the line. I think there’s a bit of equivocation here, though not necessarily on your part, but within the whole context of the thread. Do you mean, “It’s hard to draw the line, because we do not yet know how to”? Or do you mean, “It’s easy for ostensibly proper corporal punishment to be abuse because the parent doesn’t have enough information”? (Or something else…) > [@](#): > > There are ways to force or compel or cajole kids to do things without hitting them. Not a single person in this thread has denied this very obvious fact. > [@](#): > > If I can figure out a way to get a high school football player out of my classroom and into the hallway without touching him, surely you can handle an eight year old. I don’t see how one follows from the other. Can you elaborate on the link here? ---
**Author:** ![pseudotriton\_ruber\_ruber](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/a9a28c/32.png) [@pseudotriton\_ruber\_ruber](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pseudotriton_ruber_ruber)\ **Post date:** [October 13, 2008, 3:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corporal-punishment-yay-or-nay/467075/144 "2008-10-13T15:28:37Z")
> [@erislover](#): > > Only, first, can you state clearly what your position is? Sure. I’m opposed to spanking. ---
**Author:** ![erislover](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/71e660/32.png) [@erislover](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/erislover)\ **Post date:** [October 13, 2008, 3:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corporal-punishment-yay-or-nay/467075/145 "2008-10-13T15:52:32Z")
> [@pseudotriton\_ruber\_ruber](#): > > Sure. I’m opposed to spanking. I’m not opposed to spanking. ---
**Author:** ![El\_DeLuxo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/el_deluxo/32/9043_2.png) [@El\_DeLuxo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/El_DeLuxo)\ **Post date:** [October 13, 2008, 4:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corporal-punishment-yay-or-nay/467075/146 "2008-10-13T16:52:30Z")
Me? Yay. I’m not a parent, though, nor will ever be, which probably invalidates my opinion as far as some who do claim that status are concerned. As _some_ posters here realize, there’s a big difference between a spanking or whoopin’ and an actual battering attack. One is an attention-grabbing and unambiguous form of punishment, which gets the point that "you don’t DO that!’ across, quickly and clearly, while the other is indeed cruel and abusive. My mother (who has an authoritarian personality and a pronounced mean streak, and was fairly emotionally unstable when I was a kid) tended to really ride the borderline between the two, on me more than my brother, while my dad – basically an easy-going, good-natured guy – only punished me physically twice that I can recall, and both times I definitely had it coming in retrospect. Besides, now that CP has fallen somewhat out of fashion, you can see and hear the results nearly everywhere – god-awful, spoiled, nasty little hellbrats who inflict themselves on the public at large, and plainly need some of that nonsense whooped right out of them, should’ve happened long ago, but they ain’t gonna get it. What’s more, I have personally experienced what it’s like to live in the same space as a kid raised by parents who believe that discipline and punishment, especially but not exclusively of the corporal variety, is an evil on the level of racism – because children are an oppressed class, you see, and adults (parents in particular) are inherently the oppressors in a relationship of fundamental inequity, unless the kids are conscientiously treated as equals (which always comes down to letting them have their way) – and let me tell you, _that_ was a hideous situation for everyone involved except for Little Lord Gimmee Gimmee himself. I’m considering starting a thread about that scene just to counterbalance all this controversy about spankings ---
**Author:** ![Joey\_Tightlips](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/57b2e6/32.png) [@Joey\_Tightlips](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Joey_Tightlips)\ **Post date:** [October 14, 2008, 6:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corporal-punishment-yay-or-nay/467075/147 "2008-10-14T18:37:07Z")
I know I’m late to this party, but I just wanted to add that even though I can’t ever recall my parents ever hitting me, I certainly recall biting my tongue many times or curbing my behavior because somehow I just _knew_ that my mom would not hesitate one bit to smack me if I did something to deserve it. Maybe my parents were just magical or I was just a perfect kid, but I see this as the ideal situation and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. I think the one thing that made my parents different is that they didn’t sweat the small stuff. We didn’t argue about eating all my vegetables, it was a simple, “no veggies, no dessert”. No arguing or hitting necessary. But if I wanted to play near the railroad tracks, I had better not get caught or else. I simply wouldn’t dare talk back to mom. I’ll share one of my favorite all time stories. At a neighborhood gathering some of the other prissy uptight mothers were asking my Mom about how she raised such mild-mannered kids (me and 2 sisters). One mom was sad because her kid had told her to “shut up”. She asked, my Mom how she would handle one of her kids saying something like that. She replied, “Well, I guess that would depend on how close I was to him.” The other mom, intrigued, said “Really, that’s interesting. So your response would depend on your emotional closeness with each child differently?”. My mom, “No I meant, it would depend on whether he was close enough to slap.” The other moms in unison, “GASP!!!”. They were speechless. She still laughs about that story to this day. Love you mom!! [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corporal-punishment-yay-or-nay/467075.md?page=7)