Yes, yes, yes, a thousand times, yes. Pass a law to ban hitting children.
Calif. Lawmaker Seeks Ban on Spanking
California parents could face jail and a fine for spanking their young children under legislation a state lawmaker has promised to introduce next week.
Hitting your children is not an appropriate consequence. There are always better consequences for the things children do.
There’s a step missing, though. Parenting classes need to be available for anyone who wants them.
Case study: There’s a empty house next door. Oldest Boy once threw a couple of rocks through the window. He thought the house was abandoned. The owner wasn’t too pleased. So Boy and I went to see the neighbour and explained, and then he paid to fix the window. (I paid the neighbour, and Boy repaid me a couple of dollars out of his allowance per week.) And that was it. He never felt the need to do it again. I didn’t need to yell at him or hit him.
Hitting children is an entirely useless consequence that has nothing to do with the offense, does nothing to deter repetition, and engenders revenge.
Another thought:
The governor said he and his wife, Maria Shriver, did not spank their four children and used alternative methods for discipline. For example, Schwarzenegger said they found it more effective to threaten to take away their children’s play time if they didn’t do school work.
“They hate that much more than getting spanked,” he told reporters Friday in Los Angeles.
Perhaps the Schwarzenegger children were so well-behaved because if they were naughty, they’d have Arnold Schwarzenegger beating on their ass. Well, maybe not from the sound of it.
UPDATE: If you need another reason not to hit your kids, consider this. It seems to turn them into authoritarian wingnuts. Who then defend the practice of hitting the next generation of kids. Stop the cycle! of Republicanism.
23 January 2007 at 11:52 pm
I am with you 100% on this one. I was so disgusted when the last attempt to have a law passed in the UK failed a few years ago. Instead parents are allowed to use ‘reasonable force’. You can legally treat children worse than dogs in the UK. As a survivor of what can only be described as physical abuse at the hands of my mother I made the decision never to hit my children and I never have. I looked to my friends and other sources for parenting alternatives and I have two perfectly pleasant children who treat me, each other and people in general, with respect.
I read an amazing statistic once (I wish I had kept the source) about how the infant murder rate dropped from hundreds a year to less than 10 a few years after smacking was banned and parenting classes instituted.
24 January 2007 at 12:37 am
Now see. Here is another one where I absolutly agree with you on the basis of what “I” think is the right thing but I don’t know that I agree with passing the law. As you well know I grew up with parents who used direct instruction, redirection and other non violent behaviorism based stratagies for discipline. I also have no intention of using spanking on my own children and I do realise that the majority of studies have found that spanking causes far more problems than it solves.
But, spanking is still considered socially acceptable in western culture so as liberals is it really the best method to force a law down the throughts of millions of people who disagree.
I would fully support a program that educates parents and the public exactly why spanking is a bad choice and what the better choices are. This kind of approach would change public opinion until finaly evryone would see spanking like we do. Barbaric. and at that point it would become socially unacceptable and laws could be passed if needed.
24 January 2007 at 5:57 am
Well, sometimes there’s a compelling interest in passing laws to promote social change. And change won’t happen by waiting for it to happen. An extreme example: civil rights in the 1960’s South. I think they’d still have all those Jim Crow laws on the books if liberals hadn’t forced the issue.
But it doesn’t work all the time — e.g. Prohibition. I think it takes an egregious case to make it all right, which I don’t know that child-hitting is.
That said, there are already laws against assault and battery if someone beats me up, or my child. Why should they have an exemption so they can beat their own children? It’s just an extension of that thing we do where we don’t speak up.
snowqueen: I wish you could find that statistic too! It confirm an intuition I have (nothing more) that parents yell, act mean, and sometimes hit because they don’t know what else to do.
I think it takes a very uncommon sort of person to break the cycle like you have.
If I had a Magical Wishing Ferret, I’d treat child-hitting just like other forms of assault (legal-wise), and pair that tightly with making government funding available for STEP Parenting classes.
Meep?
See what you can do, ol’ buddy.
25 January 2007 at 12:27 am
OK here is the best I can do from Google Scholar:
Article 1
Discipline and Deviance: Physical Punishment of Children and Violence and Other Crime in Adulthood
Murray A. Straus
Social Problems, Vol. 38, No. 2 (May, 1991), pp. 133-154
Article 2
http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/reprint/161/7/821.pdf
Article 3 (plus extract)
http://adc.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/83/3/196
Professor Joan Durrant of the University of Manitoba has conducted a thorough and methodologically sound study of available statistics in Sweden relating to child abuse, parental prosecutions, social work intervention, and antisocial or self destructive behaviour by Swedish youth.29 30 Her findings show the claims of the pro-smackers to be unfounded. Prosecutions for assault and child deaths have declined, though not significantly, since the smacking ban, with five children dying as a result of physical abuse in the period 1971 to 1975 in contrast to only four children dying in the first 17 years after the ban. On the other hand, in the UK, examination of criminal statistics over the years has consistently shown that more than one child dies a week as the result of abuse.31 An alleged “fourfold” increase in child abuse turns out to relate to reported abuse, and reflects a worldwide increase in awareness of child abuse. Sweden, which has a mandatory reporting law, is no exception to this trend. The decline in prosecutions for serious assaults on children shows a particularly notable decrease in prosecutions of parents in their 20s who were themselves reared under the no smacking ban.
Professor Joan Durrant of the University of Manitoba has conducted a thorough and methodologically sound study of available statistics in Sweden relating to child abuse, parental prosecutions, social work intervention, and antisocial or self destructive behaviour by Swedish youth.29 30 Her findings show the claims of the pro-smackers to be unfounded. Prosecutions for assault and child deaths have declined, though not significantly, since the smacking ban, with five children dying as a result of physical abuse in the period 1971 to 1975 in contrast to only four children dying in the first 17 years after the ban. On the other hand, in the UK, examination of criminal statistics over the years has consistently shown that more than one child dies a week as the result of abuse.31 An alleged “fourfold” increase in child abuse turns out to relate to reported abuse, and reflects a worldwide increase in awareness of child abuse. Sweden, which has a mandatory reporting law, is no exception to this trend. The decline in prosecutions for serious assaults on children shows a particularly notable decrease in prosecutions of parents in their 20s who were themselves reared under the no smacking ban.
25 January 2007 at 12:29 am
sorry – seems I did a double paste by mistake!