“Is it possible that our children are learning violence across
their mommy’s and daddy’s knees in the name of love, and done in
the best interests of the child, with approving nods from the
religious and educational establishments-even the courts - while
all of us abhor rioting, terrorism, street crime, capital
punishment and any form of torture, brutality, and human
inhumanity?”
One of the more newsworthy events that occurred amidst the ballyhoo and brouhaha of “The International Year of the Child” that both penetrated the rhetoric and promised to make a real difference in improving the quality of life for children, at least from a child’s perspective, was the anti-spanking law enacted in Sweden. Despite ensuing political and legal difficulties in attempting to clarify both parental and children’s “rights,” and in defining what precisely constitutes a “spank,” the law focused world-wide attention on spanking as a serious concern of great consequence.
The initial prospect of an anti-spanking movement in America has had little impact. There was hardly any positive response. In fact, the idea encountered immediate resistance. Some Christians were seriously intimidated by what was conceived as a threat to their personal and religious prerogatives. “Nobody’s going to tell me I can’t spank my kids.” Some invoked the authority of God and the Bible defiantly clinging to the old adage, “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”
In a year that focused so much concern on child abuse, one would have expected enthusiastic acceptance by the Christian community. However, those denominations from whom some voice of rational assent was anticipated remained remarkably silent and non-committal. “Spare the Spank” movements did not spring up suddenly in congregations across the country, nor did they spontaneously appear elsewhere. Perhaps the lack of positive response was due to definitional problems or legal ramifications: “Is an ear-tweak a spank?” “What if I swat him just once on the butt with an open hand?” “If my son reports me, will they fine me or throw me in jail?” However, negative Christian response can more likely be attributed to the fact that many Christian parents using a variety of methods spank their own children and find encouragement to do so from their interpretation of selected biblical passages and from certain popular and polemical religious parenting primers. In the name of God, divine inspiration, and biblical inerrancy, many Christian parents, as well as administrators of church-operated children’s homes and institutions, continue to cite “Spare the rod and spoil the child” in defense of belt buckles, leather straps, hickory switches, hair brushes, boards, paddles, the flat of the hand, and, if necessary, the clenched fist or worse.
I.
Once engrained in childhood, parenting patterns are established, and once established, traditional methods of child rearing are hard to break. Parents who were reared themselves according to the oft-quoted and infamous proverb inevitably resort to spanking their children too, and the pernicious practice repeats itself. What was good enough for them is understood to be good enough for their children. Furthermore, to raise any questions about the practice of spanking as bordering on abusive treatment approaches calling one’s mother or father a derogatory name. Countless well-intentioned, Bible-quoting, church-going, respectable Christians resort to this single line to support corporal punishment in the home, school, church, and community, and thereby legitimate unintentionally all manner of actual physical child abuse.
It is generally assumed that “Spare the rod and spoil the child” is taken straight from the Bible, somewhere, although one searches for it there in vain. If “close” counts, the idea is implied in Proverbs 13:24:
He who spares the rod, hates his son,
but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him.
Ironically, the phrase, as frequently quoted, probably comes from a mock-epic satirical poem written by Samuel Butler between 1663 and 1678-not the Samuel Butler of The Way of All Flesh and Erewhon. Essentially an anti-Puritan tract, Butler’s poem, entitled “Hudibras,” was patterned after Cervantes’s “Don Quixote.” The hero, Sir Hudibras, was a hump-backed, pot-bellied, Presbyterian justice with a long, untidy carrot-colored beard. On his half-blind old horse, and with his faithful squire, Ralpho -- the English equivalent of Sancho Panza-Sir Hudibras embarked on a crusade to reform England and enforce the laws suppressing sports and other idle amusements.
For his Religion it was fit
To match his Learning and his wit:
‘Twas Presbyterian true Blue,
For he was of that stubborn Crew
Of Errant Saints, whom all men grant
To be the True Church Militant;
Such as do build their Faith upon
The holy Text of Pike and Gun:
Decide all Controversies by
Infallible Artillery:
And prove their Doctrine Orthodox
By Apostolick Blows and Knocks:
Call, Fire and Sword, and Desolation,
A godly thorough Reformation,
Which always must be carry’d on,
And still be doing, never done:
As if Religion were intended
For nothing else but to be mended.
Butler’s burlesque poem portrayed the Puritans as obnoxious nuisances whose hypocrisy and stupidity needed to be exposed. Inadvertently, however, Butter popularized for us, three hundred years later, an aphorism taken literally today by more orthodox descendents of his antipathy.
The tragic scenario and the literary source of this single line comes not from Proverbs but from a setting which finds Sir Hudibras imprisoned in stocks. A widow whom he had been wooing visits him and they discuss at length the possibility of matrimony. She offers to free him if he would consent to a whipping such as lovers endure for their ladies, and which serves virtue and corrects the mistakes of nature. She explains:
And I’ll admit you to the place
You claim as due in my good grace.
If matrimony and hangings go
By dest’ny, why not whipping too?
What med’cine else can cure the fits
Of lovers when they lose their wits?
Love is a boy by poets styl’d
Then spare the rod, and spoil the child.
Though the meaning is obscure, it is clear that disciplining children was not being debated but possible escapades between Sir Hudibras and his heroine. Such a questionable and un-biblical context hardly legitimates the use of the phrase as a religious resource, proof-text, or moral guideline for rearing and disciplining children today.
II.
Lest proponents of “Spare the Spank,” feel too proud of their moral posture, there is sufficient biblical support for the use of the rod as a means of disciplining children. The Bible has long been identified as a moral textbook, not only to justify corporal punishment, but as the actual and practical instrument for administering punishment. After all, what better means for children to get the intended message than having the words indelibly imprinted, if not on their souls or psyches, at least on their posteriors. That way the “fear of God” will be learned despite the pathetic apologies parents utter when they spank their children, “I’m doing this because I love you!” usually followed by, “This hurts me more than it does you!” or “It’s for your own good!”
Use of the Bible in child rearing is not being challenged, but particular interpretations of isolated passages need to be examined carefully and their use, when taken out of context, discouraged. Certainly, parents need to be admonished to “train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it” (Prov. 22:6), Children need parenting, training, moral direction, instruction and discipline (Eph. 6:4), but reliance on ancient proverbs for purposes of pedagogical instruction is terribly risky business. Generally, the picture of children viewed from the perspective of Proverbs was anything but positive. Children were not people, but property; they were chattel like cattle that needed to be controlled. They were for use or abuse and treated more like animals than human beings.
The rod in the Old Testament was basically a wooden walking stick, a stout club, staff, or a tree branch used primarily for defense as in the Twenty-third Psalm, or for marshalling the sheep, or for thrashing cummin. Other uses of the rod included a scourge to inflict punishment or to strike a servant (Ex. 21:20). It was also used as a sceptre of authority, the symbol of a king’s power, and an instrument of miracles, such as those performed by Moses and Aaron. But, essentially, the “rod of God” (Ex. 4:20; 7:9; 12:19f.) was used for disciplining people, including children (see Prov. 3:11-12; Heb. 12:5-11). What better means for controlling the “folly ... bound up in the heart of a child” (Prov. 22:15) than by using the “shebet” or rod. The “rod of discipline” will drive such folly out of children and make them docile and obedient; “the rod and reproof gives wisdom” (Prov. 29:15).
The context for such Proverbs is a basic dichotomy between wisdom and ignorance, or, worse, foolishness. The unfortunate fool fares rather poorly in Proverbs with the rod recommended as a ready-made instrument for keeping fools in line and correcting their errors (Prov. 26:3).
Do not withhold discipline from the child. If you beat him with a rod, he will not die. If you beat him with the rod, you will save his life from Sheol (Prov. 23:13-14).
Some children may have been saved from Sheol but lost their earthly lives, literally, due to the malicious treatment process. Undoubtedly over the centuries, the cure for many children was worse than the disease. Though instructed (Prov. 19:18) to “discipline your son while there is hope” (while he is still young and small, not big enough to hit back and hurt), and cautioned not to “set our hearts on his destruction” (keep cool, calm, and non-violent), it all has a terribly hollow sound, given the “whack-whack” of the “rod of discipline” on a boy’s or girl’s buttocks or elsewhere on the body. Irreparable physical, mental, and emotional damage can be the direct result of such rigorous advocates of the rod and defenders of this spanking regimen.
Nevertheless, if a parent is pursuing the Old Testament in order to find literary support for the practice of corporal punishment, there is ample documentation there for correlating the “rod of discipline” with current child rearing practices. If even greater support is needed, one has only to consider the Law and its instructions for a father of an incorrigible son who had violated the Fifth Commandment:
If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son, who will not obey the
voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they
chastise him, will not give heed to them, then his father and his
mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of
his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall
say to the elders of his city, “This our son is stubborn and
rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a
drunkard.” Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death
with stones; so you shall purge the evil from your midst; and all
Israel shall hear, and fear (Deut. 21:18-21; see also, Ps.
137:9).
III.
Jesus of Nazareth, identified as “the rod of Jesse” (Isa. 11: 1), the same root word, meaning a branch from a family tree, was similarly accused of being a drunkard and a glutton. Moreover, his relationship with his parents was also problematic. He didn’t live up to familial and social expectations, but what he said and did pertaining to children remains worthy of our consideration and commitment. His teaching was in diametric opposition to the corporal punishment position of Proverbs, Deuteronomy, and his contemporaries. The revolutionary social order Jesus initiated belonged to children. The future will be fulfilled by the children to whom the Kingdom of God has been promised. “Let the children come to me,” he taught, “and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the Kingdom of God” (Luke 18:16). This radical reversal in Jesus’ teaching remains as enigmatic today as it did centuries ago. Not only did he give children status as human beings, they were to be treated as human beings:
Whoever does not receive the Kingdom of God like a child shall
not enter it (Luke 18:17).
Whoever humbles himself like a child ... is the greatest in the
kingdom of heaven (Matt. 18:4).
Whoever receives a child [because of Jesus’ commendation to
children] receives [Jesus] (Matt. 18:5).
On the other hand:
Whoever causes [a child to suffer or stumble or sin] it would be
better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck
and to be drowned in the depth of the sea (Matt. 18:6).
The latter, in particular, is pretty drastic treatment for those who are derelict in their responsibilities toward children. What did Jesus mean in making these and other references to children? It would appear, without being inordinately presumptuous:
(1) Children were of central importance in Jesus’ life and teaching about the new order.
(2) What Jesus said and did in relation to children countered the position of his contemporaries for whom children were objects to be possessed, controlled, and exploited.
(3) There are important implications for the mission of the church today and child rearing methods that issue from his personal example and his teaching about children and the Kingdom of God.
IV.
A major implication for Christians is the primacy Jesus gave to relationships rather than rules and regulations. Discipline, in whatever form, must be seen in the context of discipleship. It is tragic that whenever the subject of disciplining children is discussed, even in our churches, it is all too frequently translated into a false and simplistic dichotomy between corporal punishment and permissiveness, as if there are no other alternatives. Discipline comes from the same Latin root discere as discipleship; it means, literally, “to learn.” Children will learn by imitation regardless of what they are taught or how they are disciplined. Discipleship is a matter of learning or training by imitation. To be a disciple fundamentally means to emulate the master, imitatio Christi, to imitate the model (cf. I Peter 2:1). Consequently, parents need to abandon the motto, “Do as I say, not as I do!” Such profundity is hopelessly redundant; the children have already learned negative lessons not intended by parent or teacher.
The form of discipline selected is always a secondary consideration, given the primary importance of discipleship; it is the personal and parental relationship that counts. Responsibility always falls on the adult or parent to provide a positive basis for building and sustaining relationships with the child. This is a fundamental fact that needs to be emphasized over and over again, for children imitate both good and bad models, constructive and destructive examples. Greater concentration and effort needs to be devoted to the ingredients involved in creating and sustaining positive personal relationships, such as trust building, demonstrating responsibility, sharing, cooperating, and learning the art of reciprocity and compromise.
Discipline and discipleship need not be divorced. “Disciplined disciples,” or parents who are educated in a manner similar to the rigorous training required of a soldier, scholar, athlete, or musician, are needed today. However, discipline in the form of requirements and expectations has tended to de-emphasize this correlation of discipline and discipleship. Fortunately, personal and parental responsibility has not disappeared as the adult who dispenses the discipline is still involved. The problem is a negative connotation that has been identified with the personal that has displaced the positive, because discipline has become identified with something punitive: the punishment of the slow-learner, the disobedient, the recalcitrant. Discipline need not be negative.
Discipleship, in the form of positive discipline, needs to be recovered as an important parenting concept for mothers and fathers in rearing their children. Discipline needs to be understood under the umbrella of “ significant others,” that is, meaningful and affirming adults, who can serve as models, not authority figures dispensing punishment, enforcing rules, or inflicting pain. Discipline needs to be dissociated from all punitive connotations, except what Herbert Spencer once called “the discipline of consequences,” if advice or example is unheeded. It is abundantly clear that spanking won’t help.
The correlation of discipleship and corporal punishment in child rearing raises the serious question, “What do children really learn by being spanked?” “What is being transmitted by the perpetrator of the spanking?” When parents say, “I’ll teach you a lesson you’ll never forget,” and then strike the child, they are tragically correct. But, what is learned and written indelibly on the child’s memory? Not what was said, but what was done. The correlation of learning by imitation and tactile learning as evidenced by spanking means that the child has learned some unintended and negative lessons. The real lessons transmitted by spanking, despite all that might be said or shouted at children in the course of the “prescribed” treatment, are:
(1) This is how parents resolve their intrapersonal problems.
(2) This is how children ought to be reared.
(3) They had it coming to them and their parents know what is best.
Numerous spanked parents believe they deserved to be spanked. They defend the practice with vehemence, “God knows I deserved it. I was an awful kid. Spanking helped me straighten out and it will help my kids.” This attitude is so indicative of the guilt, masochism, anxiety, and demeaned self-esteem frequently associated with spanking.
(4) Or, the exact opposite: I didn’t deserve the spanking and “I will get even.” Of course, it is absolutely taboo to strike back. But children will have their chance later in rearing their own children. Or, the reaction may take some other form of personal or social vengeance.
Our tactile sense is probably the most neglected and most important means of learning. The skin and neuromuscular network represent a direct avenue to the brain which has some important implications for spanking advocates to consider. Recently, Richard Restak, author of Premeditated Man: Bioethics and the Control of Future Human Life (1975), based on psychobiological studies of Rhesus monkeys, has suggested a direct connection between early infant touch, stimulation, movement, and cerebellar development. He wrote in a Saturday Review article on “The Origin of Violence”:
It isn’t intuitively obvious that the cerebellum, a regulator of movement, might also be involved in the modulation of pleasure or the later propensity to violence (May 12, 1979, p. 19).
Though further corroboration and research is needed, the author was not hesitant in suggesting a correlation between brain development, infant stimulation, movement, and normal social and mental development, on the one hand, and brain dysfunction, unstimulated, isolated, restricted infants and abnormal, asocial, and violent adult behavior, on the other hand. Cuddling, cradling, holding, rocking, tactile closeness, intimate contact, and movement is tied to healthy cerebellar development as the cerebellum continues to develop in the infant’s first two years. One need not speculate what negative effect either isolation or brutal contact may have on infant brain development and later adult behavior.
In John Valusek’s thought-provoking pamphlet, “People Are Not for Hitting-Children Are People Too” (1974), spanking (paddling, whipping, whacking, hitting, flogging, beating, striking, slapping, and swatting) are identified as “the major seed-bed of much of the world’s violence” (p. 71). Numerous studies have indicated that, aside from wars and riots, the home and family continue to constitute the most violent setting in America, a conclusion confirmed again and again by child abuse statistics as well as daily newspaper accounts. The home is the locus of abuse and parents remain the primary abusers. Despite a genuine concern for violence on TV, far more violence occurs in front of the set in the living rooms of America than on the screen.
Increasingly, people are recognizing violence is learned and taught as a primary lesson of life by adults who “have used intentional physical pain as a basic method of child rearing” (Valusek, p. 11). Violence is not a result of innately sinful or intrinsically evil human nature, as is sometimes suggested theologically, nor a matter of genetics, aggressive instincts, or the survival of the fittest. Violence is learned behavior, imprinted on the human brain and re-enforced through imitation. Perhaps behind much of today’s violence lies a simple reason almost too obvious for us to see, namely, spanking.
A relationship might exist between this common, age-old, child-rearing procedure and much of the violence we see in the world around us (Valusek, p. 4).
Spanking is the primary means of implanting the “punishment principle” in the child and, consequently, becomes an integral part of the child’s being and upbringing which later has to be unlearned as an adult. But the idea and the indelible impression on the memory can never be completely eliminated or erased.
Spanking is primarily an adult or parental problem. When the spanking situation is analyzed, in nearly every incident there is a personal problem of parents who resorted to the use of the “rod.” It was really the adult ego that had been defied, an adult order disobeyed, an adult request denied, adult authority challenged, adult pride or adult respect offended.
V.
The more one reflects on the popular practice of spanking, the more ridiculous the tragicomedy is revealed. A number of strange parenting contradictions become apparent. For example, aside from the obvious contradiction involved in hitting children for hitting each other, and telling them to “Stop your hitting!” one of the most ludicrous contradictions is to spank a child until it cries, for if it doesn’t cry it hasn’t been disciplined properly-it hasn’t experienced enough pain to learn the lesson-and then tell it to stop crying or it’ll get another spanking.
Another child rearing non sequitur surrounds the statement, “I am spanking you for your own good!” as if children are like Al Capp’s “Schmoos,” and love to be spanked. There is even a parenting primer entitled Spank Me if You Love Me based on the premise that spanking is a demonstration of care and should be administered lovingly. If true for children, why not similarly demonstrate our care and affection for our spouses and friends by spanking them? But that would be called assault and battery. Do we stop loving when we stop spanking? Does he who spanks hardest love best? When does a child deserve to be loved and disciplined, that is, spanked-three months, six months, nine months? When does a child outgrow the need? Obviously, when they have outgrown the spanking parent. As has been intimated earlier, very few six-feet, two-hundred pound children need to be spanked, even though their behavior may evoke the same frustrations in the parent as does the behavior of smaller siblings. Of course, size and strength, according to spanking parents, is supposed to have nothing whatsoever to do with who is or who is not spanked. And, of course, it is a child rearing contradiction of the first order for a parent to say “I’ll teach you to pick on someone smaller than you; pick on someone your own size!” as the parent strikes the little bully who had provoked, poked, or punched-out his little sister. In effect, we punish him for learning his lesson from adults so thoroughly. Yet parents are shocked in watching their own children mimic their own actions.
It is terrifying to observe how parental practices are reflected in children’s games and their interaction with siblings, peers, pets and even toys. “You’re a bad boy!” Spank, spank. “You shouldn’t do that! Naughty girl!” Spank, spank. We see in our children the quality of our parental example. For better or worse, the cycle tends to repeat itself in the next generation. The fact is we consistently do unto them what in no way would we tolerate being done unto us and we consistently do unto them what we in no way Would tolerate them doing unto one another.
VI.
Is it possible that our children are learning violence across their mommy’s and daddy’s knees in the name of love, and done in the best interests of the child, with approving nods from the religious and educational establishments-even the courts-while all of us abhor rioting, terrorism, street crime, capital punishment and any form of torture, brutality, and human inhumanity? Are we not in effect training inadvertently and encouraging ever so innocently more abuse and violence by continuing the malevolent practice of spanking? The practice has to stop, and the church could be the prime mover toward a solution rather than remain partially responsible for the problem. The assent and encouragement of home, church, and school in supporting spanking and corporal punishment is a primary means of sustaining violence in American society. These institutions, as the primary sociomoral, motivational, and attitudinal influences of our culture, provide the basic models for cultural imitation and direction.
The abolition of spanking is perhaps a utopian solution, but worthy of our greatest courage, commitment, and missionary zeal. It may not be utopian at all. Christian faith believes that people can change. Christian faith shapes our attitudes and actions, our ideas about human life and how we live, how we relate to one another, and how we treat people. The Christian church, as well as the Christian home, is the depository as well as the dispensary for those values we cherish; they are the traditional centers for the transmission of moral values, not merely by proclamation but primarily by example. That is why there is so much pressure on ministers and church members to be not superhuman paragons of virtue but positive models mindful of their responsibility for children. What more logical place and people to talk of discipline and child rearing in terms of discipleship?
The church needs to launch a campaign, even a crusade on behalf of children, to stop spanking in America. In place of negative and violent contact we need to enhance tactile impressionability by means of positive strokes, affectionate hugs, gentle caresses, avuncular pats on the back, and reassuring handshakes. We know what a significant difference maternal bonding and infant fondling make in reducing child abuse; we know how important tactile stimulation and movement is for infant cerebellar development; we know how much verbal affirmation can mean. These “needs” are never outgrown. But, in order for adults to give, they need to learn by experience in their own childhood by receiving positive physical contact. Children desperately need to be affirmed, physically as well as mentally.
What a tremendous opportunity for those involved in planning such programs as the White House Conference on Families to recommend that painful punitive spanking should no longer debilitate either the victim or the perpetrator in America. The practice should be stopped. The family will benefit immediately and immeasurably. The ultimate benefits for us all will far exceed the proximate benefit to children and parents today. Even the “household of God” would be a happier and healthier home. And, most of all, we would make a significant contribution to the establishment of global and peaceful relationships among the whole human family, for if spanking hurts everybody, we will all benefit when the tragic habit is forgotten forever.
________
Robert R. Gillogly is Associate Director of The Villages, Inc., a youth residential care facility in Topeka, Kansas. Dr. Karl A. Menninger, M.D., is Chairman of the Board of Directors. An ordained Presbyterian minister, the author is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and the Claremont Graduate School where he is also pursuing a doctoral degree. He has had both teaching and pastoral experience and has established residential care homes for youth in Ohio and California. The substance of this article was presented before a Kansas State Legislative committee considering action that would permit spanking in foster care homes.
