Corporal Punishment

I just finished listening to Mayim Bialik's YouTube video on Hitting Kids. She is pretty clear at the beginning that she doesn't believe in hitting children. She wisely follows this up by addressing how she feels about what the bible says, which is basically that based on other questionable practices, like stoning disobedient children, she feels the bible should not be used as a parenting guide in the modern era.

The thing that frustrates me is that she goes back and forth between two types of statements:

• Spanking is wrong and should never done
• There are alternative methods to disciplining children besides spanking

I agree wholeheartedly with the second. And I understand the objections. I would even go so far as to say that I would discourage spanking in many households. But I wouldn't take it off the table completely. I was going to go a different direction here, but I just thought of this: the type of parents who use the tool of corporal punishment wrongly, to where it would constitute abuse, aren't going to do a better job simply because that tool is off the table.

Someone in the comments mentioned the APA, so I decided to check to see if they had a statement on this matter. They do. They oppose the use of corporal punishment in all institutions. Here's the part that stuck out to me the most:

Whereas research has shown that the effective use of punishment in eliminating undesirable behavior requires precision in timing, duration, intensity, and specificity, as well as considerable sophistication in controlling a variety of relevant environmental and cognitive factors, such that punishment administered in institutional settings, without attention to all these factors, is likely to instill hostility, rage, and a sense of powerlessness without reducing the undesirable behavior;

 I noticed that most of the comments on Bialik's article were speaking from their own negative experiences with spanking. I wonder if Bialik had negative experiences with it too. I did not. I experienced the precision in how corporal punishment was administered that the APA mentions above. Because my parents loved me and put a lot of thought into how to correct me so that I would grow up into a responsible adult. Punishment was never a knee jerk reaction, or a point of frustration for them. If they were frustrated with me, THEY took a time out, and THEN administered the spanking.

I realize that my experience may well be the exception, rather than the norm. Nevertheless, it is enough for me to emphatically state that corporal punishment is not categorically wrong and can be done in a loving manner. I am living proof of that. I also take note that the bible speaks of the rod and reproof hand in hand when disciplining a child.  Parents need to be thoughtful when it comes to correction, otherwise whether they use corporal punishment or not, abuse can still occur.