Is it good to start with the assumption that your child will not understand anything but spanking?

People will sometimes provide a story about some terrible criminal who was never spanked. Anecdotes do not prove a general rule. In those stories there is no evidence that spanking would have prevented anything. Would Ted Bundy have stopped being a psycho if he had been spanked more?

Questions to ask before you spank

Next time you are tempted to spank your child stop and at least ask yourself this:

1. How much of my desire to spank is to actually correct my child’s behavior and how much is out of my personal frustration and anger.

2. Did I provide my child with sufficient and appropriate instruction that should have let him make the right choice in the first place?

3. Did I adequately explain the consequences of their behavior? (be that the causal results of their actions or your threat of spanking)

4. Have I listened sufficiently to my child’s explanation for their behavior? Have I put myself in their position to try to completely understand their motives?

5. Have I sufficiently explained to my child why, in addition to suffering the natural consequences of their actions, it is necessary that they also undergo corporal punishment.

6. Is my child old enough, mature enough and intelligent enough to understand all of the above and integrate it sufficiently to make the correct choice.

If you are able to answer all of these adequately and you still feel that corporal punishment is necessary, then at least you can say that you do it in a manner that is not driven by anger and impatience.

Questions to ask after a spanking

After you engage in the violence. Ask yourself the following:

1. Did I hit with greater force than I intended or was necessary?

2. Do I subscribe to the teachings of Christ? Is my maturity compared to Christ more advanced than my child’s maturity compared to me? Does Christ offer violence or love to me as reproof of my failures and wrong doing?

Then call your child back, apologize to them and never do it again.

Replace the spanking with communication, understanding, instruction and love.

It’s hard to change

Nobody who was spanked or has spanked likes to hear stuff like this. They can’t agree with it without either admitting that they were abused or that they have abused.

I don’t attach the label of abuse to spanking for that reason – it makes it harder for people to change.

I simply point out that there is another option for parenting. It’s called peaceful parenting.

Each generation is given the opportunity to parent better than the prior. Most parental attitudes and habits are simply reproductions of the parenting each person received themselves while children.

Breaking out of the parental cycle of violence is difficult – but it can be done.