Can't Touch This

Much like the generation before mine, and the one before that, and so on and so on back to the beginning of time, I shake my head when I look at the next crop of kids. I am pretty sure that there was a morning many, many years ago when a cave woman looked at a kid playing in the dirt and said, ‘Ug, we no have rock to play with when me kid’. That’s just the way it is. Technology advances, and money keeps getting made, people live longer and are healthier and then all of a sudden there are holographs and instant food machines and I finally have a teleporter. We struggle a little less with each baby boom, and while this is a good thing, it’s also a bad thing. It’s part of what is keeping kids inside, contributing to not only an epidemic of obesity but an alarming lack of vitamin D (as if rickets are back!). It’s part of what is giving your average kid that obnoxious entitled attitude, a complacency and laziness born of no farm chores at 5 am, hot Totino’s Pizza Bites for snack, and a cozy car ride with a personal DVD-player.

The other part of the problem is this issue with parents thinking they’re hurting their kids’ feelings by disciplining them, by enforcing boundaries and encouraging respect. Good manners and common courtesy are a rarity nowadays. All these things are hard, and take work. They upset the child, which upsets you. It makes life a lot less fun. But they also guarantee a happier, healthier child, just like small amounts of sunlight and exercise and a strictly enforced bedtime routine.

Just like everything else with parenting, there are lots of differing opinions on what ‘appropriate’ disciplining is. For some, this means time out or lots and lots of counting. For many of my friends, it was wooden spoons on their backsides when they were kids. Personally, I think there is a happy medium. I know that the threat of counting works for some people, but it drives me crazy. I’ve seen it overused and used ineffectively way too often. Smacking a kid with a spoon is abusive, to me, especially when you get pissed because you break your spoon and so you make your kid go get ANOTHER spoon and you smack ‘em even harder (no, seriously, true story! People are crazy).

In case you hadn’t caught on yet, since I was dancing around this topic quite a bit (bought it a drink, told it that I liked its dress, talked about the weather), this post is about spanking. I’m a bit of a spanker. If you are horrified and need to leave right now, I understand. I know there are people who are totally, utterly opposed to physical punishment of a child in any form, and just like many other parenting decisions that I may not follow, I support that. I am aware that many places have begun arresting people who spank children, especially in public. And let me say upfront, I do not agree that ‘what goes on in someone’s home should stay behind closed doors’.

Before you freak out more, please allow me to share my self-imposed spanking rules. Bottom only, over the pants, one smack, never in anger. Why? Because it’s not about hurting the child, so I’m not waling away on a bare tush. I’m not kicking or knocking her in the head. I am in control, so there is no chance of things getting out of hand. A spanking is a last resort, an everything-else-has-failed. Threats, bribes, time out, counting, you name it. A spanking says THIS IS SERIOUS. It says I am The Boss. I worry that a lot of parents today don’t like to say that, for whatever reason. You can say it without spanking, you just have to find a way to do it that works for you and your child. If your child is laughing and running away from you, they are not getting the message. Jelly has been spanked probably 5 times at most in her life, so don’t think I’m waking up and spanking her every morning to start the day.

However.

Last weekend we were playing, and she got a strange look on her face, and said, ‘Now, Mama, I am going to give you spankins’!’. She proceeded to hit me several times, with an angry scowl. I was quite startled. ‘Was I naughty? Why do I get spankings?’ I asked her. ‘You need ‘em!’ she replied, continuing to smack me. The violence was surprising. Even though this wasn’t what I was doing, this was how it was perceived. So somewhere, some analyst or specialist was right. I have never seen any sort of demonstration of violent play before, so I’m not sure if it’s an age/emotional maturity thing that’s starting to happen now or what. It did definitely make me stop and think about it though. I really try to reserve spanking for major issues, for example, touching the stove or running out into the street. Something that requires, as my father loves to say, a Significant Emotional Experience.

Discipline is similar to successful potty training in that it requires hurting a child’s feelings to really get the message across. They have to feel a little bit of shame and embarrassment in order to correct and adjust their behavior. Some kids do this better than others. Some kids never learn to do it at all. As a parent, the last think you want to do is intentionally make the light of your life unhappy. Media venues taunt us with ‘proof’ of emotional scarring every day; it’s just another one of the zillion things you can accidentally do right or wrong that shapes your child for better or worse. Will I give Jellybean an extra chance next time before I raise my hand? Absolutely. But will I give her a swat if I think it will help her to learn respect, self-control, and ultimately, self-discipline? Absolutely.