When Is Spanking Child Abuse?
Thanks for your response. I don’t tend to think of what happened to me as abuse, because it seems absurd to put it in the same category as the abuse that some of my friends experienced, which has left lasting scars both physical and emotional. And because I don’t want to cause any grief to my father, who has made great strides since my childhood in overcoming his anger and his depression.
I guess my problem with the idea that spanking is okay is that it’s hard to draw a clear line between the kind of hitting that is okay and the kind of hitting that is not. And if we teach kids that abuse should be reported but spanking is okay, how are they supposed to draw that line?
I guess because I know from firsthand experience that spanking is not always abuse, and that it is not in fact “hitting,” I don’t have a hard time drawing a line between the two. We know that killing is wrong, and yet we allow capital punishment. Imprisoning someone is wrong, yet we allow people to go to jail. Bossing people around, even, isn’t socially appropriate, and yet we do it all the time with our children. We know the difference between the right expression of a behavior and the wrong expression of a behavior simply because there is a difference. And if a large part of parenting isn’t teaching your children how to distinguish between right and wrong, where to draw lines even and perhaps especially in the gray areas, I don’t know what parenting is.
As I’ve said, my experience with spanking was very different from yours, and I have to think that is because one was done appropriately, productively, and healthily, and the other was not. Any disciplinary method has the potential for negative effect. I think any act of discipline that is done rashly, out of anger, or in otherwise poor judgment is likely to have the same effect that you experienced, whether there is physical contact or not.
