Like about 75% of my fellow spankos, I have long held that smacking children as a form of discipline should never be part of modern life. We know the horrors of non-consensual corporal punishment, and largely agree that it simply is just not on. Period.
Except. There is always an "except". Have you seen what modern adults get up to when they are told that they may never smack a child? I swear these are true:
Children are made sit behind screens during lunch hour so they cannot see or be seen by their
class mates while eating their food. Observers say many boys and girls cry openly and being
humiliated in this manner.
The screaming room is for those who get too rowdy in the class room. It is padded and measures
up to four feet by four feet. It may take two or three hours for a child to come to its senses and
stop yelling.
A boy got a three day suspension for pointing his finger at a girl and saying "bang bang".
Sending a child "to Coventry" is a metaphor for imposing a "no-talking-to" ban on the child's
classmates, who are forbidden to converse with the culprit from 10 minutes to a whole week. Its
close neighbor is called "a time out", and is equally effective in singling out a non-conformist to
sit in isolation for a while. Sometimes a long while.
And of course, there's the old stand-by of yelling in rage. Admittedly, teachers are not supposed to yell in rage (they put the kids in their charge in the screaming room if they do that) but there is much anecdotal evidence to suggest that not all teachers keep their tempers in check. And it is quite clearly the first weapon of choice of the modern parent.
So - unless we come up with a fairer method of achieving the old style: punish-forgive-foget for both authority figure and miscreant, I am going to go out on a limb and say a mild whack might be much better than the current range of options facing our kids.
The curious logic for me, and I suspect for most of you, was that spankings rarely happened - and the abusive ones always seemed to attract the attention of the relevant authorities. It was not that they happened, it was that they could happen. And the possibility made it fairly simple to choose between following some rule or other, or risking your butt. That sort of overhanging threat does not seem to have any real effect when it comes to time-outs and suspensions. It will take a far keener mind that mine to resolve that apparent conundrum.
