Think It Over Thursday: Hitting kids

I’m not even entertaining the idea of hitting children as an actual form of discipline or behavior management or especially parenting. I have written several blogs about the proven harms of spanking, and you can feel free to read them, below, if you wish, but anything that feels as wrong as this really doesn’t need a lot of evidence to show why it’s wrong. We don’t need much evidence to show why beating an adult or a dog is wrong to condemn those actions—so why the hell do we still allow child abuse—“spanking”—when it’s aimed at humiliating and harming our most vulnerable citizens?

What I want to know is why we still allow this brutal, Cro-Magnon practice to continue. (If we want to be Cro-Magnons, by the way, why not stick to breastfeeding and attachment parenting?) I can’t believe that it’s still legal to administer physical punishment in school in so many states while so many countries have outlawed it. I don’t want to hear “My parents spanked me and I turned out all right!” either. For one thing, how do you know you turned out all right? Kidding aside, our parents also smoked around us, let us go to sleep with bottles in our mouths, put us to bed on our stomachs and didn’t use booster seats in cars, which all led to problems like dental decay, asthma, allergies and, oh, death. So that’s not a valid argument, and frankly I’m tired of hearing it.

So many people even seem proud to have been spanked as children! That, to me, is very strange. And yet they still often report how bad it makes them feel to spank their own kids. Don’t you think if it feels bad, you shouldn’t be doing it?

Harms of Spanking:

Study Finds Spanked Children to Be More Aggressive

Father Spanks Daughter to Death

Violence Should Not Be Our First Impulse

Using Your Parents As an Excuse Just Doesn’t Work

Being Knocked Out Isn’t Something to Brag About

Join National Spank Out Day

Ten Reasons Not to Hit Your Kids (This one isn’t by me, but it’s so worth reading.)

Photo courtesy of Sara S. via LivLuvCreate.com (Please feel free to share it on your social media.)