To Spank or Not to Spank. That’s the Real Question.
Were you ever been spanked? Did you deserve to be spanked?
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“I have good kids, I love my kids. I try to bring them up the right way, not spanking them. I find that I don’t have to spank them. I find that waving the gun around pretty much gets the same job done!”
— Denis Leary
Slowly, generation by generation spankings are becoming out of fashion. Society is slowly frowning upon parents who discipline their children. Parents don’t want to be parents anymore, they want to be their child’s best friend and therein lies the problem; a parent can’t enforce rules when they’re your friend.
Ironically, as Americans protest the use of spankings, they laud capital punishment as well as abortions and torture. In the United States, the draconian concept of capital punishment is legal on the state level (27 states) and the federal level (all 50 states and territories) and by the military.
Capital punishment is mainly used in the cases concrning murder. The government though, teaches that murder is wrong by killing individuals under the guise of justice. This reminds me of the old adage, don’t do as I do, do as I say, this couldn’t be more appropriate.
According to a study published in JAMA Pediatrics in July 2020, researchers found the percentage of parents reporting spanking their kids had declined from 50 percent in 1993 to 35 percent in 2017, yet corporal punishment of children persists. Nearly half of all parents of toddlers and nearly 70 percent of the parents of preschoolers in the United States use spanking to discipline their children. By the time children in the US reach middle and high school, roughly 85 percent have been spanked by their parents.
In “Exploring the Evangelical Justification of Spanking as Punishment,” Dani Fankhauser claims, “Spanking was a last-resort punishment in my family, used only when timeouts and grounding failed. It wasn’t an outburst of anger, but thoughtful and premeditated,” and this was the way spankings were handed out when I was growing up. Dani goes on to say that, “identical experiences can affect people differently” which I totaly agree with as Dani’s outcome is the complete opposite to my outcome.
