According to a report in GOPUSA, “Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson says he never intended to hurt his 4-year-old son when he hit him with a tree branch (switch). But experts in childhood development said the intent doesn’t matter — striking a child is never appropriate.” Apparently, my parents never got the memo.
I was, what was called in my neck of the woods, a “precocious” child. One definition of “precocious” is “ahead in development, such as the mental development of a child.”
I wasn’t that kind of precocious. I was more the strong-willed kind who never learned anything the easy way. To correct my way of thinking and behaving, my parents employed corporal punishment. My mother’s instrument of choice was the switch. Dad’s was the belt.
We had a few bushes in my yard that we called “the switch bush.” I would often be sent by my mother to cut my own switch. It was something akin to digging one’s own grave. A switch always hurt, more so if short pants were worn.
My mother was the disciplinarian in family misdemeanors. If a family felony occurred, such as lying to my parents, overt rebellion not corrected by a switch, or fighting my mom during a switching, my father took over. The switch was always preferred to the belt. Every parent I knew used corporal punishment and all of us in the neighborhood avoided jail and a wasted life.
When I had my own kids, I followed the example of my parents. Once, prior to administration of the punishment, I said to my son, “I want to say something before I do this.”
Through little boy tears he said, “I know. You’re gonna tell me it’s gonna hurt you worse than me.”
“No, that’s not it at all,” I responded. “I want you to know that this spanking is going to cause you pain. That’s the lesson. Disobedience brings pain. It does now and it always will.”
And that really is the lesson. Disobedience to the law, to rules, to God, to employers, and to other authorities brings pain — maybe not physical pain, but pain of some sort.
As a former social worker in the area of child abuse and neglect, I have seen the horrors of true abuse. I did investigations, I removed children from homes, and I helped put people in jail.
Corporal punishment, in my experience and opinion, is not abuse, whatever the experts in childhood development may say.
“We do have to respect other people’s cultural points of view, but the law is very clear and the research is very clear,” said Kimberly Sirl, a clinical psychologist at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. “Spanking doesn’t work, and it just makes kids mistrustful and aggressive. What we’re teaching them is fear rather than responsibility and problem-solving.”
Sorry, Kimberly, each to his or her own, but I always trusted my parents, I am not generally mistrustful of other people, and the possibility of spanking kept my aggressive tendencies under wraps.
Am I an outdated dinosaur? Maybe. Many disagree with corporal punishment, but I still believe that disobedience causes pain.
Maybe if the 2.8 million people who languish in America’s prisons, and the 4.8 million on probation or parole, had learned that lesson as children, they might have had a different adulthood.
[David Epps is the pastor of the Cathedral of Christ the King, Sharpsburg, GA (www.ctkcec.org) which meets Sundays at 8:30 and 10 a.m. He is the bishop of the Mid-South Diocese which consists of Georgia and Tennessee (www.midsouthdiocese.org) and the Associate Endorser for the Department of the Armed Forces, U. S. Military Chaplains, ICCEC. He may contacted at frepps@ctkcec.org.]
