To Spank or Not To Spank, that is the question

I have been thinking of this for a while. My longer more thoughtful posts take me months to formulate in my head. Anyways people ask me all the time if we spank our kids as a form of discipline. We always say "no" or "its our last resort", although it has been a process where we have gotten more and more committed to the idea of not spanking. Before Thanksgiving one of my friends asked the big question. After I said, "No in general we don't spank, but Owen is making it really difficult because he is so strong willed", she asked, "So what about what the bible says?" And I said, "What does the bible say?" She said, "Well in the Old Testament there are some verses about spanking". I didn't really have an answer and hemmed and hawed around the topic because I had not really thought of it from that perspective.

I knew the oft-used phrase "Spare the rod spoil the child" was nowhere in the bible. Sorry to disappoint, but if your parents said it was and you got spanked because of it, well now you can say, "It's not there!" It is one of those phrases that is related to an old wives tale, originating more in poetry than a religious source.

But I didn't have a response to my friend, and frankly I hadn't even done any research as to what the bible might say about spanking. I formed my own beliefs outside of that framework. So let me back up and start from the beginning so I can get to addressing the question.

When Todd and I first got married I worked at a preschool for a while, having completed a degree in Family Studies and Human Development which involved a lot of parenting/family research. So I had taken classes on the different styles of parenting (authoritarian, authoritative, permissive being the main ones) and knew the tendencies of each (another blog post to come). So I had already made some decisions about my future parenting style based on the research that was out there. While working at the preschool I became very sure of one thing: I could parent without spanking. As a teacher I could not spank other parents' kids, while there were many times particular kids made me want to spank. So it was there that I learned many other ways to discipline children, to change behavior for the positive over time without spanking. This was when I first had the thought, "if I can't spank these kids why would I spank my own some day?" Working at a preschool gave me a beginner's practical toolbox of parenting ideas for discipline.

Sometime between having my first child and that spanking question, I also read Kids Are Worth It: Giving Your Child the Gift of Self Discipline by Barbara Coloroso and some things by Dr. William Sears. I was becoming even more settled on the non-spanking decision. But I had not read many contemporary Christian books because I found most Christian authors to be misguided or misinformed, mainly because they had no formal training in or knowledge of child development (not counting the famous Dr. James Dobson who has a PhD in the field, but he still comes down a little hard on some issues for me). Because my background was in child development I was not interested in hearing someone tell me about disciplining my child from their personal trial and error when they had no knowledge about the developmental stages of children.

Case in point, I have read such books where the "terrible twos" is stated as the beginning of our "sin nature" beginning to show. However, childhood development has shown that toddlerhood is not a time of rebellion, but rather it is a cognitive shift that God created in all humans where they no longer see their physical body the same as their mothers. Toddlerhood is the beginning of seeing your body as yours, that you can control your actions, they are not reflexes or responses to your mother. You begin to see that your mother is her own person and not an extra leg you have, or something like that. This phase is noted as an autonomous phase (there are a few more times this happens in our childhood) -- it is a way that we become individuals. God made us that way, otherwise we would nurse our mothers until we were leaving for college, or we wouldn't be able to leave for college because we were not autonomous enough to do so.

While I don't wish to sidestep the reality that there is a moral component to the child's development at a very early age, it is misinformation like this that sent me over the edge. I didn't read my next Christian authored parenting book until last year. And had I not been alone at my friend Rachel's house with my sleeping children while everyone else was out having fun at a film festival I would not have been snooping through her books to find Spiritual Parenting, by Michelle Anthony. Who knows how long it would have been before I ever read another Christian authored parenting book?

Back to whacking, I mean spanking... seriously if you are a spanker please do not take this post as a criticism. I'm just finally coming to terms with a more developed reason for why we have decided in our family to parent the way we do. I have close friends who use spanking, and although they all think my kids will probably turn out to be rebellious hippies who use cloth diapers on their kids who get birthed at home and other crunchy things like that, they still like me.


"Then he came back to the basket and took out his son Benjamin by the ears, and whipped him with the little switch"

So it really bothered me that I didn't have an answer to the bible question. I have to admit I sort of thought this was the type of thing that was passed down from parent to child and no one really knew why it was done. And we all told ourselves that spanking was biblical but didn't really have any proof, we just thought it was okay because we turned out okay right?

I started doing a little reading, like where in the bible would the idea of spanking your kids come from? What do we find in the bible about disciplining a child? And what is the roll of the parent?

All those questions soon to be answered in part two! Check back soon...