Hope has a post on her site about spanking, which links to another post about spanking, on a blog belonging to a friend of hers. Upon reading both, I couldn’t help thinking of my own childhood, and the decisions my hubby and I have made about how we want to raise our son. We agreed from the outset that neither of us were in favor of spanking or corporal punishment.
To borrow a phrase from Charles Dickens, I was “brought up by hand.” My parents were (are) what you might call “from the old school” when it comes to how children should be raised/treated. They took “spare the rod, spoil the child” quite literally, and my recollections of childhood are peppered with memories of some of the time when “the rod” was applied. I was hit, as a child, when I didn’t do what I was told, or I did what I was told not to, or when I “talked back.” The list of items I was hit with included: open hands, the back of the hand, belts (and the occasional buckle), switches (small, slender tree branches that I often had to fetch myself), wooden rulers, plastic paint stirrers, and extension cord, and at least one rubber hose. The full fledged spankings stopped when I reached my teenage years, but I was still fair game to be slapped. It was years before I learned that there was a different way of doing things.
When I tell people about those experiences, and usually they are advocates of spanking, they often respond, “You weren’t spanked. You were beaten,” as if to discern between the two. Honestly, I don’t see a difference between them.
The most important thing I took from my experience growing up was the solemn vow that if I ever had children I would never strike them.
You can’t effectively teach a child that using physical violence to get what you want or express your feelings is wrong if you, the parent, use physical violence to get what you want or express your feelings.
Hope’s friend, Kati Granju writes:
I realized that I certainly did not want my daughter to grow up believing that sometimes, under the “right” circumstances, she deserved to be hit by the people she loves. I reaffirmed my vow to myself that I would raise my children without violence.
Hope also reaffirms Granju, saying”
…parental use of physical violence teaches a child that sometimes they deserve to be hurt by someone they love. Knowing that partner/spouse abuse is still a problem in this country, its scary to think that we might unwittingly, in whatever small way, set our kids up to accept an abusive partnership in the future.
I’ve never been in an abusive relationship, but I have one sibling who has, and we were raised together, in the same fashion. So there may be something to the spanking and the propensity to enter into abusive relationships. Like I said, I’ve never been in one myself, but I came away from my experience of being “raised by hand” with a set of my own issues to work out into adulthood.
What I learned from my experience was a definite aversion to the use of violence and force. (In fact, I’ve been told at least once that my aversion to violence indicates something being very wrong with me.) I learned what it’s like to be the object of violence, or intimidated with the threat of violence. I learned what it’s like to to be faced with someone bigger and stronger than you, and whom you can’t stop from hurting you. I learned, to some degree, what it’s like to endure in justice. And on some deep level I think I did absorb the idea that on some level I deserved that treatment. It’s something I still think I’m trying to unlearn today.
I think that experience is something that still affects and informs me even today. Even though I think it did me more harm than good. It’s an experience that I don’t want to pass on to my son.
