Thanks for your response. I don’t tend to think of what happened to me as abuse, because it seems absurd to put it in the same category as the abuse that some of my friends experienced, which has left lasting scars both physical and emotional. And because I don’t want to cause any grief to my father, who has made great strides since my childhood in overcoming his anger and his depression.
I guess my problem with the idea that spanking is okay is that it’s hard to draw a clear line between the kind of hitting that is okay and the kind of hitting that is not. And if we teach kids that abuse should be reported but spanking is okay, how are they supposed to draw that line?
I guess because I know from firsthand experience that spanking is not always abuse, and that it is not in fact “hitting,” I don’t have a hard time drawing a line between the two. We know that killing is wrong, and yet we allow capital punishment. Imprisoning someone is wrong, yet we allow people to go to jail. Bossing people around, even, isn’t socially appropriate, and yet we do it all the time with our children. We know the difference between the right expression of a behavior and the wrong expression of a behavior simply because there is a difference. And if a large part of parenting isn’t teaching your children how to distinguish between right and wrong, where to draw lines even and perhaps especially in the gray areas, I don’t know what parenting is.
As I’ve said, my experience with spanking was very different from yours, and I have to think that is because one was done appropriately, productively, and healthily, and the other was not. Any disciplinary method has the potential for negative effect. I think any act of discipline that is done rashly, out of anger, or in otherwise poor judgment is likely to have the same effect that you experienced, whether there is physical contact or not.
I see what you’re saying. But you are a rational adult. Kids are kids. What I’m asking is, if what you experienced is okay spanking and what I experienced was abusive spanking, how does a kid in my position differentiate between the two? There was nobody to tell the 12-year-old me that what my father was doing was not okay. I hated it, but I figured that since it was “just spanking,” it was culturally accepted and there was nothing I could do about it.
And there probably wasn’t, because if I had told anybody that my father spanked me, they probably would have responded like the people in this thread have responded—by saying that a spank or two is good for kids. And I’m afraid that as long as people think that, there are going to be people like my dad who think that what they’re doing is perfectly fine because they think of it as spanking, not abuse. And their kids are going to grow up, like me, wondering why their humiliating experience is seen, by a large portion of the population, as an acceptable way to treat kids.
