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Anti-spanking indoctrination is undermining mental health

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By DOMEICK J. MAGLIO

Neo Traditionalist

Published: June 26, 2009

Anytime our "experts" write or speak about spanking as synonymous with abuse it is splashed over the entire media. The evidence these professionals use is anecdotal or dubious research although we take it as gospel truth. The volume of these reports in the press and higher education is so deafening that there seems to be unquestionable consensus that all spanking is abusive.

The effects of this indoctrination campaign has been staggering to everyone's well being.

Even though 90 percent of American adults have been spanked as children, as young parents they are shunning the most effective means of communicating a forceful "no" "to their toddler's harmful behavior. This "harmful behavior" would be a spank on the hand or behind.

Kate of "John and Kate Plus Eight" was lambasted by the tabloids for spanking her young daughter. Yet the psychological abuse to their eight children of having strangers filming every conceivable moment 24/7 is disregarded. An anti-spanking campaign trumps a more complicated analysis of how and when spanking can be effective.

The incessant anti-spanking indoctrination program has successfully repressed this important tool of child rearing from the inexperienced parent's repertoire. Even though many parents know that a slap would be appropriate and effective, they feel it would be politically incorrect or even a punishable offense to do so. Organizations and citizens have been intimidated into rejecting this effective and natural form of discipline.

Of course, Americans did not hear about the May 22 press release that debunks the myth of spanking as necessarily abusive. It breaks with the false consensus of child development experts. Our mainstream media rejected this press release as important enough to print.

This report should have been headline news. The title was "The American College of Pediatrics Challenges Report on Spanking."

"Elizabeth Gershoff, Ph.D., authored a report, Physical Punishment in the United States, published by Center for Effective Discipline. This report presents flawed research to build a biased case against the use of spanking of children by their parents and to advocate for a ban on its use. Unfortunately, medical organizations have endorsed the report's conclusions even though it is based primarily on her misguided 2002 meta-analysis of corporal punishment research."

"Of the six scientific reviews of physical discipline of children published between 1996 and 2005, her review is the only one of the six that supports an absolutist anti-spanking conclusion. The other reviews conclude that the outcome of physical discipline depends upon how and when it is used and further concludes that nonabusive spanking can be an effective component of a comprehensive disciplinary plan with children between the ages of 2 and 6 years."

Thank you, American College of Pediatrics, for using scientific review, reason and common sense to break the stranglehold on the minds of all parents. Obviously, spanking can be abusive although any rational person has to admit under the right circumstances, appropriate timing and the correct intensity of the slap, a slap can be the most effective means of establishing and maintaining limits.

A disobedient child is vulnerable to experimenting with dangerous and immoral choices. Parents who only use ignoring, redirecting or placing a child in "timeout" eventually are assessed by the young child, at best as ineffectual or at worst as wimps. The child continues to "push the envelope" hurting himself, others or develop out-of-control behavior.

When a child does not listen to authority figures, everyone suffers. Not only does the child become a victim of having no precise limits, the family and society will be adversely affected. Any authority figures such as teachers, neighbors, counselors and law enforcement will have to pay the price to save the lost soul from his destructive behavior.

A disobedient child matures into a dysfunctional young adult. This angry, depressed or impulsive person leaves a wake of new victims. His family's hours of pleasurable time together are turned into hours of anguish. Marriages become battlegrounds. Husbands and wives fight over the child's behavior in school, at home and in the neighborhood.

Child rearing without spanking has created an epidemic of new childhood mental disorders. It is an indictment of our experiment on insisting we raise children without spanking.

Let us use more common sense in executing appropriate spanking. This will increase respect for authority figures, for the concept of right and wrong and the word "no."

Appropriate spanking does work for the good of everyone.

Dr. Domenick J. Maglio, Ph.D., is the author of "Invasion Within" and "Essential Parenting." He is a psychotherapist and the owner/director of Wider Horizons School. Visit: www.drmaglio.com.

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