I sat down with my 3-year-old daughter and told her that she had done something that needed to be addressed by a punishment. “I am going to have to spank you,” I told her. I turned her over my knee, raised my hand high above my head, and brought it down. She burst into screams and my watching friends burst into laughter. “That’s a spanking?” they chortled, for my hand had contacted my daughter’s bottom with the force of a butterfly alighting on a nose.
The “child of my first marriage,” (as Paul Simon sang) had never before been spanked, and was never spanked after that. She had seen spankings: my friends were enthusiastic spankers. But her parents did not believe in it, and I do not remember why I thought I should — or could — spank her that day.
In my early days on “Crackbook,” (what I call a popular social media site) I thought that civilized discourse was possible. I responded to a post about “the good old days,” when kids drank out of the garden hose, rode bikes without helmets and were whipped. My response was that I did not want to return to the good old days when my father would beat me bloody, thanks just the same. One of the other responders said that I probably deserved to be beaten. I’m unlikely to see any more posts from that enlightened person, as I deleted the “gateway person” from my friends’ list.
The current firestorm of attention to domestic abuse and child abuse brought on by the behavior of National Football League players brings back memories of my wracked and wrecked childhood and my father’s abuse of my mother and his children. I was listening to a TV program when a retired basketball player said that African-Americans from the south routinely beat their children, a half-hearted attempt to explain away the marks on a 4-year-old’s legs. Whether or not this is true, the things that happen to us as children serve as lessons; some we keep, some we throw away. I remember a time that, while watching a television program on child abuse, my wife reached out to touch me. Tears were on my face, and I turned to her and said, “I wonder when they invented the term, ‘child abuse?’ I could have used a little help.”
I threw away the lessons of my childhood when I became a man, although I slipped for a little time with my two youngest children. I spanked them, and I am still sickened by the memory. I also sat them down and apologized to them. They were about six or seven years old, and I told them that I would never again hit them. It is possible for us to learn and grow; we should commit to trying to become better people.
Indiana is one among 19 states that still allow corporal punishment in schools, but I do not know if my two Indiana children were ever spanked in those schools. When they lived with me in Missouri, I told the operators of the day care they attended that they were not to be disciplined by spanking. There are many people who will contend that they were spanked as children but survived and thrive. I survived, though the bloody beatings my siblings and I received can only euphemistically be called “spankings.” I also thrive, but I contend that my thriving is despite my abuse, and not a direct product of it.
A “tradition of spanking” may be an adequate explanation for some, but for me, I refuse to travel that beaten path.