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Bringing Up BabyThe elusive balance between love and discipline.

Compiled by Adam Christian
Updated Friday, Jan. 26, 2007, at 8:44 PM ET

If the songs of Madonna and Britney Spears affirm the virtues of a good spanking from time to time, the idea of corporal punishment has become decidedly less vogue in the arena of childrearing. The trend towards pacifism found its ultimate expression this past week in a California bill to outlaw spanking by parents altogether. Widely dismissed as an excessive manifestation of the liberal nanny state, the proposed law receives a rare defense from Emily Bazelon.

Many cast a skeptical eye on the supposed link between child behavior and discipline in the first place. "There are so many things going on societally" points out chadosaurus, among them "parents … being lazy, short sighted, concerned more with being best friends than parents, selfish" that it's impossible to cite spanking as "either the problem or the solution." Isonomist- chalks up the escalating rate of juvenile misbehavior and violence to the disintegration of the two-parent household since the 1960s. Taking the interrogation of such a link further, Vepxistqaosani3 laments the general lack of respect shown superiors:

If the argument that spanking is ineffective be true, then it follows that American children should be better behaved today than in the past.

But friends and relatives who teach in the public schools assure me that this is not the case; that children today are far more disrespectful and unruly than ever. Who among us over forty can remember even the most notorious juvenile delinquent mouthing off profanely and obscenely to a teacher? But that is not even unusual today.

unempirical attacks the proposed spanking law as overly broad, and therefore prone to abuse by overzealous prosecutors. wolfmann questions the basic enforceability of yet more statutes aimed at regulating behavior within the home. Inquisitor14 blasts Bazelon's article as "the worst kind of irresponsible indefensible social theory … especially as the author admits that there is not a preponderance of evidence on either side here."

An advocate of the occasional smack to the backside, kjm rails against the underlying ego psychology of modern parenting:

Just follow a badly misbehaving kid thru a store while his mother is busy telling him, "Mommy said for you to stop that," Mommy said for you to be quiet," Mommy said you won't get a candy bar if you don't behave," ad nauseum, and you pray they will pick the kid up and deliver two quick smacks to the backside.
A couple of swats on the hind end thru layers of clothes (the classic definition of spanking) teaches a child that he owes you and others around him respect and good manners and that, as a parent, it is your obligation to see that he learns this valuable lesson so that others will like him.
Letting a child grow up thinking he is the center of the universe, which many unspanked children seem to feel, is a disservice and poor parenting.

janeR agrees: "A sting to the behind is better than letting the child go beserk in a tantrum or run out into traffic if they don't get their way." Arkady makes a compelling argument for preserving parental authority in matters of discipline:

In short, there's almost no reward or punishment that someone couldn't see as doing a terrible disservice to the child. The "ban spanking" crowd wants to prevent other parents from using one tool that they don't approve of, but they don't seem to have considered that they could as easily have taken from them the tools they consider appropriate. Each parent decides what rewards and punishments to use. To the maximum reasonable extent, I'm in favor of leaving those calls to them, since they know their children best.

OskarS, a "25 year-old Swede who has never been spanked," writes in to register strong opposition to any form of corporal punishment:

Since I grew up in a world were harming your child was illegal, this whole discussion is completely baffling to me. To say that you can't raise a kid without spanking is so absurd that I can't believe what I'm hearing…

Now, you might say that I'm extremely pacifist, or that I'm too much of a bleeding heart liberal, that I'm out of the norm. I'm really not. Every single parent of small children I have ever known (quite a number of them) would say the exact same thing.

We don't grow wilder or out of control, we don't grow up to be criminals. For those of us who do it's not because they weren't spanked, it's because of bad parenting. And having a lousy parent spank you would not help a whole hell of a lot.

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Moira Redmond is a freelance writer and a former Slatester. You can e-mail her at .
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