Bay Times published this on Saturday, 16 December 2006.
A recent editorial, your columnists Richard Moore and Rosemary McLeod, and several of your correspondents continue to trot out the same old argument that in raising children corporal punishment equates to discipline and to spare the rod is to spoil the child. I can only assume that in the good old days, when every parent religiously smacked their children for misbehaviour, there was no youth crime, no wanton violence, no desecration of churches or graves. Please correct me if I have something wrong.
In my own experience, when I brought up my children without any corporal punishment, I was aware of a number of other parents of the same generation who also taught values without smacking. I spent a short time working for Social Welfare and I saw another side to life where most of the kids in state care had received more than their share of “hidings” from their parents. Presumably the children of the former group have grown up to be violent criminals through their parents’ negligence, while the kids in the latter group are pillars of the community thanks to those hidings. Or am I wrong again?
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