Smack or whack

The current poll of Irish adults overwhelmingly demonstrates our lack of consideration for children. Repeated efforts on children's rights seem entrenched in petty squabbles and lack of direction. A statement from TV3's Amanda Brunker notes "When the naughty step doesn't work,when the taking the toys away doesn't work I have smacked them hard enough to leave a visible mark. I don't do it often but at least I am honest. People try to be too PC." The smacking debate clearly demonstrates that what happens behind closed doors is not to be interfered with by government.
The Irish times poll indicates that 67% of its online readership consider smacking an acceptable part of raising a child. The comments are, for the most part in favour of smacking as an effective means of raising a child. A well adjusted and suitably chastised child who knows that love and not frustration is the well from which this practice springs.

Lets break down the argument
1: It didn't do me any harm.

Memory, its not as good a record as one imagines it were. It fades, it is notoriously open to interpretation, think back to any event in childhood and more than likely it has been 'polluted' by numerous intrusions, you have a vague recollection but not a crystal clear recall. I urge anyone to read Alice Isens' work on selective memory loss.What happens is that we remember large events but they tend to be 'fuzzy' they lack real clarity, objectiveness and in many cases any basis in reality. I have vivid memories of falling in a pond as a child because I was told about it, not because i remember it.
Think about the last time you fell over, the horrid feeling of loss of control and how frightening it was, you fell over a lot of times as a child but don't remember it so vividly, that is because our minds are designed to protect you from such feelings and they fade, we don't relive them time and time again because it is unpleasant and the nature of memory is use it or loose it. So when you say it did you no harm, it does not mean you remember the harm it did at the time, your just justifying it away.

2:It teaches them right from wrong

Bandura showed that social learning is a more powerful tool than Skinners stimulus:response mechanisms in the 1960's, research since then has proven that what you do is more powerful than what you say. Display it and its a normative behaviour that will be adopted by your children. And its the constant harking back to behaviourism that keeps this mentality alive, children will stop doing what you don't want them to if they associate that behaviour with a painful stimulus. And it has to induce some amount of pain...otherwise its not an effective stimulus, so justification on the basis that its only a 'gentle tap' not only demonstrates a gross misunderstanding of the facts and it shows that your probably lying, to yourself. Children learn more from what they are rewarded for than what they are rejected for, which leads nicely into -

3:I don't want my child to be wandering the streets, if only those kids had been shown some discipline.

Invariably the children wandering the streets were children where a smack and not a word or reward for good behaviour was ever dispensed. So the argument once again falls flat, if those children know that physical punishment will accompany bad behaviour and yet they continue to act in that way then surely the answers lie elsewhere as far as productive parenting.

4: I only do it when I'm calm

I would love to meet the parent who manages to put off punishment until such time as they are completely calm, the idea that one could feel completely in control of ones senses and lovingly smack a child is incomprehensible. When a friend or colleague acts in a way that displeases, you do you suppress all reactions until such a time as you are ready to apply a short sharp smack to their behinds? Why is OK to smack a child and not an adult. If its down to small children's inherent lack of understanding, then why do creche workers not have the 'right' to physically discipline children.?


Lastly I think we need to reassess the use of language, a smack is a hit, smack merely dresses the word up as something benign. Its a well known trick in court for defense council to refer to car crashes with terms like smack, graze and bump. This convinces people that the accident was not as dangerous, careless or serious as words like smash, crash and hit.

The only people that are convinced of carefree childhoods are the ones that have forgotten their own.