A Chamber of Drunken First Impulse

The Canadian Senate wants to make it illegal to spank your children. By repealing section 43 of the Criminal Code, which expressly allows it, they would make spanking a matter of simple assault. That is, a felony.

All the relevant experts seem to agree:

The Canadian Paediatric Society: “The Psychosocial Paediatrics Committee of the Canadian Paediatric Society has carefully reviewed the available research in the controversial area of disciplinary spanking. …The research that is available supports the position that spanking and other forms of physical punishment are associated with negative child outcomes.”

American Academy of Paediatrics: “Corporal punishment is of limited effectiveness and has potentially deleterious side effects. … The more children are spanked, the more anger they report as adults, the more likely they are to spank their own children, the more likely they are to approve of hitting a spouse, and the more marital conflict they experience as adults. Spanking has been associated with higher rates of physical aggression, more substance abuse, and increased risk of crime and violence when used with older children and adolescents.”

England's Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and Royal College of Psychiatrists: "We believe it is both wrong and impracticable to seek to define acceptable forms of corporal punishment of children. Such an exercise is unjust. Hitting children is a lesson in bad behaviour.”

UNESCO: “To discipline or punish through physical harm is clearly a violation of the most basic of human rights. Research on corporal punishment has found it to be counterproductive and relatively ineffective, as well as dangerous and harmful to physical, psychological and social well being.”

And yet—it is not really all the experts. On the other side, one could cite the Book of Proverbs:

“He who spares the rod hates his son,
but he who loves him is careful to discipline him.” (Proverbs 13:24)

“Folly is bound up in the heart of a child,
but the rod of discipline will drive it far from him.” (Proverbs 22:15)

“Punish him with the rod
and save his soul from death.” (Proverbs 23:14)

“The rod of correction imparts wisdom,
but a child left to himself disgraces his mother.” (Proverbs 29:15)

So we are really faced with a choice. For the religious, it is a choice between the authority of God, and that of man. For this reason alone, freedom of conscience requires that we not outlaw spanking. But even for those of us who are non-religious, it is a quandary. Who are you going to trust: the current experts, or the wisdom of the ages?

The answer to my mind is obvious: trust the wisdom of ages. Is it really likely, after all, that all of our ancestors up to a generation ago were idiots? No. Do we really have any better information, or a better way of knowing, than they did? No.

Those who worship at the altar of science, as opposed to scientists, may disagree. They may claim that empirical science is this better way of knowing.

And it is, for matters touching on the physical, that is, the sensory realm. But can it give us any greater insight into the hearts of men than our grandfathers had? No; by its nature, it cannot.

Upon the great and obvious fallacy that it can, much harm has been done: including the doctrines of Social Darwinism, Communism, Fascism, feminism, free love, and Freudian psychotherapy.

But don’t just take my word for it. Let’s examine the arguments against spanking in detail.

We cannot claim that it harms a child physically—if it did, it is already assault by the criminal code. Indeed, the blows are applied to the buttocks—the one part of the body best cushioned from blows. Spanking hardly even hurts—some, I hear, actually indulge in it for pleasure. We have gotten pretty sentimental if we find this level of “violence” intolerable.

The arguments are rather that it causes psychological or moral harm. This is interesting--because it is in direct contradiction to the wisdom of the ages, which holds that not spanking is the moral danger. And it is in exactly this sphere, the moral and spiritual, that science is least equipped to know.

The Canadian Paediatric Society’s explanation that it is “associated with negative child outcomes” is too vague to be useful—except that the notion that human behaviours can be classified simply into “positive” and “negative,” like electric charges, bodes very poorly for a true understanding of human nature. Is it possible for value-neutral science to determine what human values are “positive,” and which “negative”? It is not.

The American Paediatric Society is more specific: it claims, firstly, that spanking causes people to be angrier as adults.

This claim specifically goes against the wisdom of the ages. The I Ching, for example, observes that “through oppression, one learns to lessen rancour”—suffering, and even unjust suffering, reduces anger, rather than increasing it. The Beatitudes imply the same.
But note the phrasing: “the more anger they report as adults.” From this we can well imagine the sort of study that was done. Adults who showed or reported a good deal of anger were asked if they were spanked a lot as children. This was perhaps even contrasted to a control group that did not show or report much anger.

But what this is likely to measure is whether the adults were still angry at being spanked, still nursing the memories, not whether they were spanked more often. And those predisposed to anger will naturally be more likely to still be angry. Proving absolutely nothing.

The same objection applies to a study of adults who hit their spouse or have marital difficulties. And to those “more likely to spank their own children.” Moreover, this last objection is tautological—it assumes spanking is bad, in order to “prove” it is bad. I would imagine adults taught woodworking by their fathers are more likely to teach their children woodworking. Does this prove woodworking is wrong?

And there is another problem with the logic here. “Spanking has also been associated with higher rates of physical aggression, etc.” Post hoc, ergo proper hoc: it is surely at least as likely that such adolescents are spanked for their bad behaviour, as that their bad behaviour is because of the spanking. Otherwise, this becomes an argument against police, prisons, and even hospitals as well.

Such is the simple-minded folly of the social sciences—the thing being observed is not passive and objective, but quite aware of being observed, and much smarter than any experiment.

The American Psychological Association argues that spanking is liable to lower self-esteem. And this is surely true. This seems to be its main point—it doesn’t hurt much, but is ignominious. The problem is, the APA thinks this is a bad thing. All religions point out that self-esteem is a bad thing. Hitler had lots of it. Bullies have it in truckloads.

The Royal College of Paediatrics gets credit at least for plain speech. They make no attempt to justify their stand in pseudo-scientific terms, but just call it “bad behaviour.” Again, assuming what they claim to prove.

UNESCO does not appeal only to pseudo-science, but also to the philosophical doctrine of human rights. If all humans are equal, it is surely just as wrong to force a child to do anything against his will as to force an adult.

But wait a minute. We do force adults. We actually do have a police system and a prison system for them. It follows that it is perfectly proper to discipline children as well.

Moreover, there are serious practical problems with any human rights-based objection to using force against a child. For, logically, that would mean any and all other alternate forms of discipline are also violations of his or her human rights. So would forcing him or her to wear a seatbelt, or to get an immunization, or to eat his broccoli.

UNESCO does bring up one new argument: that spanking is “counter-productive and relatively ineffective.” Of course, the statement is nonsense: if a thing is counter-productive, it is completely, not relatively, ineffective. We are not dealing with sharp minds here. But it is possible to tease out an argument: that other forms of discipline might work better than spanking.

First, if so, so what? This does not argue for an elimination of spanking. It might still be most useful in a specific situation.

Second, it is unlikely that UNESCO actually has access to any studies of scientific value that demonstrate this. This is because there are no studies of any scientific value that demonstrate this. The CPS is honest about it: “The existing research is not in the form of double-blind, randomized controlled trials, as such studies would be impossible to conduct. Moreover, no modern ethics committee is likely to approve research that involves violence against children.”

In other words, the scientific community assumes prior to all evidence that spanking is wrong. And it has produced no evidence that it is.

But third, and perhaps most importantly, let’s consider UNESCO’s assumption that it knows what it means for spanking “to work.” What is spanking supposed to do?

With its blinkered, simple-minded view, psychology seems to think it is just about controlling behaviour. If so, then, arguably, other techniques, like reasoning to a child, could work better.

But this is not what the wisdom of ages claimed. The effect of spanking was not about curbing one specific behaviour, but was to “teach a lesson.” To teach wisdom, the opposite of folly. And, indeed, to “save his soul from death.”

These are no trivial benefits.

Parents also used to deliberately scare their children. They used to warn them of the bogeyman. This, like spanking, seems to be present in all cultures, though the bogeyman’s identity tends to shift. In Korea, a tiger was supposed to come and eat the noisy child. In the Philippines, the Moors will kidnap him.

And, interestingly, kids seem to be fascinated by this idea. It is the same fascination that attaches to dinosaurs, or dragons, or the fierce animals at the zoo. To a definite point, kids love being scared.

What they are getting from this, perhaps, is an emotional education. They are learning, harmlessly, how to deal with fear. The whole point of spanking, accordingly, may be that it is frightening in prospect, but turns out not to hurt much at all. By going through this lesson, children may learn to grapple with their imaginations, face their fears, deal with physical pain, and, if warranted, persist in spite of it.

What are we doing if we refuse them this education?

It doesn’t bear thinking about.