To Spank or Not to Spank

A war has been raging in my household of late, and in brazen defiance of all logic and probability, the larger, stronger, savvier, more experienced of the combatants is nearly always the loser.

I end up feeling like a loser, at least, every time I spank my three-year-old son.

Liam is an adorable, funny, playful, bright and loving kid, so it’s painful to describe our relationship in harsh terms, but lately he’s adopted pushing daddy over the edge as his favorite pastime. Some days it’s like having our own little Iraq insurgency right here at 9 Maplewood Avenue. The calm of each new day is shattered before 8 a.m. over such incendiary questions as whether Liam wants peanut butter or jelly on his toast. He is a master of the improvised explosive rhetorical device. It is crude but effective. A typical conversation:

"Liam, would you like toast for breakfast?"

"No toast. Cereal."

"Okay, how about Cheerios?"

"No Cheerios. Toast."

"Do you want peanut butter or jelly? Or both?"

"Peanut butter."

"Okay, it’ll be ready in a mi—"

"Jelly. Jelly. I want jelly jelly jelly want jelly … No jelly. Ice cream."

"Arrrrrggggg!!!"

All this before daddy has managed to slurp down his first cup of coffee. But before you take me for a short-fused brute who uses corporal punishment in response to typical finicky toddler behavior, let me assure you I set the bar much higher on offenses that call for spanking. While we are no Mr. and Mrs. Ghandi, my wife and I think of ourselves as fairly patient and progressive parents. We agree that spanking is the discipline of last resort, and we reserve it for times when Liam has or is about to put himself in danger (such as running into the street after being told not to), or when his behavior threatens another person’s safety. Unfortunately, he has little interest in safe, quiet or peaceful activities.

One day this week, for example, he attempted to find out how hard he could bite his baby brother’s finger before it came off, and he probably would have found out if I hadn’t been there to unclamp his jaws and deliver a whollop to his posterior. The next day he tried for a toe, but again he was pried loose and punished. This sort of thing happens a lot, but baby Carter is resilient, as all second children must be if they intend to survive to adulthood.

I feel obliged to acknowledge that there are echoes of my own childhood in Liam’s alarming and destructive exploits. The reign of terror I waged on my younger sister Nancy, circa 1975-1988, included an experiment in which I tested the hypothesis that I could keep her quiet for at least five minutes by sealing her lips together with Krazy Glue. The adhesive proved alarmingly effective, and Dad had to apply several substances before he found one capable of unsticking her lips. (I’ve since toyed with the idea of claiming trademark rights for a product I would call "Sanity Solvent," which I would market specifically to the two demographic groups most prone to trouble with Krazy Glue: construction workers and the parents of preadolescent boys.)

For my scientific endeavor I was punished not merely with standard spanking but with a vigorous paddling with the heftiest wooden spoon in Mom’s kitchen. Other offenses that earned me a painful tenderizing with it included shooting my sister with a BB gun. (The fact that it was a ricochet rather than a direct hit was not considered a mitigating factor because the object that deflected the BB was Dad’s car.) The spoon itself was the sort of long-handled utensil one imagines an old-world grandmother twirling inside a steaming pot of mouth-watering goodness of a Sunday afternoon. But that particular spoon and I had a long and bitter relationship, which I ended at age 11 by secretly burying it in the back yard.

Beating a child with a wooden spoon might seem a draconian punishment by today’s elevated standards, but growing up I was often reminded that the instruments of corporal punishment had been even crueler for previous generations. Behind the door to Dad’s office there used to hang a leather strap that his father had used to keep razors sharp and his four children in line. It was a weathered and obviously well-used piece of brown cowhide, about three inches wide and three feet long. Dad only had to explain its history to me once, and he never had to take it off its hook. From that point on he would merely arch an eyebrow and nod his head in the general direction of its resting place behind the office door.

Seeing that vicious strap of the ’40s and ’50s often made me wonder if the decision to use the spoon in the ’70s and ’80s was a natural progression toward gentler methods of discipline. If so, I’ve often wondered, what sort of medieval bludgeons must the pre-strap generations have been punished with? Burlap sacks filled with lead shot? Red-hot pokers? My ancestors were either verywell-behaved or deft at dodging blows, else I wouldn’t be around to speculate about them today.

In light of the weaponry employed by earlier generations, my empty-handed paddling of Liam's bottom seems a quantum leap forward in tolerant parenting. But the experts tell me I am not tolerant enough. One of the more popular reference volumes on the subject is What to Expect: The Toddler Years, which warns that "Spanking is humiliating and demeaning to both the parent and the child, often shattering self-esteem and morale." Most of the other books in the How To Be a Less Imperfect Parent section at Barnes & Noble seem to take the same position, offering such advice as "Consider a time-out," and "Let your child suffer the natural consequences of the crime." I have already established that spanking my toddler has a negative effect on my own self-esteem: I feel bad about it after I’ve done it, even when I can’t see any better means of preventing an injury or calling his attention to the fact that his behavior is dangerous. On the other hand, I’m pretty certain that being flattened by a truck in the middle of the street would also tend to put a damper on his self-esteem, not to mention the morale of the entire family.

I imagine these books are intended for an audience of parents from another species, let’s call them Homo Angelicus. They never lose their cool or suffer paralyzing pangs of terror upon seeing their children in life-threatening situations. They all raise confident, well-adjusted children with healthy attitudes and few insecurities. Their kids never need to be spanked and their morale is always sky-high, although some of the younger ones are missing a few fingers and toes.