Reflections on National Spank Out Day

A Guest Post by Matthew Copeland Kohler

April 30th is National Spank Out Day. This is a day where we recognize the long-term harm caused by inflicting corporal punishment on children and advocate for gentle methods of discipline that rely on connection and trust between parent and child.

The word discipline means to correct or teach. It need not be synonymous with punishment or spanking. Spanking and shouting at children breaks your connection with them because connection is based on trust and safety and no one really feels safe and able to trust someone who is hitting them or shouting at them.

In my complicated childhood experiences, I had one parent, my ex-father, who followed his Independent Fundamental Baptist Church’s teachings. These teachings were that spanking was an act of love commanded by God. But I had another parent, my mother, who was raised United Methodist, was an early education teacher, elementary school teacher, and was educated in child development and brain science. She did not spank and tried to prevent my father from spanking my brother and me. She also rarely shouted like my ex-father did.

As a result, my brother and I have a connected and close relationship with my mother and not my ex-father. We haven’t spoken to my ex-father in over eleven years. Spanking, shouting, and anger broke any connection we may have had with our father.

My mother was able to correct us without spanking and there are a variety of ways to teach and correct that should make spanking unnecessary. However, they take work. Spanking is often a shortcut that relies on manipulation through fear and pain at the expense of connection with the child and with the cost of possible long-term trauma and mental health issues. Here are some of the ways I remember being corrected by my mother that never involved corporal punishment:

  • She sat with me for a conversation about the problem and ways to make better choices. Then she gave me construction paper and crayons and guided me through the process of writing an apology note where I stated what I did wrong, why it was not a good choice, stating how I could do things differently next time, and saying I was sorry. And then she would let me illustrate the front of the paper and fold it so it looked like a card. Finally, she would go with me so that I could deliver it in person. It was an effective and gentle way to hold me accountable while also implementing a type of restorative justice.
  • She read stories to me where characters had the same problems and behaviors and how they ended up solving them. Then, we would talk about it in the context of my choices.
  • She would redirect my attention to something else.
  • She would ask lots of questions to find out what the need or cause was behind the behavior. Behavior is communication that a child needs something, lacks skills, and is having difficulty.
  • She used time-out but not in the traumatic way I’ve heard some describe their experiences with it. I think the way my mom did it was more like what we would call “time-in” today. I sat in a rocking chair with my mom close by. I was allowed to talk and my mother would talk with me. She would help me calm down and we would talk about the issue. I wasn’t shunned and ignored like some who have experienced time-out. I wasn’t banished or had attention and affection withdrawn. Also, the rocking chair was really soothing for calming big feelings.
  • She let me experience natural consequences for choices.
  • A last resort may have been the loss of a privilege for the evening but it was usually replaced with something else. Otherwise you just have an antsy child who now has nothing to do. For instance, if the privilege of television was revoked, we could read stories, color, create art, etc.

The biggest part of discipline, though, was the connection piece. It is natural for a child to want to please an adult they feel connected and safe with. If I did something wrong, I always went to my mother because she wouldn’t spank me and rarely shouted. But a lot of times, I really didn’t need any punishment at all because my connection and safety with my mother made me want to please her and to be happy with my choices. Just having a conversation about ways to do better was often enough for me to change. It takes work, though, to establish connection. Fortunately, there are many ways to teach and correct that do not involve hitting or screaming at a child.

Aside from the loss of connection and safety, over fifty years of research and the experiences of victims have demonstrated other long-term consequences. They have also demonstrated that spanking is pretty ineffective at teaching a child much of anything except fear. Some of the facts from research and experiences include the following:

  • Spanking is a poor way to teach a child long-term positive skills to self-regulate, control impulsivity, think critically about the effects of various choices, etc. You cannot learn when you are being spanked or shouted at, because the fear of both of those reactions from a much bigger, stronger, and more powerful adult sets off the child’s Fight or Flight response. When the Fight or Flight response is activated, your body releases cortisol to prepare for the threat to your safety and the thinking part of your brain shuts off so that all your energy is focused on responding to the threat. You cannot learn when you are in this state of mind.
  • The only thing researchers found was effective with spanking was gaining instant and unquestioning compliance for a short moment. However, producing a child who just obeys authority without question does not teach any critical thinking. A lot of children who were part of fundamentalist and evangelical environments that emphasized cheerful, unquestioning, first-time obedience report extreme difficulty as adults with decision-making, taking reasonable risks, and needing lots of external validation to make decisions. Furthermore, research from Murray Strauss found that children who were learning a behavior had to be re-taught and corrected several times before internalizing the skill or behavior. Spanking might stop the behavior instantly for a short time, but the behavior always came back, requiring multiple spankings before the child internalized the skill. The research also showed that children who were consistently corrected without spanking learned the desired behavior at the same pace or even more quickly than the children who were repeatedly spanked. The spankings didn’t help the children learn any faster.
  • Spanking can be a form of unintentional sexual assault and sexual abuse. A child is told that anything covered by their bathing suit is private, but then a parent will pull down a child’s pants (and maybe even their underpants) and violate their bodily autonomy by touching a sexual/erogenous zone of the child’s body in a way that is violent. Sometimes the church tells children that, when dad does this, it is an act of love. Sometimes the child is being told that “this is love” either right before the spanking or during the spanking. In addition to this confusion of hitting being loving and dad exposing a private area of the child’s body and touching it, there is a physiological reaction that makes spanking unintentional sexual abuse. Smacking the buttocks repeatedly causes blood to rush to the buttocks through the iliac artery. The iliac artery also branches off to the genitals. So the blood rushing to the buttocks as it is being repeatedly struck can also be rushing to the genitals. Blood rushing to the genitals can cause an erection and arousal for boys and also arousal for girls. The child often doesn’t realize it has happened because they were in so much pain, but the brain can make a connection between the stimulus (the spanking) and the arousal that resulted. A sexual reaction has been forced on a child who does not have the ability to consent to an adult causing such a reaction.
  • Spanking and shouting cause issues with perfectionism. A child learns they must be perfectly behaved to avoid the risk of being shouted at or spanked. They then transfer this fear of falling below perfection to other adult authority figures in their lives—like teachers. They learn that, if you are not perfect, something painful will happen and you are a bad person. In essence, spanking is a form of rejection. The child isn’t learning that they have made a wrong choice and can learn and grow from it; they are learning that they, as a whole, are bad people and that is why they deserve to be beaten.
  • Corporal punishment has also been linked to trauma, complex trauma, complex PTSD, anxiety disorders, depression, difficulties regulating emotions you were never allowed to express because they were sinful (like anger or crying), aggression, and physical health problems.
  • Spanking was shown to have the same effect on the brain as other, more severe forms of abuse like punching and kicking or sexual abuse.

The fifty years of international, peer-reviewed research was found to be so conclusive that the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a statement saying that they condemn the use of spanking in any situation due to the long-term harms associated with it and because it is ineffective.

Christians need to step up and speak out about this issue. The church is at fault for using their influence to bury a lot of research that showed negative results of corporal punishment. However, the research has always been there. Good Christians can listen to science instead of misinterpreted and out-of-context scripture used to promote something destructive. 

We should also consider that children are not our property. They are their own people who have their own bodily autonomy and consent. With all the long-term, harmful outcomes associated with corporal punishment, what right does any authority figure have to force that risk of trauma and harm onto a child? I would say, “None.”

For more information check out the work some of these individuals have done to unpack and deconstruct the assumptions, false beliefs, and harm behind spanking

About the author: Matthew Copeland Kohler is a teacher who specializes in a phonics-based reading program that helps dyslexic students develop their reading fluency. He is passionate for advocating against corporal punishment and educating others about the topic of Auditory Processing Disorder, with which he personally grew up.

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