spanking_kids

Here’s your ridiculous New York Times trend piece of the day: pussified modern parents, shamed into pussification by their equally pussified peers, have shunned spanking their children for screaming at them, because yelling “You colored all over the wall I just painted you stupid little asshole!” is so much better for a child’s emotional development than a whack on the bottom. Yes, this makes perfect sense.

You see, the problem here is two-fold…a) things like “time out” don’t usually work, and b) parents who don’t spank their children tend to become big balls of bottled-up angst. They hold it all inside until they just can’t take it anymore, and then they explode.

Many in today’s pregnancy-flaunting, soccer-cheering, organic-snack-proffering generation of parents would never spank their children. We congratulate our toddlers for blowing their nose (“Good job!”), we friend our teenagers (literally and virtually), we spend hours teaching our elementary-school offspring how to understand their feelings. But, incongruously and with regularity, this is a generation that yells.

“I’ve worked with thousands of parents and I can tell you, without question, that screaming is the new spanking,” said Amy McCready, the founder of Positive Parenting Solutions, which teaches parenting skills in classes, individual coaching sessions and an online course. “This is so the issue right now. As parents understand that it’s not socially acceptable to spank children, they are at a loss for what they can do. They resort to reminding, nagging, timeout, counting 1-2-3 and quickly realize that those strategies don’t work to change behavior. In the absence of tools that really work, they feel frustrated and angry and raise their voice. They feel guilty afterward, and the whole cycle begins again.”

The article includes quotes and anecdotes from various parents talking about their non-spanking disciplinary actions. This one was my personal fav…

“I’d like to think that most of the time we have a good interaction based on reason,” Lena Merrill said of her 4-year-old daughter, whom she has never spanked. But then there are the times when “she’s done something like poured milk on the floor or ripped a page out of a book,” Ms. Merrill said. “I just lose it.”

Usually, she says, she shouts something like, “Why did you do that? Why would you do that?”

“It’s phrased like a question to make her think, but the tone scares her,” Ms. Merrill said.

Lena, I don’t know how to put this except to say…BEAT THAT GODDAMN CHILD! Take it from me, someone who got the shit beat out of him by his parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, getting beaten occasionally made me a better person. Sure I hated it at the time, but I’m so glad I was raised the way that I was raised looking back on it. Stop sending more bratty twats like Spencer and Heidi into the world who have never felt physical pain during their pampered childhoods. Just stop it!