Spare the rod

I have lots to tell you all about this past weekend -- my baby girl turned six and had a very special Lord Of The Flies edition of kid's birthday partydom, PLUS I did a book signing & baby showering thingy with mah bestest internet dork pal -- but we'll get to all that. All in good time, friends.

Because right now what I want to talk with you about -- as a parent, and as a citizen of this country -- is the matter of corporal punishment. Primarily I'd like to address the following question, which has been rattling around in my skullcase all morning long: is the culture of the United States a culture that essentially aids and abets child abuse?

I realize that's a whopper of a query, but what I'm really trying to get at is that it seems to me that the ever-increasing tolerance of violence in our society, coupled with it's noted emphasis on personal freedom and generalized overvaluing of individualism, generates an almost perfect habitat for abusers and abuse in all it's myriad forms. Children are, of course, the likely targets of this abuse simply because they are least empowered to fight back or turn in their abusers (who are typically parents or relatives). And so the culture as it exists now seems to at least abide violence against children, even if it does not condone it.

I got to thinking about all of this today because of a very thought-provoking article on Slate, which you really should read in its entirety before continuing on with this post. One of the more disturbing moments for me in reading the article was this bit of commentary:

If you hit another adult you can be arrested and sued, after all, so shouldn't our smallest, weakest citizens have a right to equal or even more-than-equal protection under the law? In this country, if you do the same thing to your dog that you do to your child, you're more likely to get in trouble for mistreating the dog.

And this deeply disturbs me on multiple levels. First, that children don't have at least the same protection under the law as adults (when it seems to me that, if anything, they should have MORE protection), and second, that our culture is so enthralled by it's own blustery rhetoric of individualism and platitudes about "freedom" that, indeed, people are more likely to report animal abuse than child abuse. One can only infer that, collectively, the people of this great nation view reporting a parent striking their child as an assault on the parent's freedom... to abuse their child. Oh yeah, of course, isn't that in the Bill Of Rights somewhere -- that we have an inalienable right to beat the crap out of our kids, if we so choose? That article's smack in-between the right to bear arms and the amendment about women being able to vote, isn't it?

I don't mean to sound all judgey-judgey. Listen, I'm an imperfect human being just like everyone else, and I've had moments where my frustration level as a parent hit such a boiling point that I had to almost physically restrain myself from striking my daughter. In one terrible instance of simultaneous parent-child meltdown I DID swat her bottom, in fact. I'm not proud of that, but the point is I understand the human impulse running to violence under circumstances of extreme stress, and I understand how someone can be pushed to that unfortunate breaking point. I get it. I do.

But here's the thing. Though I understand how it happens, I still know in my heart and in my gut that it's absolutely and unequivocally wrong. The one time I swatted my daughter's bottom I immediately felt utter repulsion and horror at my own behavior. While my daughter seemed to just barely register that I'd struck her behind at all, I was reeling because I understood that I had just crossed a line that I shouldn't have ever crossed. It wasn't even a thought process really -- I was viscerally sickened at almost the precise millisecond my palm met her buttocks. I instantly understood on some profound, unconscious level that what I'd done was a betrayal of trust and a enormous parenting failure.

Should I have been locked up for that mistake? No, of course not. I swatted her bottom only slightly harder than I do in jest, when we're playing around and I lovingly give her a butt-pat. What constitutes abuse is clearly something more than a one-time (or even two-time) indiscretion, though I don't claim to know how or where to draw that line. When does a parenting mistake become abuse, exactly? Putting aside the horror stories we come across on the news with frightening regularity, stories that typically end with the death of a child after a life of pain delivered by the very people who should've been their protectors, what standard could all the people of this country agree upon as unacceptable parental use of force/violence, and therefore not hesitate to report it to authorities, as we unhesitatingly report the abuse of an animal? Would the people of this country permit such a thing at all, treading as it would on individual "rights" and "freedoms"? Is it even possible to legislate people's comfort-level regarding interfering with things that go on behind closed doors, things that are often heard muffled through walls? I don't know.

My view -- and it's probably not a popular one if the statistics cited in the Slate article are to be believed -- is that an adult's right to privacy and individual choice ends when he or she begins directing physical violence at a child, and furthermore, that a society that accepts violence against children as part of its culture is a profoundly broken one. I may be in the minority here, but it seems to me that having the "freedom" or "right" to physically hurt the small and weak isn't any kind of freedom at all -- it's oppression.

So God bless America, y'all. Because clearly we need all the help we can get.