Here’s a little mind exercise

If you think it’s okay for parents to use “light” corporal punishment against their kids, let me ask you this:

Do you think it’s okay for a teacher to use the same “light” corporal punishment against a child in their class who misbehaves?

Do you think it’s okay for police officers to use “light” corporal punishment against people in the streets who commit violations?

Do you think it’s okay for correctional officers to use “light” corporal punishment against prisoners in a correctional institute?

Do you think it’s okay for a man to use “light” corporal punishment against his wife when she does something that he considers disobedient?

If not, why do you find it acceptable for a parent to inflict any level of pain and fear against a child as a form of discipline, but not when the situation is a non-parent with a child, or an adult with another adult?  What makes parents hitting children an acceptable scenario but not the rest?

There’s a pretty famous quote from livelong anti- corporal punishment advocate and children’s book author Astrid Lindgren that Sums up very beautifully what I think when people want to quibble about severity when it comes to hitting children:

“When I was about 20 years old, I met an old pastor’s wife who told me that when she was young and had her first child, she didn’t believe in striking children, although spanking kids with a switch pulled from a tree was standard punishment at the time.

But one day when her son was 4 or 5, he did something that she felt warranted a spanking — the first in his life. And she told him he would have to go outside and find a switch for her to hit him with.

The boy was gone a long time. And when he came back in, he was crying. He said to her, ‘Mama, I couldn’t find a switch, but here’s a rock you can throw at me.’

All of the sudden, a mother understood how the situation felt from the child’s point of view: that if my mother wants to hurt me, it makes no difference what she does it with; she might as well do it with a stone. The mother took the boy onto her lap, and they both cried. Then she laid the rock on a shelf in the kitchen to remind herself forever: never violence.

And that is something I think everyone should keep in mind. Because violence begins in the nursery, one can raise children into violence.”

Because when you think about the massive imbalance of power in parent-child relationships and the complete dependency of children, and how much they basically HAVE to trust their caregivers, even if you’re only breaking that trust a little, you’re still betraying your child it if you purposefully hurt it.

I’ve seen this quote before but didn’t know how to find it, so I appreciate you adding it to the conversation.