Last week, CNN.com reported that over 200,000 children in the US were spanked at school in the 2006-2007 school year. As I read the article (with this blog post in mind), I took note of what I felt were some the key takeaways:
- Corporal punishment is legal in 21 states, but only used frequently in 13
- Texas led the paddling pack with 48,197 students receiving CP that year
- CP was disproportionately applied to Black students (17.1% of the population received 35.6% of those swats, and was 1.4 times more likely to be paddled than White students)
- A mother whose 13-year-old son was paddled was told by school administrators that paddling is “the quick and dirty way of dealing with discipline problems”
I was originally going to focus this piece on the utter dearth of empirical support for corporal punishment (sorry, my access to EBSCOhost is limited over the summer), but then I got to the user comments, where I was taken aback by the overwhelming support for corporal punishment in schools. Scroll down to the end of the article to the “Sound Off” section (can’t link to it directly) to read the comments.
Go ahead; I’ll wait.
…
Please don’t get me wrong, folks: I’m not here to tell you how to raise or punish your kids, and I know that the spank/no-spank debate is a hot-button issue on wildly successful dates in parenting circles. My concern in this instance stems not from whether or not people spank their kids, but rather that so many people seem willing to put this decision in the hands of their children’s schools.
Postscript: As I read this article, I was reminded of someone I once knew who told me she “could not wait” for her son to turn 1 so she could start spanking him (not sure how she came by that magic metric). We had quite a few discussions about parenting, but never did I feel less comfortable than when she’d talk about spanking with such fervor. I always thought the phrase “a gleam in one’s eye” was just a figure of speech until I heard her wax romantic about the ways she could, would, and did spank her child.
Damian Bariexca is a high school English teacher/school psychologist from Perkasie, PA. He has blogged about education, technology, and psychology at Apace of Change since 2007, and has two children, Dylan and Kiera. Damian can be found on Twitter and Identi.ca as @damian613.
I know it’s bad form to comment first on one’s own post, but I just came across this, which makes for good supplemental reading:
U.S.: Corporal Punishment and Paddling Statistics by State and Race
Definitely not an unbiased source, but at least an interesting at-a-glance look at how different states handle corporal punishment.
My child’s school has no business doling out corporal punishment. I would be horrified if they did! But, as a postscript, an elementary school I attended for two years relied primarily upon corporal punishment doled out by the school principal, with a yardstick, and in front of the entire class. It was awful.
I think it’s horrible all the way around. Definitely not how I’d plan to start my morning. I can’t imagine hitting a 1 yr old baby, Hitting is wrong. Wow. Sick. I can’t even wrap my mind around the sort of insanity that allows for violence against children, whether it’s at home or in schools.
Wow…I can’t even believe this is something that still exists. As a prior elementary school teacher, I cannot imagine using any sort of spanking or corporal punishment with my students. It’s just not something I would even consider. As a parent, I would be horrified if one of my children was punished this way in school. I just don’t think it is an appropriate form of discipline…there are so many more effective ways of dealing with poor classroom behavior or poor behavior in general. The Center for Effective Discipline makes some great points about why spanking is not an effective form of discipline at http://www.opposingviews.com/questions/is-spanking-an-acceptable-form-of-discipline. Definitely an interesting and thought-provoking read.