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.

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.

There’s this song by Ben Folds that brings me to tears whenever I hear it. “Still Fighting It” is essentially a love song to his son, and the line that hits a little too close to home for me is, “You’re so much like me… I’m sorry.”

I’m not shy about tooting my own horn when it comes to my strengths, and I’m always proud when I think I see them in my son. His love of books and puzzles, his problem-solving skills, his fairly early grasp of phonics - I’m proud to have helped laid the groundwork for this sort of thing, both through nature and nurture. Like any 3-year-old, of course, he has his moments - the temper tantrums, the irrationality, the occasional laser-like focus on certain elements to the exclusion of everything and everyone else around him - and we roll with the punches. I try to keep my cool and engage in all that positive behavior support that I learned about in grad school (and really, that many teachers learn simply from years of experience dealing with people). But there are some times when it’s even harder than usual to maintain that detachment - when I see him grunt or tic, when I see him whine incessantly about nothing, and when I see him terrified of the most benign things (e.g., soap bubbles). Those times, I feel like it’s 1980 and I’m looking at a 3-year-old version of myself.

I’m not sure if it’s more a sense of self-loathing or overprotection that makes me feel this way; moreover, I’m not sure which is worse. Maybe it’s the uncertainty of it all - for example, I had a variety of physical tics (including grunting and twitching) when I was young; and truth be told, I have never managed to completely kick them (I’ve just become an expert at masking them). When I see my son grunt for no apparent reason (like frustration) it scares me. I start to question myself - is he going to have to endure the teasing that I had to because of this? Is this my fault? Is he learning by watching me, or is this genetic?  What have I done? And I just go down the rabbit hole of anxiety and neuroses typically reserved for brand-new parents of infants.

I’d be lying if I said this doesn’t impact how I react to these behaviors. Yes, I’ll typically react more harshly when I see these than when he does something that wasn’t problematic for me as a kid. Intellectually, I know it’s no good, but I’m so emotionally scarred invested in what I believe people’s reactions to those behaviors will be that I sometimes find it hard to treat the situation with the cool head that it requires.

Looking down the road for my son sometimes feels like looking back down my own well-trod path. In looking into his future, my greatest fear is that I’ll see the same pitfalls and traps I went through – being painfully socially awkward and withdrawn for much of adolescence, and the resultant bullying and teasing (or is it the other way around?). I’m not here to say my childhood was significantly worse than anyone else’s – hell, I probably got off easy compared to what could have been – but to look at the larger significance of my concerns, I guess I kind of want him to learn from my mistakes before he gets a chance to make them himself. Not too unreasonable, right? Right?

Makes me wonder if I’m more concerned about protecting him from having to experience them, or protecting myself from having to watch him experience them.

(Note to Kate, et al.: next one’ll be more uplifting, I promise!)