You will respect me!

Do those words sound familiar? Maybe a blast from your childhood? My sister and I can evoke the evil eye from my mom to this day with a perfect imitation of her words from our childhood: “You don’t have to like me, you don’t have to love me, but you will respect me, young lady! Do you understand me?!” Oh, make no mistake, we definitely understood. We were more afraid of Mom than Dad. Mom could never be manipulated. She was on to us from day one.

With so many people who believe spanking should be outlawed, this debate will continue and everyone has an opinion, including those in the psychology field. In fact, it’s the psychologists and behavior analysts who are most vocal in their adamant beliefs against corporal punishment. The general consensus is that it impedes emotional growth and leads to adult depression and low self worth. I doubt that. My self worth is just fine, thank you very much. It suffered no ill effects from childhood spankings. There was a time kids had a healthy respect for teachers too. Well, unless you were my sister. One teacher broke a ruler on her butt, which led to two rulers being taped together to serve the purpose and ensure baby sis got her just desserts, although it’s not clear anymore which rule she’d broken since at one time or another, she’d broken all the rules. In true form, she’d had a bellyful and commenced to taking the taped rulers away from the teacher and broke them after the first lick or so. This, of course, triggered the phone call to Mom. Let me say this: I’d have preferred five rulers being taped together or recess taken away forever than to have my mom come to the school for something like this. It didn’t matter if a teacher had shaved our eyebrows off, glued our hands to our desks and forced a kid to eat the mystery meat from the cafeteria - we knew parents and teachers were on the same side. Period. The double ruler episode was no different. As spirited as my sister was (and still is), she knew she didn’t have a chance once Mom showed up and took the teacher’s side.

With so many TV shows showcasing a British nanny’s approach to discipline, it seems as though there’s another way. But for every family who allows a camera crew and an assertive nanny to come into their homes for a week to show these desperate parents another way, there’s thousands who don’t have that option. More times than not, when an exhausted and defeated parent says, “I just don’t know what else to do.”, I find myself thinking “Yeah. Maybe you don’t, but I do.” That’s a bit disturbing to me since screaming kids who kicked and threw things at their parents like these just didn’t exist in the 70s when we were in elementary and jr. high school and on the rare occasions it did, parents sure didn’t expose it to the outside world because that meant the parents lacked strength to keep their kids in line. And “timeouts“? Yeah, right. That’s a new word exclusive to current times. Timeouts back then referred to something a referee yelled at a ballgame. And God forbid we back-talk. Our “smart mouths” were by far the worse thing to display. As kids, this resulted in (and in this order): the evil eye that told us we were in for it, followed by the finger directing us to step right “here” and do it now, and that was followed by, “Young lady, you can assure yourself that once we get home, that little stunt you just pulled has guaranteed a spanking. Now you get back over there and behave yourself.” And finally, it ended with our heads dropped and sulking back to wherever we were before we’d dug the hole we were now in.

Most states are vague regarding corporal punishment. The laws seem to be worded differently, and honestly, some are open to interpretation. And surprisingly, many states still allow physical discipline as an option for teachers. Most states have wordings such as, “excessive punishment” and “physical injury” but don’t really make the distinction between abusive and disciplinary.

Tennessee’s law has this statement:

Permits criminal charges against a parent/guardian/custodian who administers “unreasonable” corporal punishment which causes “injury” to the child. Sec. 39-15-401 [Cr.]

California’s law has this statement:

Serious physical harm does not include reasonable and age-appropriate spanking to the buttocks where there is no evidence of serious physical injury.

Delaware’s law reads:

Force is justifiable if reasonable and moderate and by parent/guardian/foster parent/legal custodian/other similar person responsible for care and supervision. Intended to benefit child.

Keep in mind, these are only very small excerpts. Many feel that the lack of spankings and basically, a lack of discipline as a whole, have led to the problems with kids of all ages. I don’t know that I agree totally with that, but I do think it certainly plays a part. And the answers won’t be found in this post, but what I can tell you is that because we were raised in a home with very definitive roles (Mom was Mom…we had a lot of friends, but she wasn’t one of them. She was too busy being a mom) and clear expectations of what the rules were and the consequences of breaking them, we’ve suffered no ill effects.

In a time where child abuse cases are daily happenings in courts across the country and are analyzed on every primetime news show, it’s clear there’s no balance. The laws should be written to provide clear and definitive definitions of what constitutes child abuse, which is a crime, and less about what defines responsible discipline and parenting. And for what it’s worth - the evil eye counts as responsible discipline - and quite effective, at that.

Family case that drew most interest from Family Lawyers at lawyerahead Inc.

Business case that drew most interest from Business Lawyers at lawyerahead Inc.