25th Sep 2022

"Hell Is For Children"

How many times have you heard that it use to be okay to spank kids in class with a ruler or a paddle? And how many times have you heard that all of the world's problems started when they made it illegal for parents to spank thier own children? But wait a second, the US government has never made it illegal to spank kids.   

Despite opposition from medical and social-services professionals, as of 2022, the spanking of children is legal in all 50 states.

It is illegal to beat your kids until they are black and blue and can't sit down for a week, but that is what parents do in Christian homes all across America. It is illegal to burn your children with cigars and cigarettes or to put soap or hot sauce in kids mouths but that's what American parents do, all the time.

We all agree that it is wrong to hit a grown man or a grown woman. We all hopefully agree that it is wrong to hit animals. Why is it in any way helpful or right to hit a small defenseless child whom nature has charged us with keeping safe?

Answer me this, why is that you believe you can not control a small child without the use of violence? Are your options that limited or are you just taking your own problems out on someone who is defenseless? You've had a bad day, the boss didn't give you the promotion that you wanted and now you want to take it out on someone who can not fight back. Take all of your anger out on someone who has nothing but love for you. Your kids have nowhere to go. No way to defend themselves. And so many American kids run away from their Christian homes becuse they prefer to sleep on the streets where they feel safer than they did at home. God bless America ya'll. And yet the parents aren't gulty of any crime(s), it's called tough-love. Unable to find love at home the children turn to self medicating on hard street drugs that leads to run ins with law enforcement which than they are labelled criminals or they overdose. While the mental scars that their parents gave them go untreated and unpunished. That's the American way.    

This form of discipline pretends to be educational but is actually a way for parents to vent their own anger. Spanking involves the learned misrecognition of injury as education.

American men have no problem beating on their wives and children but won't stand up to someone their own size, not without a gun. Respect is earned like trust. And I can not respect any one who needs to use violence to get what they want. That's what street pimps do. American parents, so-called Christians, should be better than street pimps, don't you think?

In America we've all heard parents say, "I brought you into this world and I can take you out." Why is it legal for your own parents to threaten your very life?

FACT: It has never been illegal in America to spank your own kids. But answer me this, if it's good for your kids is it good for you too? Because the bosses in America use to be able to beat their workers with a whip and I'm told that production was double what it is today. So, should we allow your boss to crack the whip, to beat you if you take too many bathroom breaks?

FACT: Real men do not need to use the threat of violence to gain respect. Respect is earned. If you can not earn the respect of a small child there is something wrong with you there is not something wrong with the child.      

In 19 States, It's Still Legal to Spank Children in Public Schools 

TheNewYorkTimes: Corporal punishment is banned in the United States’ military training centers and can no longer be carried out as a sentence for a crime. It is prohibited at Head Start programs and in most juvenile detention facilities, too.

But in many states, there is one place where it is permissible to hit, spank or slap: school.

Corporal punishment, defined as paddling, spanking or other forms of physical punishment, is legal at public schools in 19 states, mainly in the South, and is also allowed at private schools in 48 states.

Students are typically spanked with paddles that measure up to two feet long and several inches wide.

This practice remains legal because of a Supreme Court decision that is more than 40 years old. In 1977, the Supreme Court ruled in Ingraham v. Wright that corporal punishment in public schools was constitutional, which meant that each state could make its own rules when physically disciplining students.

No other corporal punishment cases have made it on to the docket since then. This is in part because people are protective of their ability to discipline their own children in the manner they see fit.

In both Alabama and Mississippi, black children in some school districts were more than five times as likely to be physically punished as white children were, the data showed.

A recent Government Accountability Office report examining federal data from the 2013-14 school year found that black students, boys and disabled students are punished at greater rates than their peers. 

In Tennessee, officials discovered that children with disabilities were being physically punished at a higher rate than other children in about 80 percent of the state’s public schools that used corporal punishment. The details were laid out in a report from the Tennessee comptroller’s office of research and education accountability that used federal data to analyze four different school years.

Likewise, in Louisiana, students with disabilities were punished at disproportionately high rates.

The data does not say what type of physical punishment the students received, whether the punishment resulted in the need for medical treatment or why the students were punished. 

Wikipedia: Corporal punishment of minors in the United States, meaning the infliction of physical pain or discomfort by parents or other adult guardians, including in some cases school officials, for purposes of punishing unacceptable attitude, is subject to varying legal limits, depending on the state. Minor children in the United States commonly experience some form of corporal punishment, such as spanking or paddling. Despite opposition from medical and social-services professionals, as of 2022, the spanking of children is legal in all 50 states.

Corporal punishment is most frequent for toddler-age children and continues into children's adolescence. More than a third of parents in the US report using corporal punishment on children less than a year old.

Researchers estimate that 85% of American youth have been physically punished by parents during childhood or adolescence. The most common form of physical punishment is spanking on the buttocks with an open hand. However, more than one in four parents have also reported using an object, such as a hairbrush or wooden spoon, a belt or a spatula or their fist to hit their children.

A 2014 real-time investigation of mothers in Texas found that nearly half used some form of corporal punishment during the duration of the study. Subjects tended to use spanking when angry and for trivial misdeeds, such as minor social transgressions by children. Those mothers who spanked tended to rely on spanking as a punishment rather than using it as a "last resort". These episodes of corporal punishment were not usually effective in stopping the unwanted behaviour. According to the study's lead author, George Holden, "The recordings show that most parents responded either impulsively or emotionally, rather than being intentional with their discipline", contrary to the advice of spanking advocates. The audio recordings used in the study revealed that mothers tended to spank their children, of varying ages, an average of eighteen times per week. Researchers had earlier estimated that American parents used corporal punishment an average of eighteen times per year. Based on these preliminary results, Holden suggests that studies using self-reports may dramatically underestimate the actual incidence of spanking by parents.

Public support for parents' right to spank remains high in the U.S. despite a growing body of evidence linking corporal punishment by parents with numerous adverse effects such as aggression, antisocial behavior, anxiety, and depression in children.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Association of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the National Mental Health Association suggest non-violent discipline as an alternative to corporal punishment. Techniques include: Rewarding good behavior, allowing natural consequences to instruct the child (along with explanations when necessary), disciplinary consequences that are tied to the aberrant behaviour (such as taking away toys when the child doesn't pick them up), and time-outs.

The American Academy of Pediatrics discourages corporal punishment because the nonphysical discipline techniques work better and avoid the negative consequences of physical punishment, including: Making children more aggressive or more violent, potentially causing physical harm to them, and teaching them that it's acceptable to physically hurt a loved one.

Professionals say the key to discipline include: communication, respect, consistency, moving on after the punishment is complete, matching discipline to the age of the child, and learning how to recognize when there may be some external factor driving a behaviour (such as being hungry or being bullied at school).

In 2008, the Minnesota Supreme Court considered a case involved a man who had struck his 12-year-old son 36 blows with a maple paddle. The trial court held that this constituted abuse, but was reversed on appeal. In affirming the reversal, the Minnesota Supreme Court stated that "We are unwilling to establish a bright-line rule that the infliction of any pain constitutes either physical injury or physical abuse, because to do so would effectively prohibit all corporal punishment of children by their parents" and "it is clear to us that the Legislature did not intend to ban corporal punishment".

Bans on the corporal punishment of children have been proposed in Massachusetts and California but have failed to secure passage.

Regulation of corporal punishment in public and private schools is done at the state level. There is no federal policy regarding corporal punishment in schools. In 1977, the Supreme Court of the United States found that the Eighth Amendment clause prohibiting "cruel and unusual punishments" did not apply to school students, and that teachers could punish children without parental permission.

The ban of corporal punishment use even at schools has still yet to be achieved in the USA. In 2022 not all 50 states made the practice unlawful. Since the 1970s, 31 states and the District of Columbia have banned corporal punishment in public schools, though in some of these there is no explicit prohibition. Corporal punishment is also unlawful in private schools in Iowa and New Jersey. In the remaining 19 U.S. states there was not any ban, and corporal punishment is lawful in both public and private schools.

Spanking Is Ineffective and Harmful to Children, Pediatricians’ Group Says

InternationalBusinessTimes: Globally, 44 nations forbid parents from smacking kids, but the United States isn't likely to join them anytime soon. Experts say that although societal views of corporal punishment are shifting, the practice is too far ingrained in American culture.

Another high-profile child abuse case of pro football player Adrian Peterson, who was indicted on charges he whipped his 4-year-old son with a tree branch. Peterson argued it was part of his family tradition, saying in a statement that "I have always believed that the way my parents disciplined me has a great deal to do with the success I have enjoyed as a man."

The most successful attempt to forbid spanking in the U.S. came in Delaware in 2012. Then-state Attorney General Beau Biden -- a son of President Joe Biden -- supported a bill there that sought to criminalize any punishment of kids that causes physical injury or pain. That bill became state law. (The younger Biden left office Jan. 6.)

TheNewYorkTimes: The American Academy of Pediatrics new policy, which will be published in the journal Pediatrics, updates 20-year-old guidance on discipline that recommended parents be “encouraged” not to spank. The organization’s latest statement stems from a body of research that was unavailable two decades ago.

“One of the most important relationships we all have is the relationship between ourselves and our parents, and it makes sense to eliminate or limit fear and violence in that loving relationship,” said Dr. Robert D. Sege, a pediatrician at Tufts Medical Center and the Floating Hospital for Children in Boston, and one of the authors of the statement.

Children learn positive behaviors from practicing actions that work, ones that lead to a sense of belonging and competence. They internalize what they practice and what their family practices. They learn reasons for their actions from what they hear and are told, but active practice has the deepest impact.

He pointed to evidence that corporal punishment initiates a cycle of aggression that often followed children into adulthood and raised their risk of mental illnesses, including depression and anxiety. A 2009 brain-imaging study found that young adults who were spanked as children had reduced gray matter volume in the prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate, suggesting they may be on a trajectory of altered brain development. Those who had been spanked also performed worse on IQ studies. 

Harvard.edu: Spanking elicits a similar response in children’s brains to more threatening experiences like sexual abuse.

PsychologyToday: Analysis, conducted at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa, offers new evidence that corporal punishment causes cognitive impairment and long-term developmental difficulties.

According to the report, spanking may reduce the brain's grey matter, the connective tissue between brain cells. Grey matter is an integral part of the central nervous system and influences intelligence testing and learning abilities. 

Additional research supports the hypothesis that children and adolescents subjected to child abuse and neglect have less grey matter than children who have not been ill-treated. A 2016 analysis of multiple studies found that children do not benefit from spanking.

Medical professionals investigating the long-term effects of spanking have consistently found a link between corporal punishment and increased aggression in children. Such "educational" discipline correlates to higher levels of acting out in school and trouble in academic performance. It predicts vulnerability to depression, typically in girls, and antisocial tendencies usually manifest in boys.

“Certainly you can get a child’s attention, but it’s not an effective strategy to teach right from wrong,” Dr. Sege said.

Advice for parents and caregivers:

“Where We Stand: Spanking” (American Academy of Pediatrics HealthyChildren.org website)

“What’s the Best Way to Discipline My Child?” (American Academy of Pediatrics HealthyChildren.org website)

Positive Parenting Tips (Centers for Disease Control)

If you are a parent, or plan to be a parent, and want to learn to not use spanking, HERE is a place for resources to help you.

NOTE: This is a totally free article, no subscriptions or pay walls, no ads or pop ups, no donation buttons or anything to join or buy. No spam! I do not profit from any of this. I am not running for any political office, nor do I endorse any candidates or political parties.

Do yourself a favor. Think for yourself. Be your own person. Question everything. Stand for principle. Champion individual liberty and self-ownership where you can. Develop a strong moral code. Be kind to others. Do no harm, unless that harm is warranted. Pretty obvious stuff...but people who hold to these things in their hearts seem to be disappearing from the earth at an accelerated rate. Stay safe, my friends. Thanks for being here.

If you’re having any difficulty you can contact:

The nonprofit organization End Violence Against Women International began the national Start By Believing Campaign in 2011, to promote positive responses to sexual assault survivors who disclose. As the campaign’s name suggests, a statement of belief can have a huge impact on sexual assault survivors, and can influence their decision whether or not to disclose their sexual assault again. Start By Believing also provides more tips on what to say and what not to say when someone confides in you they’ve been sexually assaulted.

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