Hold Out Your Hand!

The New York Times today reported on shouting being the new spanking for parents.  Educated and enlightened parents who would never consider spanking their children instead admit to screaming at them when things get out of hand.

We all have a default setting when we lose it over the kids and many of us resort to spanking which is the word we use to erase our guilt over hitting people one-quarter our size.  A parent who spanks a co-worker for misbehaving gets charged with assault.  No such consideration is afforded a little kid.  Oddly, there is no evidence that spanking actually works.  It does not diminish bad behavior in the future.  Indeed, study after study shows kids who get spanked act more aggressively toward others, to which I say this is a surprise?

I was raised by spankers, and on some fundamental level I sensed it was ineffective all the way back to when I was little.  I grit my teeth like I was getting a vaccine at the doctor’s office and the brief, unpleasant episode was over quickly.  My biggest challenge was in keeping track of how my Mom and my Dad liked to administer the dose of “this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you”.  Both of them were hand slappers, but Mom wanted the hand presented palm down and Dad wanted it palm up.

On rare occasions Dad put us over his knee for a slap on the bottom, but there was so much formality in being ushered into the living room for this that the whack was anti-climatic.  It was also difficult to predict which was a hand slapping crime and which was a bottom slapping crime, which lead me to believe, even way back then in the 1960s that the drama had more to do with Dad’s mood after a day at the office more than anything my sisters and I did that was wrong.

Funny, but I cannot remember a single transgression that warranted any of the dozens of slaps I received growing up.  As we got a little older, my sisters and I used to laugh at the predictability of it all, the tone of our parent’s voice and the split second hand up/hand down decision.  Punishment was always preceded by the stern command “Hold out your hand!!!”   And that’s all I paid attention to.   The crime was inconsequential to whether I put my hand up or down.

The most devastating punishment my dad ever gave me never involved physical contact.  It didn’t have to.  In my first week at Chandler Junior High in Worcester I made a cool new friend named Catherine who suggested we ride our bikes to Bradley’s after school one day.  Bradley’s was like K Mart, it had everything.  It even had make-up and to a 13-year old make-up was the next frontier; exciting and still forbidden at my age.

Catherine and I studied all the possibilities with all the colors in plastic packaging on the racks until suddenly the nature of the trip changed.  To my horror,  Catherine started gathering up make-up and dumping it into my purse.  I was frozen. I couldn’t tell her to stop or she’d tell all the kids in this new school in this new school year that I was a total nerd.  I just stood there and let it happen.  To my relief, Catherine started placing some items in her own jacket pocket.  At least I wasn’t going to be the only one going to jail if we got caught, which we did.

It was completely awful.  Mom was summoned and instead of slapping my hand in the security office, she just sat in a chair and cried.  Dad came home from work and I waited, no, I hoped to hear “hold out your hand’ so I could take the little bee sting and get on with my night only this time no such familiar command came forth.  After dinner Dad told me to sit in my chair at the kitchen table, and instead of sitting in his chair beside me, he walked across the table to take Susan’s chair where he just sat and looked at me.

I was all defiant and bold.  I sat there, sighing and staring right back, so put out by this total waste of time.   I had television to watch.  What was taking so long?  After what felt like three hours in that kitchen, I asked how long I was going to be stuck there and he calmly told me to be quiet.  He didn’t yell, he didn’t even seem angry. He didn’t raise his hand.  He seemed possessed and it knocked me off balance.  I knew then I was cooked. Where was his temper?  Where was his hand the size of a tennis racquet?  Eventually I realized he was too disappointed in me to do anything but sit there with a surgical gaze that cut me in half like a scalpel.  The tears began streaming down my face.

I never forgot the punishment nor the conduct which provoked it.  It wasn’t enough that I allowed the stealing to be applied on me.  I should have stopped it. In the future, no amount of ridicule I received from school mates for doing the right thing could ever be worse than the feeling I let down my Dad.  Rather than demoralize or humiliate me with physical contact, that long, long night at the kitchen table that probably stretched to 20 minutes, strengthened me.  I was resolved to do whatever it took to never have to sit in the presence of a disappointed father again.

Hit or yell at another adult, and you’re viewed as a crazy person.  Hit or yell at your child and you’re viewed as a parent.   When a child loses control the last thing they need is a parent who loses control too and then starts hitting in the name of making it better.  It doesn’t teach a child self-discipline; it teaches them when nothing else works, you hit the person smaller than you and its OK because it’s only spanking and the smaller person deserved it.

Remain calm, composed and in command, and you’ll bring the temperature of a room down to something that works.  Your kids might even remember what it is they did wrong and should not repeat in the future.

I found a method of discipline with my own four children which proved stunningly effective.  Everyone who witnessed it could not believe it.  I’ll write about it next time.

Tagged as: Parenting, spanking, The New York Times