Spanking or Child Abuse?

As a senior, I have to take Health to graduate.  We have a lot of guest speakers come, and recently there were a couple of women who came for two days from The Parenting Center.

They talked about a lot of things, most of which I agreed with.  The last day, however, they told us how evil spanking was.  They said that, when a parent loses control with their child, whatever they are doing is what they explode with.  Their logic was that, if you, as a parent, are spanking your child and you lose control, that rage will show itself in you hitting your kid, which could possibly kill the child.

Then they showed us an Oprah video about this lady who could trace child abuse back 130 years, all the way back to the Civil War.  She said, "There are two ways to raise a kid:  through love or through fear; my father only knew how to raise us through fear, so he did."  She talked about how she promised herself that she would never beat her children like her father beat her and her siblings.  Then, in the video, she had two boys.  She tells us about an incident when her oldest had colic, and she took him down into the basement (where his crib was) and stuffed a rag in his mouth to shut him up (she said that she had had a bad day, and had a headache).  Then she told us how that had scared her, because she could have suffocated him.  That was the only reported incident of anything like child abuse until the serious one happened.

She had just cleaned up the living room because they were going to have company (her boys were 8 and 5).  Her kids got some chips and made a mess, so she sent them to their room and cleaned up the mess.  They were in their room crying (they shared a room), and she took a curtain rod and spanked them with it.  When she got to the door (the curtain rod still in her hand), they were still crying, so she turned around and threw the curtain rod at her youngest son.  It went through his eye and into his brain; he died in the hospital.  The ladies from The Parenting Center told us that we shouldn't spank our children, because of this; we could kill our kids.

I was spanked as a child.  I would get a warning first, then, when I continued to do that one particular thing wrong, my dad would send me to my room.  He would calm down in the living room, then come in with the belt (or just with his hand, when I was really little).  He would explain to me that he loved me, but that I had done wrong, and that I needed to understand what I had done was wrong.  He would tell me that he hurt when he had to spank me at least at much as the actual spanking hurt me, and then he would do it.  Before the spanking, he would always make sure that I understood what exactly I had done wrong.  After the spanking, he would leave the room, with me crying on my bed, and give me time to think about what I had done wrong, and what I could do next time to not do that.  Then, after about ten minutes, he would come in and hug me and tell me how much he loved me, and we would talk about what I could do better the next time.  He never left any marks, and I learned the lesson.  That wasn't child abuse; that was discipline.

A few months ago (I think that's how long ago it was), California was locked in a debate about whether or not to outlaw spanking, as it was "child abuse".

Is spanking child abuse?

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