I've had some experiences that color my feelings (toward skepticism) when I hear anyone express in what feels like dogmatic terms, or even with a high degree of certainty, what is right and wrong in childrearing practices.
First, as I have said, my mother was insane and often violent. I have had to wear to school clothing chosen to hide bruises and welts; I have been so marked had to stay home from school; I had one very humiliating black eye caused by being beaten with the wooden-handle ends of a jump rope. I saw my sister picked up by her hair and swung around the bathroom, and I saw her with welts, and with a black eye, too.
I feel compelled to mention here that my mother had wonderful human qualities, too; and her own childhood was more horrible than the one she provided her daughters. She tried her best.
I turned out okay. Averagely neurotic, I'd say. Satisfied for the most part with what I've done on the planet so far, good friends, good life, a long and happy marriage, we raised a fine child who's our best friend and has a good and successful life of his own. Life is harder and more complex than this, but this is adequate to make the point that I wasn't destroyed by my mother's violence.
Something messed my sister up bigtime, though. She thinks it was Mama. I don't know.
I've seen many, many, many people I know raise children, and raise them in many ways. I see a correlation between having raised healthy children and having loved the children, or maybe it's truer to say I see a correlation between hostility or coldness or chaos or something I'd call "emotional distance" from the children and messed up children. But I've seen no correlation at all between non-spanking and happy children who became happy adults. (I haven't known anyone personally whom I knew to be a child abuser or 'beater,' though I dare say they'd know I'd do something about it if I knew about it, so maybe some acquaintances have fooled me.)
When I worked at the home for "neglected and dependent children," I knew children who were horribly damaged, and others who seemed simply wonderful-- sound, confident, dear children with a good potential for happiness. I suspect I never met one in my five years who hadn't been at least spanked; and most had been brutalized. I knew a little boy who was afraid of red paint; it turned out that he had watched his mother murder and dismember her boyfriend. I knew a family of three siblings who couldn't talk except in incomprehensible guttural sounds because they'd been kept by themselves in a room into which food was thrown daily for most of their lives. I met a family of children who were discovered by social services when a cop noticed one of them in the street with a severely burned hand. His mother had held his hand in the flame of a gas stove for stealing food from the refrigerator.
I'm going to tell you about this last family, because it's the one I always think of when people are so sure of what makes a sound child.
There were five children. Their parents were drug addicts. Their mother was a whore, their father her pimp. When they went out of the apartment to score, the children were chained to a radiator (not a hot one.)
But this family of children was so, so strange. They were wonderful. They loved each other, the older keeping close, and strict, tabs on their younger siblings at the home, where they were assigned to different "cottages." They were happy spirits, they were tough but not 'mean,' they were capable of fun and kindness and mischief, and they were intelligent.
I just couldn't get over it. I fell in love with the four and a half year old who was in my pre school program. I'll call her Geraldine Ramos, though that wasn't her name. When I left there, I cried, I missed Geraldine so much. I wrote her mother a letter telling her how fine a child she had raised in Geraldine. I hoped she would keep in touch, but I never heard anything from them. When the children were removed from the parents, the parents had both gone into drug rehab and, later, they got their children back.
I learned most of what I knew about the family from a social worker who wasn't supposed to divulge this sort of information; but we were friendly, and she knew how much I cared about Geraldine. She told me that the reason the children had been chained to the radiator, according to the parents, was that the neighborhood was dangerous, and they had to keep the children locked up so they wouldn't go outside. She said that the children all, including the brother himself, believed that the punishment to their brother, the burned hand, had been "fair," because he was taking food that was supposed to be shared when their parents returned. She told me that the reply to the question, "What did you children do when you were chained to the radiator" had been, "We sang."
Geraldine was what you would call 'spunky.' The 'punishment' for misbehavior in this very difficult group of pre schoolers was to sit in your cubby for a minute, or maybe even for five minutes, occasionally ten. The worst punishment I could give was to tell the child if certain behavior didn't stop, I would have to not let the child come to school the next day. I was distressed when I learned that this threat was also being used in the cottages by caretakers. The children did love my school. They saved up their splinters, keeping them a secret from cottage staff, so I could take them out. They never cried when I took splinters out. I taped the splinter to a card with a silly praise poem of the brave child and mounted it on the wall. This was the hardest job I ever had, for many reasons, only one of which being that so many of the children were very difficult indeed; and why not? Even if a child had had a lovely life, being taken away from your family suddenly and thrust among strangers would be traumatizing and affect your behavior.
Anyway, I return from memory lane to finish the story about Geraldine, the point of which was to show why I'm so very uncertain about almost anything except that a genuine and positive, I mean friendly, emotional connection is what is most important, not child raising rules. Consistency is good. Order is good. Respect for the child is good.
Geraldine had a strongly developed sense of right and wrong. She took note any time a child transgressed seriously enough to be consigned to a term in his or her cubby. If she thought the time served was sufficient, either because she thought I or one of the teachers had been too harsh, or because she suspected we had forgotten the time, which happened occasionally, she would catch my eye, put her hands on her hips, stride bossily over to the cubbies, and take the child by the hand, and lead him back to the playroom. She would then stand and look steadily at the adult who'd cubbied the child until she was sure no one was going to countermand her order. I always thanked her for 'reminding' us of the time, lol! (She was very fair.)
Once when Geraldine had successfully completed a pretty difficult new puzzle, I had exclaimed, "Geraldine, how'd you get to be so smart?!", and she had replied, taking the question seriously, and standing with her head raised in the most perfect imitation of a royal personage you could imagine, "I am a Ramos."
You can see why I loved this child. She was an integrated, strong and spirited individual.
And you can see why I have so little certainty about whether 'spanking' or not is important, in the presence, or absence, of other parental qualities. |
