(bright, poppy music)
- Welcome to "The Parenting Junkie Show."
I'm Avital, and this is the place to go
to love parenting and parent from love.
Let's talk about spanking.
Maybe you grew up within a religion or a culture
that is pro-spanking children.
Maybe, important influences and religious leaders
have said "Spare the rod, spoil the child."
And it can leave you thinking that that's the only way
to be a good parent, and the only way
not to raise a spoiled brat.
Maybe you've already considered not spanking
and being more gentle and respectful towards your parents,
and then you get comments such as these,
"Well I was spanked, and I turned out fine."
"I guess that explains his tantrums."
"Aren't you worried you'll be raising a spoiled brat?"
"Just wait till he's a teenager."
"You arguing with the bible now?"
When you hear these kinds of messages,
you can easily find yourself questioning
your gentle parenting choices.
And with all the peer pressure and expectations
around you, it can feel like it's just easier
to go along with the culture, and what if they're right?
But then maybe you pick up a parenting book
or watch a video, or hear a podcast,
or see someone at the playground,
and you get a spark of inspiration.
Maybe you start to wonder how it would be
if you didn't go that route, if you decided
that hitting kids isn't for you.
And then you start to research
and read more and more about it,
and you start to discover how actually harmful it is?
How much research there is to back up
that hitting kids is a terrible idea.
And the more you think about it,
and the more you learn about it, the crazier
and more abusive it seems as a parenting tactic.
All right Marcy, well that's it for our yearly review.
We're doing OK, but we want to get that motivation
up a bit, so I brought my belt with me.
And let's get cracking, shall we?
And suddenly it can just seem so absurd
to use violence in order to teach children to be kind.
How can violence ever teach them to be kind?
You know John, if you want to have a happy,
healthy relationship with your wife, and in your marriage,
you need to introduce some violence.
Hitting her once in a while will really keep her happy,
connected to you, and she'll show you in turn,
the kindness and the unconditional love
that you're looking to receive.
And the more you think about it,
you're not sure if it's funny or sad,
or scary, that this is still legal
and encouraged in so much of the world.
Perhaps in so much of your world.
But if you're watching this video, I'm here to tell you
that you can do this.
You can give yourself permission to parent
in the exact way that feels right to you
that makes sense to you,
and that's rooted in real evidence-based research as well.
That's just the cherry on top,
because the research is absolutely clear
that spanking, hitting little children is a really bad idea.
It's really psychologically damaging,
and it doesn't teach them the lessons
that we want them to teach, it's completely ineffective!
And in fact, counterproductive.
The research is there, and it's always great
to have science on our side.
But I think most of us just, when we look inside ourselves,
we know that hitting people doesn't feel right
on the intuitive level, we don't want to do it,
it doesn't make us proud of ourselves.
We usually do it from a place of panic
or feeling triggered, or from a place of succumbing
to what our teachers and guides have told us
is good parenting,
and necessary in order not to raise a spoiled brat.
But times are changing.
We used to think that smoking cigarettes
was not only OK, but even healthy for you.
And today we know better.
Everybody knows today that cigarettes kill you.
And more and more parents are awakening to the fact
that spanking, hitting children kills the relationship
and demotivates them, demoralizes them, shames them,
and can be really labeled as a form of abuse.
Without getting into the labels,
and without debating whether or not it's abuse,
we can all agree
that we don't want to be violent people, right?
And we don't want our children to be violent people either.
In order to raise kind, compassionate, and gentle people
who know how to use gentle hands and their words,
we adults need to do the same.
So if you are feeling pressure from the people around you,
from your culture, from your religion,
or from the institutions that you take part in,
I'm here to be that voice whispering in your ear
that you can give yourself permission
to divert from that script, to evolve,
to jump into the next evolution of parenting,
and not to parent the way they did 50, 100,
or 1000 years ago.
Now we know better, and we can do better.
You can do better.
You can be the exact parent that you want to be,
the gentle, kind, compassionate one.
You can release yourself from cultural expectations,
and you can reinterpret, even holy scripts
in a way that makes sense to your modern day brain.
This is my invitation to you to do the work
to release those expectations.
Those expectations are theirs, not yours.
If you need to meditate, or journal, or go to therapy,
or talk to a trusted friend to release that need,
to uphold other peoples' expectations
and other peoples' dictates of what good parenting means.
To me personally, it is crazy that hitting children
is still legal, I have compassion for those parents
who grab their children and hurt them out of anger
because I too struggle with a temper,
and I too have been less than gentle to my children
on numerous occasions.
But I'm ashamed of that, and I feel guilty about it,
and I'm not proud of it, and I don't endorse it
as a good parenting approach.
And I know that it warrants an apology when I do that.
Some people used to think it was OK to hit people of color,
or to hit women, to use violence to oppress minority groups
and to control them.
And today,
we know better.
Pretty much everyone accepts that that is not OK
and amoral, and unethical.
And yet, it's still legal, and even encouraged
in many places around the world
to use that same violence to control little children.
How are we not protecting
the weakest members of our society?
They can't uprise and rally and protest.
And yet it's still OK to use violence against them.
Well, we as their parents need to protest that.
We, as their parents, need to stand up
to the influences and leaders and authors and thinkers
who say "Use violence, spank your child
"when they're disobeying you."
We need to protest and say, "No thanks.
"We're going to do this peacefully."
So let's come back to "Sparing the rod, spoiling the child."
And what to do, or even think if someone says that to you.
And if you feel that pressure
that you should be spanking, or you're spoiling your child.
Everything in life is up for interpretation.
And this sentence too can be interpreted in a myriad ways.
We've just decided culturally that it means
you need to hit, but the truth is that if you look
at the use of the word rod, it's typically used
for a shepherd, shepherds held rods
and they used them to shepherd their sheep,
to herd them in the right direction
and to guide them along a path.
When you think about this metaphor for parenting,
it's actually a really fitting one for peaceful parenting.
We talk about using our rod, our wisdom, our guidance,
our voice to shepherd our herd, our children
along a path to guide them.
And I think that's beautiful.
I think as peaceful parents,
that is our role, to be the guide.
Being our children's guide means that
if we were to spare them our rod, our guidance
and our boundaries, then we would be spoiling them.
We would be leaving them without that shepherding
which they need.
They need the leadership of the adults in their lives.
They need us to help them and guide them along a path,
their own unique path, but along it,
especially in those early years.
And so don't spare your rod, and don't spoil your child.
Be their shepherd, be their guide.
In this week's podcast episode,
we're taking these ideas even deeper.
So make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcast
to "The Parenting Junkie" Show."
So if you're as passionate as I am
of making spanking and hitting children a thing of the past,
share this out on Instagram.
You can tag me @parentingjunkie,
I'd love to share your stories too.
And you can leave me a comment about this
or any questions you might have, over on the blog,
theparentingjunkie.com/blog.
I would love to have a conversation
and hear your opinions and your experiences
around spanking and hitting kids.
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then slam on that "Like" button,
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same place next week.
Thank you so much for being here today.
Keep on loving parenting, and parenting from love.