Is corporal punishment and physical restraint good for children? What do you think? I'm Nicholeen
Peck, I teach parenting all over the world through the lens of the principal self government.
And in this video, we're going to be talking about corporal punishment and physical restraint.
The short answer to the question is corporal punishment and physical
restraint good for children is no. And, yes, it depends on the circumstance. So we're going to
talk about those circumstances so that hopefully, you can decide how to best touch or not touch your
children. As a general rule, I do not advocate for spanking children or using corporal punishment.
In fact, I don't say corporal punishment is necessary at all. For years, I did treatment
foster care for troubled teens, they were all between the ages of 12 and 18. And I could not
touch them. I could not smack them, flick them, tap them, spank them, because they weren't mine.
If I did, that, I would be hauled into court and have my own negative consequences that I
didn't want to deal with. So I had to put that off the table. That was never going
to be a possibility with these children. But sometimes I did have to restrain them.
Because sometimes they were a danger to themselves or to other people. And that was the time when
physical restraint was actually okay. In fact, I was told that I needed to do that to keep them
safe. So is corporal punishment necessary? No. Could physical restraint be necessary? Possibly.
Although I would think in most cases, it's not necessary either. I'm hoping that no one has to do
physical restraint. But if so, we'll talk about it. Many people say corporal punishment is biblical.
And that all depends on how you interpret the Bible. The Bible is interpreted all the time
in different ways. And this is where we run into a lot of social debates and the theological debates.
So when we read the verse that says "spare the rod," now people say, okay, that means you need to spank
children. In fact, there have been many people who are part of church groups who have advocated
for spanking children. I am not faulting them for going there. Because if you don't know any other
interpretation, what do you have left, right. And people don't know what they don't know. But I do
know as a parent who did spank my own child one time, and I felt incredibly guilty after I was
not in control. When I spanked that child, I knew I wasn't being principled, I was being emotional.
And did my child really learn the lesson that he needed? No, he learned that he was afraid of me
is what he learned. There is a way you could do a spanking to a child and have it be principled,
but it takes a lot more self control than most people are willing to do. And you have to maintain
it the entire time. And when I say self control, I mean total condition of heart, of love the entire
time. So you would have to say, okay, the rule in our home is if you don't follow an instruction,
or if you roll eyes, or whatever it is, then there will need to be a spanking,
and you will need to accept it. Here's how you accept a consequence.
And you would teach them the skill for accepting a consequence, which is a skill that I do teach.
And then you would say, okay, so just now you had a moment where you lied, or you rolled eyes,
whatever the circumstances. And so you have earned a spanking. What you should have done is you
should have chosen to tell the truth or to keep that calm face, voice and body, whatever it is.
And since you chose not to, we're gonna need to do the spanking. So can you accept your spanking? Oh,
yes, dad, or yes, Mom, I can't accept my spanking. Okay, well, then let's do the spanking. And then
you would feel love in your heart toward the person, you would do the spanking. But here's
the problem. You did something to the child, the child didn't really get the opportunity to have
much character development, it was minimal. And so why not do more? Samuel Smiles, an author from
the 1800s, said that work is the antidote for a sick character. So we often use an extra chore
in our family. And we give our children the opportunity to accept their consequence
by actually serving the family in some way by doing an extra shore. This is quick repentance.
It doesn't follow them around. It doesn't require actually physically doing anything to the person.
They have to choose to take action on their own. And if they don't, and they're completely out of
instructional control at the time, then there's something else that we do called the rule of three
and we work them through that process of getting to a place of calmness.
So it is possible for a person to get calm. You just have to do some teaching ahead of time.
Spanking is not necessarily the answer. When I was in Africa years ago, because I was invited
to go there by the Catholic Church, which was a great honor, because I'm not even Catholic.
I went there to teach them the things that I teach, because they were concerned about
their parenting and wanted to make sure that their parents had more information about how to handle
current problems in society. Well, at that time, when I went to Africa, they were doing corporal
punishment. In fact, I'm sure some people, many people still are, but they had an actual rod,
an actual stick in their houses. So they were very literally taking a rod and caning or, you know,
smacking their children with it. So every time I spoke to these groups of religious leaders,
and even academic leaders at their high level institutions like Strathmore University, people
would raise their hands, even professors sometimes and say, What about corporal punishment?
What about spare the rod? And I would say to them, how do you know that that is really a
rod meaning a stick? There's a lot of metaphor in that Bible. Christ is what? He's the bread,
he's the water. He's the life, he's the word. He is the beginning and the end. Okay?
There's so many things that he is, how can we say that the rod is truly a rod? What if
the rod is something else? What if the rod is the word of God? What if the rod is
truth? What if that's what we're supposed to spare to our children? And they went, well,
I'd never thought of that before. But I thought of it, because I'm a Bible reader, and I couldn't
spank or hit children. And I knew I didn't feel good or right doing it. But I wanted to know,
could that mean something else? And I feel the answer is yes. Because we see Christ in his life,
we see the woman who is taken in adultery thrown before him. Does he stone her, that was the law.
He could have stoned her. Did he? Did he cane her? No, he got down on her level. And he thought,
he drew in the dirt. And then he said, go and sin no more. He filled his heart with love for the
woman. He told her what she had done was wrong and gave her instruction not to do it again.
He taught her with deep love and acceptance for her when other people were not doing that.
And I reasoned that there has to be a way to do that with our parenting too. And there is.
I used that way with my foster children and with my own children, we corrected them. And while
we corrected them, we connected with them, we realized there was a way to feel closer
to your children during an after a correction than you even did before. And it was beautiful.
They truly did have changes of heart and learn to master themselves and govern themselves
so much better. So what about physical restraint, we need to talk about that too. But before we do,
click that subscribe button. If you are trying to have more calmness or peace or unity in
your family, this is the channel for you, and you're not going to want to miss the videos.
Click subscribe now. So let's talk about physical restraint. When might you have to restrain someone
physically, I reasoned that if it was something a person could get arrested for, I probably had
a duty as a parent to do some physical restraint. So if a person was going to hurt another person,
that's called assault, and a person can get arrested for that .If a person is going to
damage someone else's property, destruction of property, they could get arrested for that,
too. If a person is going to hurt themselves in a significant way, then they are going to have
to be held in custody for a time to just to make sure that they're safe and everything's okay.
So those three things are the reason why a person might need to be restrained. So if I
just don't want a person to have another cookie, and am I going to be aggressively grabbing them
and holding them? No. If a person is going to run in a road and get hurt, might I grab
them and quickly hold them? The answer is yes, I'm going to stop them from getting run over by a car
or from hurting somebody else. So those would be the times. Now there was something they taught me
to do when I did treatment foster care that was very useful when I didn't need to use physical
restraint. And this was called a soft hold. When a person does a soft hold, what they do is they
gently hold the person, it's firm and gentle, they can't move, but you're not like death gripping
them, right. You're holding them in such a way you might pull their their hand to one side, you
might put their arms across their chest and put your arms across their arms. In fact, I'm pretty
sure that I have a whole video where I talked about doing a soft hold and I think I showed it
on my son. So find the videos where my son is with me, my son Porter, and you'll probably see
me doing a soft hold and what it looks like. So when it's a small child versus when it's a big
child that could look a little bit different. A soft child, a small child might be on your
lap where a big child and you might have to be behind them. Doing a soft hold might be necessary
to keep a person safe. They may not like it, they may fight you and the whole time you're
doing that soft hold and you're holding them in place, you're thinking I love you, it's okay,
be calm and you're keeping your breathing, very regular, very calm and not choosing to fight them,
even if you have to use a little bit of muscle to make sure that they don't hurt themselves,
or somebody else at the time. Now, obviously, if a person is a great enough danger,
and if they're bigger than you, and you're not able to do a type of a physical restraint,
that would be safe for them, then you might have to call for help. And you know, occasionally
with some of my foster children that were bigger than me. I had to actually call the police and,
and it kind of removed the other people from the area if that person was going to be that big of a
danger. So you know, keep everybody safe. By and large, you shouldn't have to restrain. Hopefully
you can teach your children how a correction is going to happen, how to accept a consequence,
teach them the skills that they need for self government and for success. And then that
will decrease their anxiety so that they won't feel the need to try to control you physically.
But occasionally that can happen and if so, learn the skill that you need to do a good soft hold.
And I teach that in my parenting course, which is the TSG parenting course. I especially go into
detail about that in my three day training called the parenting mastery training. So you can look
those things up at teachingselfgovernment.com.