Is It Ever Okay to Spank Your Kids?
This article and other hot button topics including infidelity, teaching morality in schools, sex, lying to your kids and how TV and video games are actually good for your kids are all in the April 2010 issue on newsstands March 15th.
At that moment, I decided that I’d never write about spanking or any other controversial parenting decision again. What if the next time I wrote about making such a decision, someone really did call the police? I wasn’t sure what kind of decision might prompt another such reaction—feeding my kids fast food or letting them play alone in the yard might be controversial, but they’re not grounds for accusations of neglect or harm (are they?). But then, I wouldn’t have thought that a light swat on my daughter’s bottom when she was in the midst of an uncontrollable tantrum would provoke such a reaction either. What would I do the next time I was confronted by a parenting conundrum in which I was forced to decide between doing the best or most effective thing (however defined) and doing the thing most likely to be approved of by a jury of my most critical peers?
I had occasion recently to put that question to the test. My daughter (now in kindergarten) was home sick from school—well enough to boss me around but nonetheless snotty and miserable—and when my husband called, late in the afternoon, to say that he couldn’t pick up her brother from daycare, I was faced with a dilemma. Leave the girl for less than 10 minutes to walk a few paces up the street to get the boy, or bundle her up in her snowsuit and drag her through the wind and snow beside me?
“Leave her,” my husband said when I worried aloud about taking her along. “She’s four, but she’s mature and independent. You know that she’ll be fine. You leave her by herself for longer stretches when you take a shower or disappear into the basement to do laundry, right? She’ll be fine.” I hesitated. I called a girlfriend who has a four-year-old of her own. “Leave her,” she said. “But don’t tell anybody. Don’t tweet it, don’t blog it, don’t say a word about it. You’ll get skewered.” “But I should still do it?” I asked. “You would do it?” “Oh, totally,” she replied.
So I did it. I left my iPhone with her, with my husband’s cell-phone number cued on the main screen, and I told her to call him if she was scared or needed anything, and to not answer the door, which I locked. I was gone just under 10 minutes, and when I returned with her brother, I asked her how it had been, being on her own. “Fine. I’m a big girl, you know.” “I know.” “I did call Daddy, though. Because I couldn’t find the cookies.” I laughed, and my heart, which was still a little clenched from anxiety over the decision I’d made, eased. “And I can’t wait to tell all my friends at school that you let me stay home alone!”
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