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.
And with that, my heart re-clenched. If she told her friends, her friends would tell their parents. And proud as she was, she would probably also tell her teachers and her daycare workers and our next-door neighbours and her soccer coach and the lady who runs the bakery. It was one thing for me to make the decision to leave her home alone for a few minutes. It was quite another for that decision to be made publicly known. I wouldn’t expect anyone to report me to police, like my anonymous commenter, but still: what would people think? Did I really leave my child in the house alone? What had I been thinking?
I took a deep breath. I had to remind myself that the reactions of people who know me and my children would not be the same as those of anonymous critics on the Internet. Anyone who knows my daughter knows that she is well taken care of. They know how independent and mature she is. They know that we live only a few steps away from the daycare. They would—they should—understand why I would make such a decision, if I were called upon to explain that decision. And I would explain it. I could explain it.
“You just make sure that if you tell your story, sweetie,” I said, “you explain why you stayed home. Because you were sick, and it was snowing, and I had to get your brother.”
“Or I could say that it was because you had to fly to Candyland to buy me a marshmallow house!” “Or that.”
At the end of the day, I’m the one who has to live with my parenting choices. I’m the one who has to decide if I’m able to celebrate or accept those choices. I should be able to explain and defend those choices, of course, and this is the primary reason why I think that it is important that we, that I, resist the temptation to conceal those choices. After all, if we make a parenting choice that we don’t want anybody to know about, isn’t that a sign that maybe that choice isn’t ideal?
Maybe. Maybe not. A reluctance to be open about our parenting decisions doesn’t always signify guilt or shame. Sometimes, we’re just afraid: afraid that someone is going to judge us or chastise us, or worse. And we’re afraid of that because it happens. Whether it’s the nosy woman at the park nagging us for not having put mittens on our toddler or the well-meaning lactivist lecturing us on giving our baby a bottle of formula or the playgroup peer telling us that sleep-training is abusive or the judgmental observer deciding that spanking an out-of-control preschooler constitutes abuse and warrants calling the police. We’ve all encountered some version of this kind of well-intended but nonetheless intrusive parenting intervention and we’ve all been stung by it.
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