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 having been stung by it, many of us become reluctant to do anything or say anything that might put us in its path again. Or we make certain parenting choices more covertly or stop talking about them altogether. This, obviously, is a shame. Parents are best equipped to make the best choices when they’ve been exposed to the broadest spectrum of possibilities: when they are, in other words, exposed to a wide variety of parenting practices and to open, friendly, public dialogue on parenting issues. If all we ever talk about are (and if we limit our range of parenting choices to) those choices that everyone has decided are indisputably acceptable under all circumstances, then we’re not left with very much from which to choose. This is not to say that we should treat all parenting choices as equally reasonable—some parents do abuse and neglect their children, and we ignore this at our communities’ peril—only that, within the limits of what’s generally reasonable, we cut each other some slack. We do best for ourselves as a parenting community, I think, when we recognize that we are a community, and that being in that community doesn’t mean policing each other, but talking to each other and learning from each other and understanding that this parenting thing is challenging for all of us.
If you’d asked me a year ago whether I would ever spank my child, I’d have said no way. If you’d asked me five years ago whether I’d ever let any of my future children out of my sight, ever, I—a worrywart by nature—would have laughed at you. If you ask me tomorrow whether I’d let my kids ride the subway alone when they’re in middle school or take up extreme skateboarding or ride a dirt-bike or what have you, I’d tell you that I just don’t know. Because I don’t. None of us do. We all have good guesses and great intentions and well-laid plans, but the truth of the matter is that the work of raising children, by its very nature, defies all those things.
And so we must be patient with each other, understanding of each other, ready with words of encouragement and support rather than words of condemnation and censure. Because you never know: the next time you have to fly to Candyland to buy a marshmallow house, you might choose to leave your kids behind, too. Who’ll be the critic then?
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