[Kelli]

The other “spanking” thread along with an article I recently read, PLUS a story I heard on the radio this morning has me thinking about the varying views amongst AA’s and CC’s in regards to issues regarding discipline.

I believe it was the October issue of Parents Magazine (can also be found on parents.com http://www.parents.com/articles/moms...160.jsp?page=1) which had an article about spanking “Which Side of the Fence are You On?” It was a general article with differing opinions but in it a Duke researcher made reference to her findings that showed a cultural difference on the issue. She stated that her study showed that white children who were spanked demonstrated more aggressive behavior as young teens, but black children exhibited fewer problems. She believes her research “makes an important point about the power of a cultural community.” Her theory is that “in many European-American families, kids experience spanking as a shameful thing—it implies a loss of parental control that's frightening and harmful," she says. "In African-American families, spanking is seen as more acceptable." Her full study can also be found on line.

My first thought after reading this was is she saying that she believes spanking IS "a loss of parental control" but is seen as more acceptable in AA families, or is she saying that AA’s do not view spanking as "a loss of parental control" and therefore is more acceptable. I'm not sure which way this statement was intended. What are your thoughts on the whole thing? I can remember getting only a couple of spankings from my mom (she was the enforcer and I learned quickly) and based on my experience I never once “feared” my parents, but rather I feared the consequences that would be dished out because of my own disobedient actions. I had and continue to have a very close and loving relationship with my parents.

Below is the following story I heard on the radio today about an AA mother and daughter. Many of the comments I heard on the radio and read in the forum where I pulled the article are from AA’s who are applauding the mother’s actions. Most of the dissenting opinions I read and heard seem to be from CC’s. What do you guys think? Is this another example of discipline methods and views cutting across racial lines?

Kelli

Mom Makes Daughter Stand on Street Corner
Date: Wednesday, November 16, 2005
By: Sean Murphy, Associated Press
EDMOND, Okla. (AP) - Tasha Henderson got tired of her 14-year-old daughter's poor grades, her chronic lateness to class and her talking back to her teachers, so she decided to teach the girl a lesson.
She made Coretha stand at a busy Oklahoma City intersection Nov. 4 with a cardboard sign that read: "I don't do my homework and I act up in school, so my parents are preparing me for my future. Will work for food."
"This may not work. I'm not a professional," said Henderson, a 34-year-old mother of three. "But I felt I owed it to my child to at least try."
In fact, Henderson has seen a turnaround in her daughter's behavior in the past week and a half. But the punishment prompted letters and calls to talk radio from people either praising the woman or blasting her for publicly humiliating her daughter.
"The parents of that girl need more education than she does if they can't see that the worst scenario in this case is to kill their daughter psychologically," Suzanne Ball said in a letter to The Oklahoman.
Marvin Lyle, 52, said in an interview: "I don't see anything wrong with it. I see the other extreme where parents don't care what the kids do, and at least she wants to help her kid."
Coretha has been getting C's and D's as a freshman at Edmond Memorial High in this well-to-do Oklahoma City suburb. Edmond Memorial is considered one of the top high schools in the state in academics.
While Henderson stood next to her daughter at the intersection, a passing motorist called police with a report of psychological abuse, and an Oklahoma City police officer took a report. Mother and daughter were asked to leave after about an hour, and no citation was issued. But the report was forwarded to the state Department of Human Services.
"There wasn't any criminal act involved that the officer could see that would require any criminal investigation," Master Sgt. Charles Phillips said. "DHS may follow up."
DHS spokesman Doug Doe would not comment on whether an investigation was opened, but suggested such a case would probably not be a high priority.
Tasha Henderson said her daughter's attendance has been perfect and her behavior has been better since the incident.
Coretha, a soft-spoken girl, acknowledged the punishment was humiliating but said it got her attention. "I won't talk back," she said quietly, hanging her head.
She already has been forced by her parents to give up basketball and track because of slipping grades, and said she hopes to improve in school so she can play next year.
Donald Wertlieb, a professor of child development at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts University, warned that such punishment could do extreme emotional damage. He said rewarding positive behavior is more effective.
"The trick is to catch them being good," he said. "It sounds like this mother has not had a chance to catch her child being good or is so upset over seeing her be bad, that's where the focus is."

[spaypets]

Well, I'm pretty white and I think it is a great idea. I think in this country we're so worried about making sure our kids don't feel shame that we've stopped making them feel "ashamed." Public humiliation is one of the things that keeps a lot of us on the straight and narrow if we're tempted to stray.

One of the best punishments I ever heard was for a 7th grader who'd been cutting class. Her mother started going to school with her, attending all her classes, sitting with her at lunch. Like any self respecting 12 year old, this was humiliating -- and it kept her from repeating her crime.

My own father would threaten to call the police if I was late for curfew. I believed him, and the vision of having the police find me with my friends was too embarassing to even complicate being late. I wasn't afraid of being "arrested" -- that wouldn't happen. I was afraid of humiliation.

[LisaCA]

there is a sense of shame that has disappeared from the nation. exactly how my nephew could take spanish 1 three times and not die of shame is beyond me. Few of my students in college had any shame about the way they behaved, treated me and other professors, and treated their friends.

one of my mom's favorite punishments: if we touched something in the store without permission, we were given a warning. if we did it again, we had hang on to her skirt. While no one else in the world knew it was a punishment, we thought everyone could tell we'd been bad and freaked. It was so successful i intend to do it with dd.

it depends on the child. I know given dd's temperment it has a chance of working. a child with a fragile sense of self or with self-esteem issues would be crushed however.

about the cultural issues around spanking: yep, dad talked a lot about having to cut is own switch, then having to go get a better one after that one broke. It did well with dad's family. mom preferred mental torture, however, than spanking. Worked with me, older sister, a bad, bad, bad girl, was spanked and mentally tortured to no avail. Dad, exasperated with mom's "talking" preferred to just spank, a nod to his North Carolina roots.

yesterday dd and I were at a public play area and watched a white woman, middle/upper middle class, spank her son (one open handed swat on the clothed butt). I nearly fell out of my car. you hardly ever see this in public. And she didn't look or sound out of control. maybe the pendulum is swinging back towards the middle.

[Sleeplvr]

I don’t know any AA people who don’t spank or haven’t been spanked. They are all productive citizens and are raising well behaved children with bright futures. I know that my friends and I laugh about the punishments we received as children. Some of the punishments were awesome memories of our parents. We saw what lengths they would go to protect us and ensure that we lived a good life.

I came from a very strict household. My parents stopped spanking when we were old enough to understand what was being said to us. Humiliation and restrictions were the tools after that point. If I was humiliated I never committed whatever the particular offense was again.
DH had his last spanking when he was 16. His mom finally decided he was too old when he laughed while she spanked him. His parents were never into humiliation as a punishment because they were worried about what other people would think. My mother could care less what other people thought. I remember talking on the phone one time over my time limit. My mom picked up the extension and said get off the phone. I never went over my time limit again.

DH is a firm believer in spanking; I was against it until I saw how ornery a two year old can be. We couldn’t spank him because he was a foster child. What made it worse was he knew that we couldn’t spank him. How did he figure that out? I guess he just figured that we were weak.

I heard the story about the Oklahoma mom on the radio this morning too. I support the mom’s actions. Church going and middle class AA’s tend be very strict with the discipline. Lately all the spanking going on with my friends has been over grades. They embarrass or humiliate them for just about everything else. It is not an embarrassment for AA’s to spank their kids. They feel they are still in control. Maybe it’s the realization that kids are going to do things. My mom always said that children are going to do things and they wouldn’t be a child if they didn’t. It’s a parent’s job to set them straight. Sometimes living your life as example is not enough.

[AdrienneG]

LIsaC, My mother knew better...she knew I wasn't going to cut my own switch, which is why she did it herself. lol

Her method of disclipine was to tell us how she expected us to act, and if we misbehaved she would tell us to us stop. And if we continued, she'd say "you are getting a whipping"

Then she would bring us home, go eat her dinner, drink her water, relax while we were stressing out about the upcoming whipping. Then she'd go outside and take her time finding the right switch to cut from some bushes and we'd be all freaking out looking at her through the window.

Then she'd take one of us in her room. Sit us down. And proceed to explain what we did wrong and why she didnt like the behavior and why we were getting a whipping. I'd be sitting there thinking to myself, "Why doesn't she just give me my whipping now?"


I actually have white friends who were spanked as children. I think that social economic factors come into play when it comes to spanking. My husband himself is CC and got spankings as a child. His aunt even told us how growing up with my husband's mother and her 3 brothers they got spanking. They grew up in a poor family.

My theory is the higher the social economic class and higher the level of education of CCs, the less likely they are to spank. Its not quite so with the AAs I know.

My sister had a friend in the 8th grade who was home alone after school and decided to have a boy come visit her, even though her parents told her not to. Her father was a judge, and got a phone call from the neighbors that his daughter let a boy into their house while she was home alone. He promptly left his job and arrived at his house with a belt in his hand.

My other theory is that the more frequent the spankings the more violent it usually is. I remember being a child and knowing that pretty much every child got a spanking. If a child didn't get a spanking, we were amazed. And then amongst the children I knew who got spankings, I felt that their parents were "mean" because they'd tell me how their parents beat them til they were tired.... which I think is abusive...yet there are parents who don't see anything wrong with it or abusive about it.

I compared other's spankings to my own. In my case it was less than 5 minutes with a switch or the leather part of a belt. No welts left. Pants off, underwear on and I was hit in the back of the thighs.

Other people...whooo! I have heard it all as a child.... beatings after they have had a bath and are still wet...beatings til the child is tired.

And in my day we called them whuppings (whippings) and not spankings. I didn't hear the word spanking til I heard a CC person use the term.

I don't blame social services for being very specific on asking what types of disclipine would foster parents use.

If only the experts asked more specific questions about the spanking issue and addressed how not every spanking is the same.

[AdrienneG]

By the way my husband and I are choosing not to spank because we don't feel it is needed for a child to behave and because we both are strong willed people, and chances are our child will be strong willed. I have known children who did not benefit from spankings, who just got more violent and combative with every spanking.

And because its not in my heart to hit a child. I have never spanked a child, even when the parents said it was okay for me to disclipine their child if I was babysitting.

I remember Oprah Winfrey talking about how her best friend Gail "as Black as she is" never got a spanking as a child.

[Sleeplvr]

Originally Posted by LisaCA

there is a sense of shame that has disappeared from the nation. exactly how my nephew could take spanish 1 three times and not die of shame is beyond me. Few of my students in college had any shame about the way they behaved, treated me and other professors, and treated their friends.

one of my mom's favorite punishments: if we touched something in the store without permission, we were given a warning. if we did it again, we had hang on to her skirt. While no one else in the world knew it was a punishment, we thought everyone could tell we'd been bad and freaked. It was so successful i intend to do it with dd.

it depends on the child. I know given dd's temperment it has a chance of working. a child with a fragile sense of self or with self-esteem issues would be crushed however.

about the cultural issues around spanking: yep, dad talked a lot about having to cut is own switch, then having to go get a better one after that one broke. It did well with dad's family. mom preferred mental torture, however, than spanking. Worked with me, older sister, a bad, bad, bad girl, was spanked and mentally tortured to no avail. Dad, exasperated with mom's "talking" preferred to just spank, a nod to his North Carolina roots.

yesterday dd and I were at a public play area and watched a white woman, middle/upper middle class, spank her son (one open handed swat on the clothed butt). I nearly fell out of my car. you hardly ever see this in public. And she didn't look or sound out of control. maybe the pendulum is swinging back towards the middle.

I love that hanging on the skirt punishment. I will have to try that when my kids get older.

I have many friends with fond memories of choosing their own switch and then having to go back and get another one because the first was unacceptable. My grandmother always told us stories about her father. He would keep switches soaking in water to make them supple.

My one old age spanking was with a flyswatter. Needless to say I never committed whatever that offense was again either. I remember the spanking to this day but not what I did.

Spankings and whippings are alive and well in the south.

[sneezyone]

My mom was not into spanking - my dad was old school and would resort to it a time or two but it had no effect on my brother and it REALLY made me mad - mostly b/c I didn't do what I'd been accused of in the first place - my brother did it!! Butthead *muttering*
Anyway - shame ALWAYS did the trick for me. One time I got really smashed playing a drinking game with my cuz on New Year's. We were 11 and 12 and unsupervised b/c the older cousins (16/17) left us to go to their own party. I broke an antique table, had to have my stomach pumped at the hospital, etc. Anyway, when my parents found out they refused to talk to me for a while then on the long, silent ride home form the airport they said - and I remember it word for word - "We are so disappointed in you. It's going to take a long time for us to be able to trust you again." I WISH they would have just spanked me and been done with it! I was CRUSHED! I was the good kid, ya know? If I didn't have my rep I had NOTHING!

DH came froma beatin' kind of family. Not spanking, real whuppings. THAT, we both agree, is not something we're going to include in our parental toolkit. Shame and mental torture (DH's words) will be our primary weapons. His feeling is, dd may not know what the punishment will be for her misbehavior, but whatever it is he'll make it so unpleasant that she won't want to repeat the episode again. DD's bmom told us how she made her ego-centric preteen wear the same outfit to school for a week for not keeping the clothes off the floor. Now THAT is gooood.

[MrsSmith]

If I could chime in with another CC person's experience... I was raised in a solidly middle class family, and my sisters and I all were spanked. Regularly - I mean, that was one of the primary consequences for committing an infraction of the house rules. We also had our mouths washed out with soap (I'd be the worst one for that since ever since I was a small child, I've had a lethal combination of a strong will and a quick tongue - I was always the one most likely to talk back ) and were grounded as well. My father was raised in a "whupping" household - my grandfather would beat - not spank, but beat - my dad and aunt. Once when I was 7, my grandparents were watching us while our parents were away and I did something (can't recall what) that caused my grandfather to beat me with a belt. That was well beyond the worst spanking I ever had from my parents in my entire life.

Thinking back, I can't recall many - if any! - of my other CC friends who were spanked by their parents, though friends who were AA or Latino used to get spanked as well. As an adult, I've found spanking does seem to be more commonly mentioned when talking with AA friends vs. CC friends - now in relation to our own children and methods of discipline than just relating stories of our own lives growing up. Socioeconomic factors don't figure into it that strongly though - I went to a high-falutin', posh private school for jr high and high school, so most of my friends were well-off financially (we're talking chauffered cars to drop kids off at school and weekends in Aspen skiing or down in the Caribbean, it was ridiculous, but then it was the Greed Decade of the 80s too...).

DH and I do not believe in spanking, though as I said on the other thread, I can see where in some cases (about to stick hand in an electrical socket etc) a swat on the butt could be a good thing. As someone above said, we didn't fear our parents but did fear the consequences of getting spanked, though grounding us (taking away radio/stereo/friends over/phone privileges) worked much better as a disincentive for misbehavior.

As for that mother cited in the story above, I applaud her. I do not find that to be psychological abuse at all. I think that what she did was a similar type of response to what my mother did when my then 5 year old sister shoplifted and ate a grape Jolly Rancher from the local Quik-Chek one night. After my other sister and I ratted her out to our parents (because we were jealous that SHE was allowed to eat candy that WE had begged for and not been allowed) and it was discovered that she had stolen it, my mom made her march upstairs, fetch her piggy bank, and drove her right back over to the store, where she was made to apologize to the manager and pay for the candy out of her piggy bank. Let me tell you, THAT made much more of an impression on my sister - on all three of us kids - than any spanking would've, as I suspect this girl's hour on the corner with the sign will make on her.

Yes, the "mental torture" is a viable means of discipline in my book!

[quiescentfury]

We didnot have to hang on a skirt, but we had to walk through the store with our hands on our heads. We hated that!!

I was spanked all the time growing up. I am strong willed and never listened. I use to spank my son, but he really did not respond to it. He also did not respnd to "Time Out", but he freaks when we say "grounded" So we have learned that Grounding which is the exact same thing as time out works. Funny how a simple word change worked.

[lmrod55]

My mom and dad rarely gave spankings (but I do remember a few) and did more of the humiliation treatments (and boy did that work on me!). Dh comes from a background where he would have to go pick out the "switch" for his whuppin'...and from the stories I have heard some of them were beatings!

I don't think that spanking a child means that a parent is out of control. I too never "feared" my parents and I just asked dh and he says that he never feared his mom, just the consequences of his actions.

We will "spank" our children should it be necessary - but we will not be picking out switches, that we see as extreme (JMO). However I am already seeing with dd that humiliation works with her and I really like the skirt treatment Lisa...I will keep that in mind!

[MNelson]

I am CC and was spanked occasionally as a kid (pants around the ankles, single slap on the bum.) But my dad flatly denies it ... he truly just doesn't have a recollection of it. I probably remember each and every time. But at a certain age (8 or 10 maybe?) he stopped and instead sat me down and talked to me ... and expected me to talk to him to explain why I had disappointed him so. That was MUCH more torture than the shame of the spanking. I pleaded with him to just spank me and get it over with

I think I'll opt for my dad's later treatment ... MUCH more effective.

On the sign around the girl's neck, I also don't have a problem with that even if it would not be my choice of punishment. My nephew spent a summer hammering nails with my brother, and that was the most effective motivator for him to consider college (he's now a radiologist). No harm showing some potential real-life consequences. Now if she had taken her dumpster diving, I would say that probably crosses a line.

[spaypets]

Another white girl who was spanked. Not a lot and probably not after the age of 5. But of course, once it's in a parental quiver, the threat is always there.

My dad was beaten as a child, but we were only struck with an open hand on our behind--maybe only 5 times in our lives. I remember only one specific spanking--I was hiding from my mother at bed time--to be funny. Apparently, mom didn't think it was amusing. She counted to three, I didn't come out, so she got me and spanked me.

My mother doesn't remember that incident and when I brought it up said, "I must have been very tired." I now know how she feels!

It's always the unjust punishments I remember.

[RiverGal]

Another CC mother weighing in! I was spanked as a child...usually a switch (that I had to pick myself) or the bare hand on the bottom. We all learned the taste of soap early on for being "sassy," but soap was later replaced with Listerine because I HATED the stuff.

While I did spank my children, the spanking was reserved for only certain offenses...acts that jeopardized the safety of either themselves or another, ie: electrical outlets, fire, etc. Everything else was based on the "natural consequence" theory. Skating in the road...loose the skates. Breaking curfew...time deducted. Dawdling in the mornings...miss breakfast, etc.

At one point, I was having a problem with my 14 year old wearing my clothes without permission and often ruining them (and teens can do). She would leave the house in HER things, and change at her friend's house or in the restroom at the bus stop. Now it wasn't like she didn't have beautiful clothes of her own, which SHE picked out herself...she just had some weird obsession with MY stuff.

One day I went to get an outfit I just ironed the night before, only to see it gone. I made a stop at the Goodwill store on the way to my daughter's high school and bought a terrific polyester (mix-matched) ensemble and even a pair of hideously lovely shoes.

I pulled Stacy out of class (yep...in my clothes) and we went to the bathroom where she had to change into the NEW clothes. Oh, she kicked and screamed about it, but she had no choice...Mama was in charge. As luck would have it, the bell rang and classes were changing, so I paraded her down the hall amid throngs of students to her next class.

She pouted for days...said I had "MADE" her the laughing stock of the whole school. I told her that the humiliation she felt was a direct result of her poor choice. It actually worked...she learned about asking permission before "borrowing" my stuff after that.

She's 30 now...and not scarred a bit. In fact, she often laughs when she tells about that day...

~Deb

[spaypets]

Deb. I'm roaring, that's a great punishment!

Oh, I wanted to add -- that the socio-economic theory doesn't hold in my case either. We were solidly middle class.

But, I'm 40, and I suspect I'm a product of my generation rather than my class or ethicity when it comes to spanking. Although, I know that at least two of the parents I work with (white middle class) spank their children on occasion. I don't. I said I wouldn't and I don't as a matter of policy.