Samantha Spanking

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Samantha Spanking

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My mother was beaten violently as a child. She didn’t tell me those stories– or others– until I was an adult because her life is viciously, brutally dark. I help maintain a database on child torture and I still have rarely encountered stories more shocking and grotesque than my own mother’s. As we have both come to understand the ways our culture justifies child abuse and have learned about the realities of “spanking,” I’ve heard more about what the beatings she experienced looked and felt like. Usually, she was beaten when her own mother was enraged; she remembers the screaming vividly, as well as her mother chasing her, or beating her when she was naked and wet.
When she had me, and later my sister, my mother knew she wanted our childhoods to look nothing like her own. She never wanted to treat us the way her mother had treated her.
When my family was stationed in Iceland, we began attending a Baptist church off-base, in the village of Njardvik. My parents also decided to begin homeschooling us there, and we began to socialize heavily with other homeschooling families. One particular well-regarded family was a sort of social nexus among churchgoers and other homeschoolers. Ringleaders. Looking back, I can see they were pretty much in control of whether or not you had friends at church. When they told my parents that I was too free-spirited, rambunctious, disruptive, and they needed to start spanking me, it came with an implicit threat: beat your children or lose your entire social life on this frozen island.
A few years later, we were reassigned to Holloman AFB and we became thick as thieves with another homeschooling family who handed my parents a copy of No Greater Joy and To Train Up a Child . Mrs. _____ had listened to my mother’s concerns about not replicating her own nightmarishly abusive childhood and said “here, this is how you do it. This is how you can spank without ever becoming abusive.”
My culture accepts spanking as normal. According to one study from the University of Chicago, 76% of American men and 66% of women think spanking is fine . Given this, it’s utterly unsurprising that a strict, conservative family like the one we encountered in Iceland saw… well, all of me , and declared “that child needs a good whoopin’.” But, many people, like my parents, think that spanking can go too far and can cross a line. How do you make sure that your discipline is biblical, appropriate, measured, and loving?
Enter Michael and Debi Pearl, stage left.
They come bearing the perfect message for this audience: yes, you absolutely can hit your child while still considering yourself loving parents. And, best of all, they bring some very simple, easy rules to follow!
I know these rules by heart because I myself read No Greater Joy and To Train Up a Child several times as a teenager, in preparation for becoming a parent someday. I fully believed this argument, and so did everyone I knew. Follow these rules, and you’ll never be abusive.
Except the reality is horrific. My parents beat me nearly every single day, multiple times a day, from the time I was seven until I was fifteen. When my mother decided I needed a beating, she would say “Room.” and point in the direction of her bedroom. My stomach would drop to my feet and I would get sick. I would start shaking. My language skills would evaporate, and I would be unable to think in words for long periods afterwards. Once I crossed the threshold into the bedroom, my heart would be pounding so loud I felt our neighbors should hear it.
Then, I would walk to the side of the bed, press my calves and thighs up against the side of it, and bend ninety degrees until my face touched the mattress. To this day I cannot stand the feeling of quilted polyester sateen and the site of burgundy and hunter green together is nauseating. I would place my hands by my face, and then become as utterly motionless as I could make myself. I was required to be utterly still while she beat me for the entire duration of the beating, or she would start over.
On top of being completely still, I had to indicate — in the appropriate ways– that the beating had “succeeded,” that she had accomplished what the Pearls taught about breaking my will. I couldn’t physically resist the spanking, but I could, after a few strikes, begin to tremble. I couldn’t cry too loudly or too soon, but if I waited until just the right moment to whimper …
Once she had beaten me the number of times she felt my infraction necessitated, we would move to sit together on the bed– me, gingerly– while she performed the trauma bonding ritual the Pearls taught was fundamental to their method. This part was always worse, and harder, than enduring the beating. I would be so incredibly angry, so stuffed full of rage and humiliation and hurt, and I had to pretend that none of those feelings existed. I had to appear repentant, sorrowful, and loving. I had to hug the person who had just beaten me, tell them I loved them, and sound like I meant it , or the whole experience would be repeated until I was “broken.”
When I was in college, I and another student, with the approval of our parents, began courting. Eventually, we became engaged and started planning our wedding for after my graduation. On the surface, our relationship looked perfect and I was thrilled. I was finally going to feel like I belonged– I was straight, I was going to be a missionary, the best possible sort of Christian, and it was my fiance who was my ticket to finally feeling like I was a part of my religious community.
Like I’ve mentioned before a few times, he was extremely abusive. And, like I’ve also mentioned before, it wasn’t the incidents that any outside observer would immediately say “there, that’s rape” which have continued to torment me. Those assaults were hard enough to deal with, but what has absolutely devastated me are all the times where I imagine that mighty, invisible, non-existent audience would be confused. What exactly about this is sexual abuse? I can hear them asking as they watch the scene unfold. You are clearly cooperating .
Because I was taught that the people who hurt you, violently hurt you, every day, for years, are doing it because they love you.
Because I knew beyond all shadow of doubt that if you need to endure the unimaginable, you become motionless.
Because I had learned what signs he was looking for, the subtle hints of my surrender, and how to give them at the appropriate moments so the nightmare would just be over.
Because I was taught when I was seven years old that the best way to survive abuse is to pretend.
To be honest, if Tim had stopped writing the chapter on how to help your depressed child at page 216, I wouldn’t have a single problem with anything he says in this single, solitary chapter. His first bits of advice are:
Those are things I can absolutely get behind, and I’m actually surprised that Tim included “accept your children” here– acceptance isn’t something conservative Christians usually talk about in regards to raising children. But then he does a complete about face with the rest of his advice, which is focused on “discipline,” which he makes clear is “the rod.” He says that “The Bible makes it very clear that if you spare the rod, you will spoil the child” (217), and I’d like to take this moment to point out that this isn’t actually a Bible verse . It’s a quote from a satirical poem by Samuel Butler that mockingly suggests that spanking your romantic interest will make them love you.
Also, for an alternative interpretation on all those “rod” passages in Proverbs, I recommend reading this . Many Christians believe that those metaphors in Proverbs are supposed to be taken literally as a command to physically abuse their children, but I, and many other Christians, believe that is a grossly inaccurate interpretation.
Tim also takes the time to make sure his reader knows not to discipline his children “in anger,” and I want sit on that for a moment. A recent study revealed that the way my parents were taught to spank me– be calm during, and then be extremely affectionate and warm after– can actually make anxiety worse . The lead researcher suggests this might be because it’s “simply too confusing and unnerving for a child to be hit hard and loved warmly all in the same home.”
There’s also evidence linking the sort of spanking that Tim advocates to depression, anxiety, other mood disorders, and substance abuse later in the child’s life, which completely unravels his argument that children need to be physically abused in order to have the depression literally beat out of them. Other studies suggest that spanking can cause cognitive impairment and increase aggression . Couple that with the fact that many parents are likely to underestimate how hard they are hitting their child as well as how often they spank , it should be obvious to all of us that spanking is actively harmful, ineffectual, and not something even the most loving parent can practice responsibly.
Tim claims that spanking “assures the child of his parent’s love” (218), but I can think of few claims more preposterous. How in the world is hitting a child supposed to communicate “I love you”? I believed that spanking was a moral imperative for most of my life, and I never connected it to how much my parent’s loved me. I believed it was necessary, but that was completely separate from how much my parents loved me. The closest word to describe what I felt after a beating would be rage. It was humiliating and excruciating, and having to look at my parent and mumble something about loving them made me so angry I could choke .
Oh, it temporarily “fixed” my behavior. I usually managed to slap on the “thankful attitude” that Tim thinks parents should spank their children into (221), but it was a lie. It was something I pretended out of some sort of survival mechanism. Spanking “works” because of fear , not love.
“How to Help a Depressed Friend” wasn’t too terrible; his only real piece of advice in this chapter is not to be “too cheerful,” mostly because he thinks that depressed people find it annoying. That’s not true in my experience– I find overly cheery people annoying all of the time. Tim’s obliviousness also comes out a little bit with “Even the depressed will rarely refuse prayer, which they usually recognize as their last hope” (226). I have desperately wanted to say “oh my god, no ” many times when someone has offered to pray with me, and the only thing that keeps from me vocalizing it is the fact that would generally be considered fairly rude.
The last two chapters were troubling, since he mostly focuses on biblical figured to communicate the message that depression is a sin. What troubles me is that he chose examples like Jeremiah and his Lamentations. I think it’s a truth (almost) universally acknowledges that white middle-class American Christians have lost the ability to lament . A google search of “Christians need lament” turned up articles from pretty much every significant American Christian movement, from The Gospel Coalition to the Emergents.
One of the things that deeply bothers me about Christian culture is this whole “happy happy joy joy,” “Rejoice in the Lord Always, and again I say rejoice” attitude toward faith and worship is that it ignores reality. Living on planet earth is a catastrophic nightmare sometimes, and if we are robbed of our ability to grieve and lament, then we’ve lost a connection to our humanity. Christianity is not about being happy , but sometimes I get the feeling that’s what it’s been reduced to. Our theology needs room for shit just happens , and “Rejoice in the Lord!” doesn’t cover it.
All the way through this book, Tim has advocated a position that being thankful for everything , including the awful, terrible, no-good stuff, is the only way to avoid depression, but I think all that really does is turn us into Stepford-level automatons. We’re people, and part of being human means being sad.
In the end, that’s the biggest mistake Tim has made in How to Win Over Depression . He doesn’t understand what depression actually is– he confuses it with sadness , with grief (227), and then tells all of us that experiencing those emotions is sinful. He robs us all of our humanity.
As my partner can attest to, one of the things that have stuck with me from growing up in the Deep South is my reliance on idiomatic Southern expressions. In my area, “trip to the woodshed” was the most commonly used euphemism for corporal punishment, and while the adults who used this term obviously meant it humorously, hearing it made me feel a little sick. “I’m going to take you out back to the woodshed!” conjured images, for me, of lashings and beatings and screaming boys and girls– but in that old-fashioned Disney way, with the too-red cheeks and too-round eyes and deep furrows in the mother’s brow and the animation sequence of arms flailing up and down repeated on an endless loop. Somehow, the expectation was that we were all supposed to laugh.
Eventually, I did learn to laugh about being spanked. I turned into one of those teenagers that swapped spanking horror stories at camp, and I was proud of the fact that I had a doozy that was the ultimate one-upping story . It never occurred to me that I was probably sitting next to someone that had five thousand versions of my story, every single one much worse.
I grew up, and I turned into a young adult that was proud of being spanked. I even had a conversation with my parents at one point that I’d wished they had spanked me more . I had an argument that made sense to me at the time, but I don’t even remember it now. I was going to spank my children exactly the way I’d been taught– controlled, unemotional, in private, and as a form of training, not punishment. I believed everything I’d been told about being spanked. When I heard some people talk about spanking as if it were wrong, I rolled my eyes at the pansy-ass liberal whose children were probably some of those squalling brats in Wal-Mart that they had to satisfy with bribes. I was convinced that it was people who didn’t spank their children is what was wrong with America today.
“I was spanked as a kid, and I turned out just fine.”
No, no you didn’t. You think hitting a child is ok.
I don’t even remember where I saw that, but it hit me like a ton of bricks full in the face.
This is probably the only thing in my life that I changed my mind on so quickly and so utterly and without any more research. It was like a floodlight had flipped on inside of my head, and the sudden bone-deep knowledge wrecked me.
Spanking is the physical and violent assault of a child.
Spanking is like me, facing someone twelve feet tall and six hundred pounds, beating me. If they were to use a board proportionally the same size as the one my ex-cult-leader used, it would be like a giant hitting me with a cricket bat, and it would not matter how “controlled” they were, or whether or not they were angry, or how many times they hit me, or with what, or where. I became convinced that spanking is evil in a matter of seconds, and after the scales had fallen from my eyes I couldn’t even comprehend what I had believed before. I had gone from believing that corporal punishment was a moral imperative to believing it to be a moral evil, and from that moment forward every time I tried to think back to what it was like to agree with spanking it hurt . It made me sick.
I have a hard time saying that, even now, even after it’s been well over a year. Because my parents loved me. Love me. I have never, not for a single moment in my entire life, ever doubted that. They have always done what they thought was best, and they honestly, truly, believed that hitting me with a belt was in my best interest, that they would be be failing their obligations as parents if they didn’t. I know that the same is true for the overwhelming number of parents who adore their children.
After that moment, I did go looking for more information, and I was shocked at how easy it was to find. There are many, many studies on the effects of physical discipline on children, and none of it is positive. Spanking– defined by most researchers as “striking on the bottom with an open hand”– could lead to cognitive impairment . It increases aggression . It can lead to depression and anxiety in adulthood. I started reading material from Gentle Christian Mothers and Why Not Train a Child that offered a compelling and extraordinarily different understanding of the Bible verses I’d always assumed justified spanking.
At this point I’d been reading Libby Anne ‘s blog for a while, but now I started paying more attention to her posts about parenting Sally and Bobby . She’d grown up with all the same exact beliefs that I had, and she had the same fears that I suddenly found staring at me in the middle of the night, because as I grew in this area I realized it wasn’t just my attitude about hitting children that had to change, but how I thought of my relationship with children, and what it means to be a parent, and what my duties and responsibilities would be. I had to struggle to re-imagine what the rest of my life would look like if I became a mother.
We hit our children not only because we’ve been taught by generations of cultural training that it’s the best thing for them, for a good and just society, but the reality is that we also spank our children because we believe they are stupid. We believe that they cannot be reasoned with, that they cannot be taught and persuaded and convinced. We do not accept their reasons for their actions, and dismiss their intentions as inconsequential.
I would say we treat them like animals, but the brutal reality is that we can treat our children worse than we treat our animals. I wouldn’t do to my precious Noel and Elsa what I would have once believed to be totally acceptable to do to a toddler. We read Black Beauty when we’re children and are horrified by the descriptions of horses being whipped, but when a football player takes a switch to his child, leaving bleeding welts, people rush to his defense, saying his actions are more than just normal, they’re good.
Another unfortunate truth is that many of us are just not that patient with our children. Not hitting our children means taking a lot of time to correct a behavior. You have to stop and talk to them, to understand why they took an action, and help them understand why their action was inappropriate for the context or just plain wrong. For many evangelical Christians, this means completely upending everything the Dobsons and the Pearls and the Tripps and the Ezzos have ever told us about “child rearing” and rejecting … well, all of it.
Usually I try to take a somewhat moderated stance when it comes to things that I haven’t personally experienced: I am not a parent, and I might not ever be one. However, in this case, I can’t. I must condemn spanking for what it actually is– and I mean all spanking, not just the sort of spanking I grew up with, but even the milder gentler version of “a couple of swats on the bottom.”
Hitting our children is wrong. Hitting our children is repulsive. Hitting our children is evil.
I
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