Spare the Child
By Philip Greven
Knopf, 256 pages, $22.95
The specter of child beatings looms darkly over the country. As we read, almost daily, the horror stories of violent parents who inflict unending pain and suffering upon little children, we are quick to distance ourselves from such unharnessed aggression against the young. Who are these terrible people, we wonder. Surely they live outside of civilized society; every vestige of self-control and empathy must have disappeared in their alcoholic and drug-induced rages. We are certain we have nothing in common with them.
Not so, writes Philip Greven in ”Spare the Child,” a powerful condemnation of all physical punishment of children. What we share with the criminally guilty is a world in which it is acceptable to hit children.
Our abhorrence of hurting children is a matter of degree, not principle, Greven tells us. The vast majority of people still uphold the old adage
”Spare the rod and spoil the child,” and there are few among us who would not under certain circumstances justify a slap or a spanking. We feel we have the right to inflict pain upon our own children, and, in 30 states, we give the same right to schools.
”Spare the Child” proclaims from every page that there is no legitimate use of violence toward children. ”Every time an adult physically hits a child in the name of discipline,” Greven writes, ”an act of painful aggression against the body and spirit of the child takes place. Punitive assaults and sexual aggressions equally violate children, equally traumatize them, and are often equally painful to experience.”
Greven places much of the blame for these abusive practices on the persistent fundamentalist Christian ”obsession” with corporal punishment, a rationale for spankings and beatings that is mired in ancient biblical lore and filtered through centuries of brutality in the name of God and love.
”Punishment is embedded in most Christian theology,” he says. ”The threat of future and eternal punishment has provided the ineradicable core of violence, suffering, and pain that has perpetuated anxiety and fear in the minds of vast numbers of people throughout the world for two millennia. . . . Many Christians have heeded and acted upon the words of Proverbs 23:
13-14: `Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod he shalt not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod and shalt deliver his soul from hell.` ” Thus, beating a disobedient child into submission is held to be an act of love.
Greven is a history professor at Rutgers University, and this book would seem to bring together urgent issues in his personal and scholarly life. His studies of Protestant thought and experience, of family history and child-rearing practice, his clinical work with adults and children and his own experience as a punished child and sometimes punishing parent create strong motivation for the challenge he accepts: to help eliminate the physical punishment of children. He wants America to follow the example of Sweden, where all physical punishment and injurious and humiliating treatment of children has been banned since 1979.
Why does it seem so natural to inflict pain upon children? The long history of justifications and illusions belie singular explanations, yet one must begin to search for answers somewhere.
Greven is not unmindful of the secular environment, the patterns of societal breakdown and the psychosocial factors in individual and family life. But, again, he sees the hidden foundation for the tolerance of violence in the misuse of the Bible by generations of religious zealots, specifically in the fundamentalist Protestant belief that corporal punishment in the pursuit of obedience in children is the will of God.
Fundamentalist ”Anglo-American Protestants,” he writes, ”have always been among the most vocal public defenders of physical punishment for infants, children, and adolescents . . . calling it the `Christian` method of discipline.` ” Greven argues that, in fact, it is not the Christian method at all but rather the method of choice of people who themselves have been painfully injured as children. He includes many case studies of famous Protestant leaders with which to prove his point.
Does the author go too far in finding root causes of mental sickness and violent despair in religious zealotry? The book is filled with examples of the psychological effects upon adults of the violence done to them as children in the name of God. Depression, obsessiveness, hysteria and disassociation of all sorts can result from the suppression of anger by the child who dares not admit hatred toward the executioner.
The trauma of being beaten by those you must love bears tragic consequences. Indeed, the entire sadomasochistic netherworld would seem to be inscribed by the childhood association of love with pain.
Greven`s arguments and descriptions are compelling and, in some cases, overwhelming. Whether or not the reader accepts his basic assumptions, the great value of ”Spare the Child” lies in its shock of awareness. The subject enters our hearts and minds in a new way, and we are forced to imagine a world in which the hitting of a child by an adult is against the laws of man and God.
How then do we create an environment in which children obey us, if we cannot administer an occasional spanking? Even the good Dr. Spock, in the 1957 edition of ”Baby and Child Care,” suggests that sometimes spanking ”clears the air, for parent and child.” However, in 1988, Spock writes, ”If we are ever to turn toward a kindlier society and safer world, a revulsion against the physical punishment of children would be a good place to start.”
Unfortunately, it is easier to describe the destructive act than to construct a guide for its elimination. We can all agree with Greven that ”(t) he parent who hurts a child while imposing discipline is teaching a lesson in indifference to suffering.” And we can further endorse the idea that ”(n) onviolent discipline, especially that which emphasizes reasoning with children, fosters an awareness of and sensitivity to the viewpoints and feelings of other people that sustains the empathy of later years.” But what exactly shall we do or say when a child`s behavior makes us angry?
Greven is confident that we need not follow the violent impulse once we understand the long-term ill-effects of inflicting pain upon children. The choice is ours. Disavowing and outlawing physical punishment, we will find new ways of discipline that show ”respect for the body, feelings, and the selfhood of the child.” He does not presume to tell us how it is to be done. To this reader, it seems that the first step is one we can also adapt from the Bible: do not do to a child that which you would not have done to yourself. As we ourselves respond best to reason and not physical coercion, so must we instill this virtue into our treatment of children.
