Anonymous Asks (378)

“Should Christians spank their children?”

I have experienced spanking from both ends. (Sorry.)

I have regularly spanked three children throughout their formative years, and maintain loving and mutually-beneficial relationships with each one to this day. I have also received the occasional judicious and quite necessary whack from a loving and reluctant parent during the lengthy period it took me to grow to maturity.

Both ways, spanking worked. I regret nothing.

A Life Un-Spanked

I’m not sure where I would’ve ended up been without being spanked, but I can assure you at least one of my brothers would have found himself in a very bad place. He needed to be called out regularly, and called out with consequences. He was, and he’s a good and generous man today. He also doesn’t sweat trivia like political correctness.

Frankly, even if the practice hadn’t turned out well for multiple generations of my own family, I would have great difficulty dismissing the scriptures on the subject, which trump any and all experiences either you or I might bring to the table, good and bad.

Yes, many modern Christians try to whitewash those texts out of the Bible. They are simply wrong, but I’m not here to argue with them. They and their children will eventually pay the price if they insist on playing fast and loose with the word of God.

The Single Most Persuasive Argument

That said, the single most viscerally-persuasive advertisement for the value of Christian corporal punishment to both parents and children that I have ever experienced was watching a young mother in tears trying and failing to negotiate with an out-of-control toddler displaying an impressive ability to dominate and humiliate Mom for embarrassed passers-by on the subway line. This sort of thing happened more times than I could count when I worked downtown. It is abundantly evident the child holds all the cards in such a relationship.

Guess what: nobody was cheering on the kid. Dysfunctional parenting does not serve society well. We instinctively know there will be a price to pay for this someday. Most likely, the passive onlookers will be the ones paying it. When you allow your child to run the show, especially in public, you have failed your child. Almost anything beats putting yourself in that position.

As I have written before, if your experiences with spanking or being spanked have been uniformly negative, somebody was doing it wrong. We’ve dealt with this subject before on the blog, and my views have not changed an iota since, so rather than doing a giant copy-paste, let me simply refer our readers to this and this.

New and Notable

Might I take just a minute here to attempt to rebut a couple of new and unanswered objections to corporal punishment that have wandered across my desk since these posts went up in 2018/19? Thank you.

1/ Both sets of grandparents accuse us of being too harsh

If you are disciplining your children in anger, or if you have a history of temper issues with which they are familiar, your parents or in-laws may actually be trying to get you on the right track. Never discipline when your own emotions are engaged, either privately or in public. However, if you are disciplining your children biblically, calmly and lovingly, the problem is the older generation’s perception, not your practice.

When you have a close relationship with parents or in-laws, I know it’s very natural to share your parenting struggles and look to them for advice. Nevertheless, if you are convinced you are doing it right and that their arguments against corporal punishment are not scriptural, I would strongly advise you to stop sharing. They are not responsible to the Lord for how their grandchildren turn out; you are. Don’t burden older folks with information they don’t want and can’t process in a godly way. Definitely don’t burden them with responsibilities the Lord gave to you. No disparagement intended, but advising you to stop making them feel uncomfortable costs them literally nothing. They get to go home at day’s end, put their feet up, turn on the TV and feel good about themselves. You have to live with the consequences of raising an undisciplined child incapable of negotiating the situations life will inevitably throw at him.

Well, okay, the world has to live with that too. So does your child. So stop asking people you know will object and just do it without troubling them unnecessarily.

2/ One of our elders thinks so too

I’m curious what the main thrust of this elder’s objection might be. Is it that you were spanking your children at all, or that you were spanking them in a manner he thought was unscriptural or unprofitable? These differences do matter.

As with your parents or in-laws, negative feedback from people who have watched you discipline ought to be welcomed, at least initially, in that it gives you something to think about, pray about and consult the word of God about. Such input is always challenging and sometimes confirming. When the man objecting is an elder, I find myself wondering whether the rest of his peers would agree with him, or whether his view is a total outlier. I also find myself wondering whether his advice was solicited or spontaneous. If the former, it might be the same problem as with your parents or in-laws: you may be seeking counsel from too many people concerning a subject about which the scriptural view is not currently popular or well understood, but is perfectly understandable all the same. Do that long enough, and you’re bound to get some less-than-perfectly-convenient reactions.

However, having already gotten feedback from this particular elder, I would not casually ignore his opinion. I’d really think and pray it over. In the end, however, as with parents or in-laws, he is not the one primarily responsible to the Lord for raising your child. That’s something for which you will give an account. If his reasons for objecting to what you are doing are dubious, or if they involve explaining away the plain language of scripture, I would very much question whether the Lord is speaking through him to you.

One elder’s unsolicited opinion is different from receiving a ruling from a group of elders. The latter I would take much more seriously.