Spare the rod and spoil the child? Well, it’s not that simple anymore

HE WAS only little – about two, I would say – and a bit scruffy, his feet barely touching the floor as he was dragged along the Tesco aisle by his mother who was carrying a shopping basket and also pushing a buggy containing a younger brother or sister. She let him go for a minute, distracted by the choice of soft drinks, and he sat down and started to pull plastic bottles of mineral water off the lowest shelf.

Realising what had happened, his mother picked him up by one arm and started hitting him across the bottom and the legs, again and again. He screamed in distress. Everyone in the same aisle froze. Was it horror? Embarrassment? I’m not sure. Then, just as swiftly, everyone looked the other way as she bundled her offspring towards the checkout, clearly beside herself with stress.

You couldn’t help feeling for her and the little lad. She didn’t beat him across the head, but nor was he endangering himself by playing with some plastic bottles. She had simply reached the end of her tether.

Twenty or 30 years ago few would have blinked an eye: walloping kids was “normal”. Nowadays, though, smacking in the interests of discipline and good behaviour is a practice many parents would defend but fewer and fewer actually practice, least of all in a busy supermarket. In some European countries that mother could have been up on an assault charge. Even those Irish parents who do still smack admit to feeling guilty afterwards.

But a new study, published last week, has found that youngsters smacked up to the age of six actually do better at school and are more optimistic about their lives than those never hit by their parents. They are also more likely to undertake voluntary work and are keener to attend university, experts discovered.

Marjorie Gunnoe, professor of psychology at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, said her study showed there was insufficient evidence to deny parents the freedom to determine how their children should be punished: “I think of spanking as a dangerous tool, but there are times when there is a job big enough for a dangerous tool. You just don’t use it for all your jobs.”

The research questioned 179 teenagers about how often they were smacked as children and how old they were when they were last smacked. Their answers were then compared with information they gave about their behaviour that could have been affected by smacking. This included negative effects such as anti-social behaviour, early sexual activity, violence and depression, as well as positives such as academic success and ambitions.

Those who had been smacked up to the age of six performed better in almost all the positive categories and no worse in the negatives than those never punished physically. Only those children who continued to be smacked into adolescence showed clear behavioural problems.

The research is likely to anger children’s rights campaigners who have unsuccessfully fought to ban smacking in Ireland for years. An attempt last year by the North’s Children’s Commissioner to prevent the extension of the English law, which allows smacking so long as it leaves no mark or graze, was lost in the Court of Appeal.

In the South, corporal punishment in schools, crèches and detention centres is outlawed, but there is no law in place which expressly bans physical punishment of children in the home. Parents are virtually immune from prosecution because their decision-making rights under Articles 41 and 42 of the constitution are “inalienable”, although Irish law in this area has come under serious criticism in recent years for potentially breaching the European Convention on Human Rights which bans inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment.

Although the Government says it doesn’t want to see gardaí “prying” into domestic households, anti-smacking campaigners are hopeful that the long-awaited referendum on the children’s rights amendment to the constitution will force the courts to determine a child’s rights and thereby lead to a de facto ban.

An all-party committee, chaired by Mary O’Rourke TD, has finally agreed on the wording of the proposed amendment which will be published on January 25. The public should have its say sometime this year, assuming the Oireachtas gives its approval.

Where public opinion stands is hard to tell. Although slapping children has become less acceptable in modern society, the majority of Irish parents are opposed to legislation which would see it outlawed, according to some surveys. Yet the less we smack our children, it seems, the louder the anti-smacking lobby protests. Rather than let smacking die out, nothing short of a ban will satisfy them.

The anti-smacking lobby wins support by equating a judicious slap with child abuse. Yet smacking is clearly not violence which is defined by the intent to do harm. To the child protection industry, however, it is all the same thing.

Yet I confess to being in two minds. If a mother seeing her small child run out into the road snatches him back and slaps his legs and chastises him, is that child abuse or saving a life? But if, as has been suggested, smacking is to blame for a whole host of psychological and social ills, including domestic violence, depression and even deviant sexual behaviour, should parents be respected for their ability to make good decisions regarding their children? Or should the Government intervene?

Behind the focus on smacking, the children’s rights lobby sometimes appears to be promoting a more poisonous message: that adults cannot be trusted to care for children. There is, of course, a sorry history of child abuse in Ireland, but must the underlying assumption be that abuse is the norm in adult-child relationships?

THE danger is that adults come not to trust one another – or themselves – around children, and children in turn are taught not to trust grown-ups. For all that has happened, abuse is not behind every door, or even every church door.

Many advocates of a total ban on smacking are against all forms of punishing children. They believe that parents who rely on the withdrawal of affection as an alternative to smacking may cause even more damage to a child. Crackpots, you might think.

But research in Britain suggests about 7% of 15 to 17-year-olds are hit by a parent in every six-month period. So can we be entirely surprised, therefore, when behaviour learnt at home finds its way out on to the streets? And while Irish parents have traditionally followed the maxim “spare the rod and spoil the child”, would anyone think in this day and age that keeping a stick in the home for the imposition of discipline, for instance, is in any way acceptable?

But if a ban on all physical punishment in all circumstances is extreme – even if a child puts its hand in the fire? – it seems the current legal position will not be tenable for much longer. It is to be hoped that some reasonable compromise can be found which outlaws the misuse of corporal punishment and the kind of smacking most reasonable people would see as excessive.

That is a job for the Dáil – not the courts.