Spare the rod, spoil the child can go too far

There’s currently a lot of hype over a video that’s gone viral on YouTube showing Texas judge William Adams as he “spanks” his then 16-year-old daughter, Hillary, with a belt for downloading pirated music on the Internet.

The video, which Hillary secretly taped when she knew she would be punished, shows him lashing her 17 times while in the meantime verbally lashing her with curse words and derogatory comments.

Hillary posted the video this week after only letting a few people in on the event that happened seven years ago, and she said she did it so her father would be forced to deal with his violent behavior and seek help.

There will be many out there that try to use this incident to say “See, spanking is wrong. It’s abusive,” but the answer is the same as with any other issue – balance. There should be balance in the punishment process. Children shouldn’t be allowed to do whatever they feel like doing, but they also shouldn’t be violently beaten and degraded.

I firmly believe children should be punished when they do something wrong. I have found the phrase “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” first coined by Samuel Butler in a poem in 1664, to be completely accurate. You can always seem to tell the children who have very little discipline in their lives by the fact that they seem to need a lot more discipline as a result. (In other words, they’re usually brats.)

Discipline is meant to be a way for a parent to show their child love because by correcting their child’s bad behavior, they are helping that child learn from their mistake and to grow from it.

In my opinion, simply sitting a child in “time out” for 10 minutes does nothing to truly teach him or her that there are consequences for his or her actions. I think psychologists telling people that spanking their children will warp their little personalities is a complete crock. I was spanked as a child when I got in trouble and it did not warp my personality, cause me to hate society, make me want to go on a shooting spree or have deep-seeded resentment towards my parents. But the main reason my spankings didn’t have this effect on me is because my parents handled my discipline in the right way.

While I believe spanking is a perfectly acceptable form of punishment for a child, there is such a thing as going to far. The reason the spankings I received when I was a child served to teach me instead of to harm me were because my parents were not abusive, as I believe William Adams clearly was in the YouTube video.

I did many things over the years to warrant a spanking, and when it came time, I wailed and screamed because I didn’t want to be punished. But my mom and dad never “beat” me. I received my punishment and was then promptly told by whichever parent was doing the punishing that the spankings hurt them worse than they hurt me. They told me they didn’t like having to discipline me, but they did it for my own benefit, so I could learn right from wrong. And then they always told me they loved me.

In this video, not only is Adams violently whipping his daughter, but he is doing so out of pure anger and he’s yelling at her and degrading her in the process. That is most certainly taking the discipline process too far.

While I don’t think the best way to handle this situation was to post the video on YouTube for the world to see, I do hope some good comes out of this situation and that William Adams receives the proper counsel he needs to realize this kind of “discipline” is not acceptable.