by Michael Patrick

Created on: May 11, 2008

Yes, spanking a child is a useful tool in the kit of childrearing. Its usefulness depends, however, on the sobriety, the mental stability, and the common sense of the disciplining parent. We all have to learn how to play nicely with other children. We don't do it automatically. We're born determined to survive. We're born selfish and demanding and impolite and have to learn how to work with others in mutually complementary ways. We must all suffer mistakes and adjust. How each family manages that is up to that family. Punishment is pain, whether psychological or physical. One is slow and the other is quick, respectively. Which works best is a matter of the rationality and wisdom of the deliverer and the peculiar character of the child as he or she grows into life and the circumstances affecting the family.

How many of us learned not to touch the fire because a concerned parent told us it would burn? Very few. It takes more than time-out or a solemn lecture to learn all of life's lessons.

All children are born with the same primal objective: survival at all cost. The most important thing to a child is structural safety. A safe survival structure needs clever seeding and assiduous watering. The ability to impart a "safe" structure to a child is a matter of intensely personal design and depends on the ability of the parent to accurately and cogently juggle the subtle needs of the family with those of the child.

It's all about structure; providing a stable environment that satisfies the psychological and physical needs of the child and insures the child's gradual understanding of how to survive in a competitive and symbiotic world. Each family's opportunities or limitations are unique. It's a tough job for parents and there aren't any fixed and firm answers to be found from child psychologists or syndicated columnists or debate forums.

For millennia, parents have managed their families without the supervision of government organizations bent on protecting children against all physical discipline. Official efforts to punish parents' actions are an example of good intentions with questionable results. It causes government to set a single, unenforceable standard for what constitutes discipline versus abuse. As has so often been reported in national media, that's a non-starter.

When I was a child in the Fifties, my father, a believer in spanking, once gave me ten sound (but not injurious) lashes with his Navy belt. Memorable, and I never again threatened to burn down

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