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Dorothy Law Nolte's verse, "Children Learn What They Live" says it all.

When parents treat children with respect, kindness, understanding, and reasoning those children (far earlier than some people would ever imagine) treat their parents and others with respect, kindness, understanding, and reasoning.

That's not saying parents who don't hit their children don't tell their children right from wrong. They not only tell them right from wrong, but through reasoning and reasonable consequences they do a better job of teaching why things are wrong and what the natural consequences are when someone does what is wrong.

I was raised in a non-hitting family, and I raised my children (now grown) the same way, and I'd venture to say that I think children raised in families where respect, reasoning, and understanding are valued may actually love their parents a little more than children who came to think of their parents as "authoritarian" and as people who didn't believe children deserve the same respect they, themselves, expect others to show them.

People who strike their children will often say, "Sometimes that's the only thing that works." That's what they believe because they didn't learn that whole families of well behaved, decent, children can be raised from birth to adulthood without ever being hit by the people who claim to love them the most.

Parents who hit children are often parents who will tell those children how wrong it is to hit other people. What children learn is 1) that their parents don't really believe that and 2) that hitting people smaller than you, and hitting people you claim to love, is what you get to do when you grow up.

I once read a book that analyzed the components of love. It noted that trying to control someone else is not real love, and neither is believing that someone else belongs to you. The one thing I remember most about that book was how it pointed out that genuine love ALWAYS has to have respect and admiration.

The world is full of people who have grown up after being hit as children and who will say, "I was hit, and I'm ok." Well, I'm not saying people will die from being hit or that everyone who was ever hit by parents will be a criminal. I am saying, however, that the relationship children have with their non-hitting parents is a better one; that not hitting children is the only real way to practice what we preach, the children who aren't hit are often far better behaved than children who are, and that even people who think they're "ok" after being hit aren't as "ok" as they would have been had they not been hit.

Think of this: Of people who were struck as children some grow up and vow never to do that to their own children. That tells us they want to be better parents than their parents were. Some, on the other hand, grow up and believe there is no way to raise a good child without hitting. The world is full of non-hitting parents with good children that prove this is a misguided, incorrect, belief. Some may know that other people can raise children without hitting them but believe their own children are too out-of-control to be able to do that. Some even believe their own children were just "born difficult", which says they believe their own children are inherently inferior to more reasonable children. (TV's Super Nanny goes into people's homes and shapes up these "difficult" children in short order.) Which of these scenarios points to hitting one's children as a way to be a good parent? None of them - and that's my point.

Learn more about this author, Lisa H Warren.
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