So, pro-spanking parents aren’t Nazis?

Here’s some honesty for you: “Children are selfish, self-centred, egotistical little monsters. They are also, and often at the same time, gorgeous, loving, wonderful creatures,” writes Irish columnist, Sinead Ryan. 

Nor is corporal punishment evil, or ineffective, she concludes. “Finally, it is its very rarity that makes it work. It shocks a child (and indeed, many a parent), and that is the point.”

Of the don’t-smack-your-darling camp Ryan states: “Smacking has been hijacked by the PC-parenting brigade, who probably frown upon the naughty step, too. They are very possibly the same parents who regularly get notes home from teacher about bad behaviour, but who cannot mete out effective punishment. Hint: that's what they want you to do.”

You see, it’s too easy to sniff at pro-smacking parents, in their working-class suburbs with no time for “I feel…” sentences. It’s too easy to pontificate about the alleged benefits of talk-therapy when you have one child, and a nanny.  It’s too easy to lecture working-class families.

The raw truth: Pro-spanking/smacking parents aren’t Nazis, and campaigning elites feel threatened by parents making politically-incorrect choices, with better results. So, how about we put the establishment’s professional do-gooders on trial?

Stacking stories

For years political journalists/reporters have been stacking anti-spanking arguments, because they feel it’s their responsibility to take sides, as opposed to reporting all sides. Their Orwellian-like accountability system is designed to weed out critical thinkers.  

In 2000, Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s New York Times bestselling brief against political correctness,Parenthood by Proxy, provided information on two important spanking articles published earlier in the renowned Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

No surprise there. But the history explains so much. You see the sociologist Murray A. Straus concluded that spanking was detrimental to children and made them more aggressive. By way of contrast, the psychologist Marjorie Lindner Gunnoe, carried out a longer-term study and found this wasn’t the case at all. In fact, spanked children were involved in fewer fights at school.

To the campaigning media this was a serious blow. As a consequence, Straus’s conclusions made the three major television networks - and at least 107 magazine/newspaper stories. Gunnoe’s politically-incorrect conclusions were only acknowledged by fifteen of the 107 print sources. Plus, Big Television shunned Gunnoe.

Odd too that Gunnoe’s politically-incorrect findings in the same publication tracked more children (over 1,100) for five years (as opposed to two years).

Guilt tripping

Thanks to the power of the internet, trying to hide pro-spanking studies is an ice-cream headache for the media.

Moreover, in Queensland, Australia, elites find little support: “The Sunday Mail-Nine News State of Families Survey has revealed that 85 per cent of people agree parents have the right to smack their children, with more than a third in ‘strong agreement’.”

But in a desperate attempt to resurrect moral equivalence, the mother who spanks her son is now compared to a child abuser. In stark contrast again, though, the media’s made-for-television soap star parent who prefers “time out” is never portrayed as a prison camp director, holding a prisoner of conscience.

Nor is biology important. Forgetting that our brains are still developing in our twenties, and that children respond to physical language, so-called experts are falling on their discredited arguments such as, “You wouldn’t spank an adult so why spank a child?” And this scholarly case: “Smacking doesn’t work, and you’re mean.”  

Of course, a married mother wouldn’t send her husband to his room, or allow her child to drive to school, but in the coming years, be prepared for more unhinged arguments because campaigning journalists/reporters are never wrong.

Swedish Alzheimer’s

As well, I’m going to predict that the elite media will continue to deny Sweden’s failed social experiments (a leftwing-approved Australian university tradition).  Or to quote, Theodore Kettle,  “Another study” buried by numerous newspapers and “published in the Akron Law Review last year [2009] examined criminal records and found that children raised where a legal ban on parental corporal punishment is in effect are much more likely to be involved in crime.”

Bottom line (no conscious pun intended): parental pacifism backfired in model Sweden and the cheerleaders were unable or unwilling to process the mess. What you’re unlikely to hear on Big Television: “Since the spanking ban, child abuse rates in Sweden have exploded over 500 percent, according to police reports.”

And it’s a familiar pattern. “As in climate change, politicians all over the world seem out of touch with the most rigorous science regarding parental discipline,” explains Kettle.

For today, media-approved experts refuse to concede that the pro-spanking parents of yesteryear reared more respectful children.  To conflate “spanking with hitting over the head with a baseball bat” is common notes James Allan, Garrick Professor of Law at the University of Queensland, in another example of Ryan-like honesty.