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