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From the Kitchen Table

The Great Spanking Debate

by Peg Luksik

(Editor's Note: PATownhall.com welcomes Peg Luksik as a regular weekly contributor.)

Last week Massachusetts held hearings on a bill to make spanking illegal. The public response, on all sides of the issue, was overwhelming. Major newspapers quoted claims that spanking teaches children violence and damages everything from self-esteem to academic achievement, while talk radio and Internet sites aired testimonies claiming that spanking taught the speakers discipline, respect for authority, and self-control.

Preventing child abuse was given as the major reason for making spanking illegal. And tragically, child abuse is a real problem, with national statistics of about 900,000 substantiated child victims annually. Those 900,000 children didn't have their bottoms swatted, they were beaten, starved, molested, raped, abandoned, burned, and killed.

Their plight needs to be discussed, with openness to the real causes of child abuse and the real solutions.

Instead, we spent weeks arguing over whether the government should expand the definition of abuse so broadly as to make it effectively meaningless, criminalizing parents who would never truly abuse their little ones, and overwhelming the resources of already stressed child welfare agencies. Case workers would be spending so much time investigating reports of "bottom swatting" that the children who are actually being injured would be at even greater risk. Somehow, that doesn't sound like preventing child abuse.

The US government statistics on documented cases of child abuse reveal discernable patterns. Children living in poverty are 4 times more likely to be abused than their more economically stable peers. Children living with two biological parents are the least likely to be hurt, particularly sexually. In about 40% of child abuse cases, the mother was the perpetrator.

We know that when a marriage with children in it breaks, the woman's income usually goes down and the man's usually goes up. We know that the mother is usually awarded custody, particularly if the children are small. This combination has resulted in a measurable family type of single-parent, female-headed households living below the poverty line.

So, the breakup of a marriage immediately creates three discernable risk factors for children. First, they are more likely to be living in poverty. Second, they have only one parent, usually the mother, who is trying to deal with the double stress of parenting alone and insufficient income – leading to the "mother perpetrator" statistic. Third, they no longer have two biological parents in the home, raising their risk of sexual abuse.

If we really want to get serious about decreasing the incidence of child abuse in America, we need to get serious about increasing the support for the traditional two-parent family. That means we need to assess the impact of tax codes and divorce laws on marriage. It means that we need to speak up when marriage is debased and ridiculed on television and in movies. It means we need to insist that our schools teach about the inherent value of traditional marriage. It means we need to work harder to protect and strengthen our own marriages.

Children growing up in strong, stable families with two biological parents are the least likely to grow up in poverty, the least likely to be abused, and the most likely to achieve success in school and as adults. If we really want to address and decrease the incidence of child abuse, we need to address and increase our support of marriage.

That would require us to admit that the desires of adults should never outweigh the needs of children. It's a lot harder than fighting about spanking. But unlike spanking, the lives of our children really do depend on it.