DON’T TURN AN ACT OF LOVE INTO A CRIME
THE proposed legislation to outlaw smacking children is an attack on normal family life by a cold-hearted professional parenting elite who think they love our children more than we do. Families don’t exist in laboratory conditions. They are not controlled environments where unwanted, confusing distractions are not present, complicating everything. They are live, messy, real-world contexts.
Spend time with a toddler and you’ll understand that when they grab your glasses or try to open the oven door, you need to be fast and firm. Unpeeling their fingers from your glasses will sometimes hurt them. And they will cry. But a stern telling-off will usually make them cry, too – the pain of a smack is secondary to the emotion of being in trouble.
Are these acts of cruelty on a continuum of abuse, with hitting at one end and serious assault at the other? Of course not, and normal people understand this.
The anti-smacking sect fetishises one particular parental act and separates it from everything else parents do. Chastising your children is a minute aspect of the relationship we have with them. The onedimensional obsession with smacking betrays a mistrust of ordinary parents.
Parents who smack are not ‘For’ smacking. It is just one of the hundreds of different, loving acts they carry out each day. Who defines themselves as a ‘fish finger griller’? Or a ‘duvet tucker-inner’? Or a ‘pocket money stopper’? We’re parents who love our children through a myriad of actions.
Born out of love, chastising can take a variety of forms. Would normal people put denial of pocket money, no TV or grounding on the same continuum as battery? Of course not. Smacking is not abuse, it sits alongside hugging, playing Lego together and bedtime stories: the continuum of loving family relationships. The professional elite has campaigned to change people’s minds but it has failed. Three-quarters of people disagree with a ban on smacking. In a democracy you try to change the public’s minds through debate. In this case, if you’d won the argument, the practice would surely die out anyway.
But members of the elite want to send us, you and I, a message. Bringing in a new law is a strange way to send a message, isn’t it? Why not just send us a leaflet or something? No, their instinct is to control people.
And it won’t stop here, either. In a discussion I joked that they’ll try to ban shouting at kids next and my opponent suggested that shouting is an act of abuse, too!
Normal parents have a repertoire of approaches to domestic discipline and justice in the home. Logically, the punishment elements only start when other tactics fail. We would rather not have disobedient children, but children are children and will push the boundaries of what is acceptable.
What the anti-smacking brigade doesn’t get is that children are different from adults. Their needs are different and their psychological functioning is different.
If a husband restricted his wife’s money, chose her clothes, what she ate, what time she went to bed and if she were allowed out of the house or not, it would be more than a little concerning. Not doing this for children would be neglect!
Children are not little adults as the professional elite would have us believe.
DO you remember when ‘parent’ was a noun, not a verb as it is today? Professionalising family relationships with ‘best practice’ destroys the spontaneity of loving relationships, squeezing out those jewels that we have all incorporated into our family folklore.
Where children’s quirks or misunderstandings, often at family meal times, become the adopted stories that families share and bond around.
The warmth of normal family life will be lost – like tears in the rain – and replaced by the dead, joyless ‘proceduralised’ parenting styles of those who claim to know better than us.
By calling smacking ‘abuse’, these people are claiming that all of us were abused by our own parents. What a disgusting way to view past generations of parents.
Under the current law, parents who use unreasonable physical punishment will be prosecuted. Unreasonable force would be abuse.
I am not arguing for the right to assault my children. I am defending autonomy for families, privacy, the right to bring up our children as we see fit. Undermining that right can only harm children and disorientate them as they grow into an increasingly confusing and illiberal world.
As a community worker, I help people to achieve a modicum of control over their lives; to determine how they conduct themselves, the business of their families and the communities in which they live.
Freedom and independence, what could be a more basic aspiration? Ironically, it seems the SNP Government doesn’t get it.