Smacking is never the answer
IT’S some years ago now but it had, as I remember, been one of those days. Two kids under five, a full-on job and a husband working nights.
It was the end of a long afternoon, both children were playing up and I still had the bath and bedtime battle to get through. I was, as I recall, very stressed.
I tell you these facts not by way of excuse but rather as explanation for what happened next; for when my daughter – then aged about three – deliberately tipped her tea on the floor, I smacked her.
It wasn’t a hard hit or a belt. It was a single smack, borne out of sleep deprivation and frustration and, if I’m honest, anger.
There were no bruises although there was a tell-tale red mark where my big adult hand had come into contact with the smooth, white flesh of her chubby little thigh.
She howled. So did I.
It was – and remains to this day
– the lowest point of my parenting career and taught me a valuable lesson: that smacking wasn’t the answer. It didn’t help to clean up the mess of spaghetti hoops on the floor.
It didn’t teach her not to be naughty.
All it did was upset both her and me terribly. She got over it, of course, and half an hour later was contentedly watching Teletubbies.
More than 15 years on I can still replay that moment with gut-lurching clarity.
For me, then, the news that Scotland has become the first country in the UK to make it a criminal offence for parents to smack their children is to be welcomed.
Indeed, our colleagues north of the border should be seen as setting an example to the rest of the UK which should follow suit and quick.
Now, I know there are those who still believe that a smack does no harm. How else to deliver a short, sharp shock to a misbehaving child?
But that is an out-dated fantasy perpetuated by those who think coppers should still have the right to give kids a clip around the ear and who will bleat about the ‘nanny state’.
The evidence of the emotional and mental damage inflicted on youngsters by hitting them is irrefutable and has been gathering for decades. It impacts on their emotional development and can harm their mental health.
What parent in their right mind would want that for their offspring?
But that’s the point – parents are often not in their right minds when they resort to smacking; they are often furiously out of control.
Most of the time delivering a smack isn’t anything to do with discipline and everything to do with a last-resort release of frustration.
I’ve heard talk of delivering a ‘loving smack’. There is no such thing.
Hitting simply teaches kids that violence is, after all, the answer – whether at home, in the playground or on the street.
Scotland’s move will give children there the same protection from assault as adults when it comes into force. And it will draw a line, once and for all, under any notion that ‘might is right’.
The fact it is taking the rest of the UK so long to do the same should shame us all.