Last night at a comedy club, a somewhat misguided, but very funny, stand up comedian passionately spewed the need for parents to beat their children.  He explained that children need a good beating.  A “good” beating appears to me to be an oxymoron, but he insisted that it was needed for the children to turn out RIGHT.

The content of that first part of his comedy did not find me laughing.  I know I can lack a sense of humor surrounding the topic of hitting children since I am adamantly against it, but the next part of what this comedian said did get me laughing, and whether I was laughing at him for his exact intended meaning, I am uncertain, but I was laughing nevertheless.

After many iterations of “children need a good beating,” he then paused for a second and said, “some parents need a good beating sometimes too”   I thought this morning about why I laughed at that when I am not an advocate of violence.  Here are my thoughts on it.

I don’t understand why adults cannot honestly think through an issue so simple as this one.  It is as if they want to believe in something solely because it justifies their current behavior.  Let’s face it, and look at what spanking really comes down to if you really and honestly look at it.  It is a big person getting angry or frustrated at not knowing how to control a little tiny person with their intellect, and thus resorting to a physical act.  It is really just that!  If you disagree, it is because you don’t want to face the truth!

I’ll return to why I laughed so hard when the comic mentioned that some parents need good-beatings.

There is something so deeply immoral and uncivilized about adults who beat or even just spank and use physical force to teach a lesson.   I am entertained by the notion of physical force being used against those who would use physical force on children.

What if those parents who choose to use physical punishments to answer the misdeeds that their own children commit got the same response to their misbehaviors.  If we can be honest about it, we should clearly realize that we adults make mistakes and do things wrong every day.  What if we got physically punished for every one of our own mistakes… what would that feel like?  Don’t we want to be corrected kindly, with intelligent and thought through guidance?  And we’re adults!  Why can’t we return the same favor to our own children?  Why can’t we treat their mistakes the way we would want to be treated.

I am not trying to claim that this is an easy thing of which to be mindful.  We don’t give this kind of grace to other adults all the time; it’s a challenge for me to do it.

The ability to stop think and reflect should be of the utmost importance to us in dealing with our own children.

The reason for my laughter when the comic said that some parents need good beatings was that I was picturing the parents who beat their children getting their good beatings from someone proportionately larger by the same ratio as they are to their own children.

Using verbal communication to guide our children has many wonderful effects on our children’s lives and the lives of us as parents.  The positive side effects of the act of talking and connecting is that you grow even closer with your children, and instead of fostering fear, you foster trust.  The children who grow up this way have very little need to lie to their parents, which then provides for them a secure and safe place to be themselves and feel comfortable.  A comfortable child has less chances of taking dangerous actions that place them at risk… Those children have more self-confidence to jump into life and realize their dreams with more ease.  And we all want that for our children, don’t we?

Testings for various purposes have their place in education. The NCLB (No Child Left Behind) Act was implemented to help schools to perform better, and to produce more learned and capable students. I can appreciate that stated goal, but the outcome of this act does not help teachers or schools in general to perform better, not from my own observations, and not from what many public school teachers and administrators have said to me. All signs point to the fact that this act is actually harming our students.

Schools appear to have been forced into a position of becoming less focused on authentically educating their students and become focused on, instead, getting them ready for the standardized exams. Schools do this by creating cramming sessions, taking time away from the students’ real education so that they can score better, so that the schools do not lose funding, which would cause them to cut classes, lay off teachers, etc. NCLB was supposed to cause the schools to become better educational institutions that could offer a better quality education to the young, instead, it placed the focus of the educational institutions on the wrong goal.

We’ve had enough time to see that NCLB not only does not work, but is also making our education worse, we really ought to try our effort at something else, better yet, this time we should really think through in a more organic and intelligent manner and do something that really will work. The answers are not that hard to figure out!

A smarter program might be one that provides coaching and more intuitive/better quality teaching methods for the teachers to become better educators by working with them on class interactions; teachers can be taught constructive ways to help difficult students and healthy ways to encourage a love for learning.

Another intelligent thing to do would be to find a way to pay our teachers wages that they deserve. Teachers are some of the most important people since they help to grow and nurture the minds and hearts of our future generation, our future world. As we treat our teachers as if they are less important, their work can flounder, which in turn causes all of the students under them to flounder in school, and usually in life. Those are just a few ideas that could be powerfully helpful and should produce real positive results!

Instead of punishing schools for not producing students who can pass standardized tests by taking away funding from schools, which causes those schools to become worse educational institutions, why not copy programs that are working, programs such as Jeffery Canada’s and others throughout the country?

There is a wise and peaceful person I want to be, but sometimes I do feel violence rising in my blood. My blood sometimes does reach that boiling point where I can feel like I could punch someone. When I see a big person picking on someone too small to fight back, like a child, whether verbally or physically, I am occasionally guilty of wanting a good fight with them. I am a small woman, but still bigger than the child who is being dumped on.

The other day I was sitting at a fast food place having unhealthy-but-fun-to-eat-burgers with my son, when I heard a father arguing with a boy who couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven, and wasn’t even a third of the man’s height. I love a good verbal argument, especially when it utilizes and promotes the practicing and development of one’s mental faculties and everyone involved comes out of it a bit more intelligent or with a more complex views on things. A good debate is a fantastic opportunity to have your paradigms shifted in a positive direction. This argument was not a positive argument.

They were arguing about the existence of dollar burgers at another location that apparently did not exist at the location where we were eating. It appeared that the father was resentful at having to spend 15 cents more since at this particular restaurant the cheapest burger was $1.15. The boy kept saying that he didn’t see a dollar menu at the other place, and that’s why he came here. The word “argument” might be too generous a word to apply to this verbal interaction, since the man had most and loudest input, and when the man was done, he concluded this mostly one sided argument with one piece of verbal vomit.

“You are a dumb shit.”

What got to me more was what ended up happening to the boy as a result of my reaction. I was so shocked that I turned my head and looked at the boy. My reaction got the boy to look over at me, which would have been fine if I hadn’t seen him fill up with shame. He was embarrassed because he knew that I heard his dad.
I could tell how he felt and I wished to god that I could say, “no, no, it isn’t you, you should not be feeling embarrassed. You are not a dumb shit and your dad is the jerk; he is the dumb shit for calling his son that. No father or no mother should say such a thing. In fact, no adult should ever say such things to children ever!”

But I couldn’t and I didn’t.
I hated that man for that.

I believe education is the greatest equalizer; I believe education can take a child of poverty and elevate him or her to a financial standing that is far superior to his or her parents, where he or she came from, etc… but before any of that can happen, the child has to be able to have the self-confidence and self-value to study or to feel that his own self is worthwhile enough to invest his or her time in…

If it takes that, what can we expect from a child who has been put down and told that he is a dumb shit? A child like the boy that I saw at the restaurant has most likely been exposed to and been living under such derailment of his self-esteem and his right to self efficacy through out his entire life… what chance does that boy have to do well in school, to do well in life, or to feel sense of self, when he only knows about a world in which the people who are supposed to love and cherish him tell him that he is a “dumb shit”?
There really ought to be some sort of counseling program that parents-to-be are all required to go through before becoming parents, where the parents-to-be get an opportunity to work through their issues and gain helpful parenting skills that do more than warn them of all the pot holes of being parents, but empower them with real knowledge about children, how to parent in positive settings, etc… Parents seem to need to be told that children are naturally good.

When children behave badly, it is the adults around them helping to produce bad behaviors… Parents-to-be ought to be taught that it is never too late to bring about positive attributes from children, and to help them to become the loving and happy adults that we are all meant to become in the first place.

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