
There are a lot of third rails in parenting--I'd list some, but really, what isn't?--and I'm going to go ahead and mention one of them. Spanking.
We chose not to. I have to explain, I grew up with a somewhat traditional Chinese immigrant upbringing, as did my spouse. It's an authoritarian kind of parenting. None of this nonsense about being your child's friend. And certainly no positive reinforcement. It's all about results, and often this means grades. If you produce, you're rewarded, but if you don't, you find out how quickly approval becomes conditional. And spanking young kids to get them to behave is just something parents do to help get those results.
Huz and I delivered: we went to Ivy League schools, we got postgraduate degrees, we're reasonably well-employed, we've never been arrested...all the things nice Chinese American kids are supposed to do when they grow up. But when we discussed how we were going to raise our son, a discussion we had when kidlet was still in utero, we ruled out spanking. We thought it was unnecessarily harsh. And in my recollection, I could never remember *why* I'd gotten a smacking with a ruler on my hand, just that in the moment, I had very strong feelings, to be perfectly honest, of hate toward the person smacking me. Those feelings blocked out any message I was supposed to hear.
That seemed to undermine the whole point of "teaching a lesson" right there. Mind you, we weren't going to go whole hog in the other direction. We just wanted to ease up on the harsh immigrant thing a little.
Occasionally it took a lot of deep breathing exercises and on-the-spot meditation (sometimes serenity NOW through gritted teeth), but we got through my son's toddler and preschool years without ever having to hit him to make him behave. Through a lucky combination of his sweet temperament and our attempts to reason with him, he seems pretty well-behaved. It was hard, but I'm glad we tried to avoid outbursts and actions on our part that are hard to take back. And now it seems research on corporal punishment shows that it does influence children's behavior--just, maybe not in the desired way.
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