I Never Spanked My Children

Discipline by dialogue, and why the hand was never needed

I never spanked my children. Not once, in all the years they were growing up.

In a country where the tsinelas has its own reputation, that sentence still earns me a look. Many of us were raised with the palo. Many of us turned out fine, or say we did. So I want to explain what I did instead, and why I chose it.

What the hand teaches

A spanking is meant to teach one lesson. It teaches another.

The lesson the parent intends is simple: do not do that again. The lesson the child receives is simpler, and it lasts longer. When someone bigger wants something from someone smaller, pain is how they get it.

Children learn far more by watching than by being told. A child who is hit to make him behave learns that hitting makes people behave. He will try it on a classmate, and eventually on someone he loves. I did not want to raise children who believed that hurting a person is an acceptable way to get what you want.

Research has caught up with what many mothers already suspected. Large reviews pooling data on more than 160,000 children have found spanking linked to more aggression, more behavior problems, more anxiety and depression later on, and a weaker bond between parent and child. What it is not reliably linked to is better behavior. The American Academy of Pediatrics now advises against it outright.

What I did instead

I talked to them. Usually in the car, on the way home from school.

My boys very rarely did bad things, so these talks were not a daily event. But when one was needed, it happened there. The car was the most private room we had. No visitors, no classmates, nobody to perform for. A correction given in public turns into a lesson about embarrassment, and a child who is embarrassed is busy defending himself instead of listening. Buckled into the seat beside me, looking out the window, he could hear.

The talks had a shape, and I kept to it.

What went wrong. Named plainly, without shouting. The act, not the child.

What the right thing would have been. Children often genuinely do not know. It had not occurred to them that there was another way.

How to do it next time. Concretely. What you will say, what you will do with your hands, where you will go when you feel the anger coming.

That I expected better. Not hoped. Expected. A child tends to rise to what the adults around him believe he can do.

That I loved them anyway. Every time. A mistake did not change it, and I was correcting them precisely because I loved them so much.

That last one is the part that makes the rest work.

The school bag

I remember one of those drives well.

His classmates had been playing, and in the middle of the game his school bag got knocked about. Nobody meant it. But he got angry, and he was still upset when he got into the car.

I know this child. He does not like his personal things disturbed. He never has.

So we talked, and I will confess I was laughing. Not at him. At how big it had become in his head. I told him it was okay. It was not intended. It happened during play, and he was not hurt.

That was the whole correction. Not a lecture. Just a mother in the driver's seat helping a boy see the size of the thing.

His feelings were not wrong. His bag was his. But anger belongs to things that were done on purpose, and this was not one of them.

By the time we reached home, the bag was just a bag again.

"But does it work?"

Dialogue is slower. I will not pretend otherwise. A slap is over in a second. A real conversation takes the whole drive home, sometimes a second one the next day.

But what a slap produces is good behavior while the parent is watching. That is not obedience. That is fear, and fear leaves the room when you do.

A child who understands why, and who knows he is loved, carries the correction with him. To school. Into the barkada. Into the years when you are no longer there to supervise anything.

It has to be sincere

Children can tell. A talk delivered through clenched teeth, with the love tacked on at the end like a signature, teaches them only that the words are hollow. You have to actually believe they will do better next time. And you have to mean the love every time, including the times it is hardest to feel.

When a child feels the love, he obeys. Not because he is afraid of you, but because he does not want to disappoint someone he knows is on his side.

My boys are grown now, both working, both in Manila. They were corrected when they needed it.

They were never hit. There was no need to inflict pain.