Loving discipline, or child abuse?

Our parenting methods would make us criminals in some countries. According to the Economist, there is a growing consensus in some parts of the world (especially Europe) that any sort of physical discipline of a child is abuse, and ought therefore to be illegal. In fact 18 European nations have already banned all forms of corporal punishment. A pan-European body, the Council of Europe, is aggressively seeking to end spanking as part of its mission to promote civil liberties. And the United Nations is pursuing a campaign to outlaw all corporal punishment, worldwide, by 2009.

Though the Economist considers this latter effort a typical bit of "Utopian dottiness" from the UN, and "wildly unrealistic," the fact is much of the Western world is moving in a direction to ban, or at least stigmatize, corporal punishment. The premise of the movement is that there is no fundamental distinction between corrective physical punishment, and child abuse. Both are immoral acts of violence that are just on different ends of the same scale.

But there is a difference in kind, not just in degree. Common sense teaches that a slap on the wrist or a spanking on the bottom is fundamentally a different creature than a blow to the stomach or head. The former is the controlled meeting out of a dose of mild pain, the latter a cruel and dehumanizing assault. A spanking (quaintly referred to as "smacking" by the Economist) is for correction for the child's own good or safety; abuse is the expression of an angry and even hateful heart whose purpose is only to hurt.

The Scriptures sanction spanking: "Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you strike him with a rod, he will not die" (Proverbs 23:13). The Bible's view of discipline in general, whether a parent's discipline of his child, or God's discipline of his people, is that it serves redemptive purposes. For the child whose parents lovingly discipline him with controlled measures appropriate to his age, it is so that "he will not die," so that folly will be driven from him (22:15), and so that his soul will be saved from Sheol (23:14). For the child of God who endures God's discipline, he will enjoy "the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it" (Hebrews 12:11).

The point is that corporal discipline is one means that God has given us as parents to lead them in the paths of righteousness and life. It must always be accompanied by love, and by the communication of God's forgiveness for us in Christ. By itself, spanking may correct behavior. But mere behavior modification is not God's purpose for spanking. Rather, the rod is to help a child come to understand, and embrace, the grace of God in the gospel. This is why it is imperative for parents to hug and pray with their children after spanking them.

Sadly, this is just the sort of view of spanking that is increasingly considered odd. The Economist notes that a "pro-smacking" (who would want to be called that?!) lobby in New Zealand did not win much support because "their religious rhetoric - talk of loving corrections, followed by prayers - sounded weird." In my view, it is lumping spanking with child abuse that sounds pretty weird.

In any case, the article noted that the U.S. is something of a hold-out in this matter of spanking (no doubt due to the still-sizable presence of weird religious types). So, we are not outlaws, at least not for the present.