Spare the Rod and Spoil the Child?

I never really needed this phrase as permission to hit my children; I did what was done to me and thought it to be the way to discipline and teach. However, I was not an example of a good parent, nor did I know how to be one, I just followed the tradition set before me by my parents, I also introduced a few new ones.

I was raised in a house where violence was the norm. Anger was the permission to hit in the name of discipline. My parents really did not know what to do to stop the behavior they did not like from us, other than to resort to violence as a deterrent to behavior they did not want. They had been raised with the same mentality and justified brutality in the name of parenthood.

In the Bible, the term “rod” meant stick of growth or a measurement for young children as they learn the ways of God and family. As they grew and became experienced, they reached certain measurements of understanding and growth. It was a measurement of maturity as well.

The meaning of the word spoil within that terminology was to leave them ignorant and allow them to follow the wicked ways of the world, or society of the heathens, or lost if you will. The phrase was not meant to be a justification for physical violence as a teacher of right or wrongs.

Now for those who were not raised in a religious environment, this phrase made little difference in condoning or justifying using physical violence as a teacher. We have become the most violent nation in the world with the most prisons in the world.

Can child abuse have some connection to the above facts? For more than 150 years, this country has been playing with behavior modification through public schools. We now have abortion on demand; we have Juvenile facilities popping up everywhere. There are Juvenile Correctional Facilities being built, and we have more counselors and drugs to treat children as young as two years of age.

What has happened is the breakdown of the family structure that all healthy societies are built upon. Our society has been redesigned and restructured without the ethical codes that were in place to keep us raising children to become mature and moral adults. I will say that in the last sixty years, we seem to have never left High School in this country.

What happened to the boys of twelve and sixteen who were able to be admirals and ambassadors? The family structure that made us the greatest country in the world is but a memory to the senior citizens of this country.

Maybe the number one cause of child abuse is that younger and younger teens are having sex and babies, or maybe it is that we don’t know how to raise children without passing on the baggage of our parents to them. I learned that to hit my children was only to make me feel like I did something to correct the mistakes they made. The number one cause of Child Abuse is IGNORANCE AND EMOTIONAL IMMATURITY!

I did not know how to handle any mistakes! All my mistakes were dealt with in the same ignorant manner. I had no patience, I had never had real love that allowed me to make mistakes and find the time to learn from them. I did not know how to raise children in a healthy environment because I never lived in one. I could not recognize my ignorance as I repeated my parents mistakes over and over, and so will millions of other parents continue to do so, unless they can wake up to see that violence is an addiction in an epidemic proportion.

Schools don’t know how to teach parenting. The family was the role model for society, or at least a healthy one! The family has been altered without any understanding of how important it was to future generations. We now live in the outcome of this change. Violence is the norm; patience and love are strangers to these generations of today.

In 1947, God was ordered out of public schools. In 2008, our nation faces the outcomes of that decision. Parents are searching for some formula to not hit their children. The formula is to learn to forgive their mistakes and show them how to find other ways of doing things until they can grow with a searching mind that makes them think of all possible ways to finish the task at hand. Before you can teach your children to do this, you will have to learn to do it yourself. You are the role model for the future; learn to be a good one.

Barbara L. González, Grace Seeker: ponderland@charter.net