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Recently
I posted to a local-to-me homeschooling list something about bullies.
I defined a bully as “someone who uses their greater physical
strength as a tool to intimidate and coerce smaller, weaker people to
do what they want.” I said that parents didn’t have
to be bullies.
Another list member took issue with this because the context was a
discussion, or rather me expressing my opinion, about spanking.
Specifically I was disputing that a blog posting about a mother
spanking her two year old should be considered humor.
Perhaps effectively asserting that parents who spank are bullies was a
bit strong—but the problem was not what I said, but that I
didn’t go on to say enough.
When I set aside my fear of confrontation and publicly and
for-the-record challenged the idea that a spanking is a funny story,
the list owner’s response was minimizing (“just a
symbolic swat”) and defensive (“it ought to be
obvious that I'm not a member of the hooray-for-hitting
squad”) before she shut down the nascent discussion.
This is a home schooling mother whom I have always considered
intelligent, articulate and nice. Yet even she felt called to defend
laughing at a mom spanking, called to justify finding humor in a
child’s pain.
This phenomenon got me thinking and has caused me to embark on what
will be an ongoing personal investigation of the portrayal of childhood
and parenting in popular culture, outside of fiction. I’m
talking about noticing and recording how the leaders, celebrities and
role models in our broader culture speak of their own children, how
they reveal their assumptions about children through their jokes and
stories.
Helpfully, that very night I watched a guest on The Tonight
Show with Jay Leno, a comedian making horrible unfunny
(and
repetitive) jokes about how much he was looking forward to all his
children leaving home, following his eldest now in college. Some of his
kids are still very young, apparently, and he remarked several times
that he didn’t want to hear about them, had never wanted to
know about them, until they were out of “his” home.
It was the primary theme to his riff.
Astoundingly, he also felt called to tell the nation that he
didn’t like his adult daughter’s boyfriend, which I
thought showed some nerve! Well, the whole evening should make for
interesting conversation at his family Thanksgiving dinner.
When Jamie Foxx accepted his Best Actor Academy Award for the biopic
Ray, he stood in front of the world and tearfully praised his
strict grandmother for punishing him with spanking, claiming that her
“tough love” is what saved him and led him to where
he is today. I felt so sad for the boy that was, wondering, would he
truly have been less successful if his grandmother had raised him
mindfully and gently instead.
He seemed a perfect illustration of the phenomenon observed by Alice
Miller. From an essay on her website:
“Taking It Personally:
Indignation as a Vehicle of
Therapy,”
Sunday May 01, 2005
Time and again, I ask myself why it is so difficult to
communicate this knowledge, why the perfectly normal
response—horror
and indignation—fails to materialize when the question at
issue is
cruelty to small children. Deep down I know the answer, though I keep
on hoping I am mistaken. The answer I have found is: Most of us were
mistreated as children and had to learn to deny this fact at a very
early stage in order to survive. We were forced to believe that we were
humiliated and tormented "for our own good," that the beatings we
received did not hurt and were harmless, that such treatment served to
protect the community (as otherwise we would have turned into dangerous
monsters).
In the subsequent discussion of his win, apparently no one noticed that
Mr. Foxx was publicly advocating spanking in an international forum.
My realization is that the condescending language and anti-child
discourses of the dominant culture are ubiquitous, osmotic and
pervasive. As the list owner demonstrated, it is extremely
easy to slip unwittingly into those discourses. Like toxic mold, they
need strong light, fresh air and vigorous focused action to eradicate
them from the recesses of our thinking and our community zeitgeist.
Hence my strong language—the strongly loaded word,
“Bully.”
It is true that most parents who choose spanking and punishments as
parenting tools probably believe, or have convinced themselves, that
they are acting out of love, duty, responsibility and necessity. They
may not have the same overt selfish motivations as your common and
garden schoolyard bully, horny boss or gang extortionist.
However parents who spank are engaging in the same physical behaviors,
using the same intimidating strategies as these socially dysfunctional
bullies, for no better outcome than to change the immediate behavior of
their kids.
The important point is not whether I privately designate any particular
parent as a bully, nor whether I have offended someone by mentioning
the word or idea. What is important is that maybe one more parent will
move beyond feeling defensive, and will ask themselves the crucial
question: “Could my child think of me as a bully?”
The risk, the likelihood, is that the children have the same immediate
emotional response towards their parents as they do to
bullies—fear, the
desire to escape, feeling trapped and powerless,
anger.
Then these awful emotional states war with the feelings of love and
admiration, the need for comfort and security from their parents, the
shattered naivety, the struggle for autonomy.
How can this ambivalence not create resentments, confusion, self-doubt
and impinge on a child’s ability to Trust? How can love and
pain not become inextricably intertwined, tainting every future
relationship?
How do I know this?
I was a spanked child. My mother was a bully.
N.B. Since Robyn and others have
commented on this issue, the blog owner has
decided to institute an editorial policy that corporal punishment
stories
will no longer have a place on her parenting humor blog site, a stance
Robyn
heartily commends.
In her
past life
Robyn Coburn has been Production Designer and Set Decorator for motion
pictures, Set, Lighting and Costume Designer in theater, and teacher of
technical theater to actors. Now she pursues an interest in writing
professionally, including screenplays, and contributes regularly to
Unschooling Discussion. She enjoys reading, swimming, sewing, the kind
of electronic games that involve puzzles instead of finger drills,
classic cinema (ie old movies), various crafts, traveling and is a
passionate adorer of James and Jayn Coburn (7).
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