Spare the Rod and Spoil the Child?

I am going to start by saying that I have never been whipped, slapped, beaten in punishment. Not by either of my parents. Not by my teachers. In elementary school, a teacher was spanking another child when the koboko hit me and left a little, bloody cut under my eye. My mother came to my school and raised hell. At FGGC Abuja where I went to secondary school, I don’t recall that we were caned. In any case, I was never. I have four sons. Neither my husband nor I have ever laid a finger on them to discipline them. We discipline them in other ways that are age appropriate according to the severity of their offence. When they were younger, it included being sent to stand in a corner of the living room, being sent down to the cellar, cutting down their TV time, taking away their electronics, being refused a sleepover, being sent to bed before their bedtime. I cannot imagine inflicting physical pain on them. My husband comes from a different culture and as far as he’s concerned, beating is not for humans. It’s not even for pets. Our children -by anyone’s exacting measures- are turning out fine. I turned out fine. My husband turned out fine. I begin with this because whenever the topic of corporal punishment comes up, someone is sure to throw the “sparing the rod and spoiling the child” argument at me. I am here to say that I am proof – as is my family- that one can successfully raise disciplined children without ever having to take the “rod” to them. Also, the bit often missed by the pro-spanking brigade is that rods were typically used for guiding animals rather than hitting them. Besides, that quote “spare the rod and spoil the child” literally comes from a bawdy, satirical poem by Samuel Butler written in the 17th century about a widow who wants the man wooing her to prove his love by spanking himself or allowing her to do the honours herself. The ‘child’ that shouldn’t be spared the rod in the poem is love. Love is a boy by poets stil’d; Then spare the rod and spoil the child

I am aware that there are people who were raised by parents who hit them like unruly cows and who believe that it helped keep them on the straight and narrow. I can’t fight with what someone believes to be true, especially if that truth is about something they experienced. I have a friend who was beaten for the most mundane things. Coming home at the end of school with a dirty school uniform, for example. The beatings he got did not stop him from playing football during recess with his friends (which was how he got his white shirt dirty) but he is convinced that without them he would have uselessed himself. Now, he is a responsible adult, husband to his beloved, father to the most beautiful children I have seen. He credits all that to the beatings. But what use were they if they did not stop him from doing the very thing he was punished for? What is the use of punishment if it hurts but does not reform? He said I overthink things.

I do not think it is a bad thing to overthink things if it means thinking things through. Your child steals money from you, you beat that child until he dies. Now, you’ve got neither the money nor your child. In 2019, Joy Egeonu beat her husband’s 11 year old nephew to death for pilfering money (which later turned out to have been taken by her husband). In January of the same year, Ajoke Adebayo beat her 14 year old son to death for stealing N21,000 from her account. I am not making these cases up, just do a google search. In both cases, neither woman intended to kill the child. All they wanted to do was to teach the child a lesson, beat sense into them or however else we want to phrase it. The point remains that once you transfer your disappointment or anger or fury into whatever instrument of torture you choose to use on a child, when your motive is to inflict maximum pain, when the end goal of that punishment becomes the pain itself, it is often difficult to control yourself. And to control the consequences.

Egeonu and Adebayo are instances of extreme cases, true but they are not alone. Google is your friend if you have the stomach for it. But even in cases where the children do not die, where they grow up and become responsible citizens and you’re congratulating yourself on a job well done, there are likely long-lasting consequences maybe hidden from you, maybe not even acknowledged by the victim themselves. I’m not a psychologist but I read things and I see things.

If as a parent, the only way you can get your child to behave is by beating them, leaving cuts and bruises and welts, then your relationship with that child is broken. If you’re hitting that child for the same offence everyday, it is obvious that your punishment is not working and a sign that you should perhaps work at understanding why your child persists in committing the offence. Who was it that said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the same result? Free yourself from that insanity. If your child cowers from fear at the sight of you, you haven’t taught that child to desist from whatever evil you think you’re shielding them from, you’ve only taught them to hide it from you.

I have been deliberate in not raising the issue of the maltreatment of domestic help here because that wickedness is worthy of its own column. In any case, whether our own child or other people’s, corporal punishment as a means of discipline is rarely ever, I daresay never, justified. So, drop that koboko and work on other ways to discipline your child. They’ll turn out fine, I promise you.