My thoughts on corporal punishment

*First appeared in the Sept. 17 edition of the Laurel Chronicle newspaper

Adrian Peterson had a bad week. He’s been indicted on charges of child abuse related to whipping his son to the point of bleeding. Peterson, who plays professional football for the Minnesota Vikings, is fighting the charges. He’s told several news outlets that he was disciplined as a child in the same way and “never intended or thought [injury] would happen…I am not a perfect parent, but I am, without a doubt, not a child abuser.”

Is corporal punishment child abuse? It depends on your perspective – and, in Peterson’s case, both the jury and injury.

According to news reports, parents are allowed in every state to use corporal punishment as a means of discipline, so long as the force is “reasonable.” Mississippi law stipulates that reasonable corporal punishment will not cause serious bodily harm, such as bone fracturing, permanent disfigurement or scarring, internal bleeding or trauma to any organ, brain damage, and impairment of any bodily function.

Roughly 19 states allow corporal punishment within public schools. In Mississippi, teachers and other district personnel may reasonably use “physical force as a means to maintain discipline and enforce school rules for self-protection or for the protection of other students from disruptive students.” It’s up to school districts to decide whether or not to employ this type of punishment.

Back to Peterson. His case will be handled in both a court of law and of public opinion, and that’s the genesis of this column. I don’t care to opine on his specific case (particularly as I don’t know all the details), but I’ve been amazed by the immediate rush to judgment on both sides of the paddle.

For what it’s worth, here are my thoughts on corporal punishment.

The Staples Household believes strongly in corporal punishment. As a child, I was often on the receiving end of this type of discipline. Switches were my mother’s specialty, and she’d even “allow” me to pick out my own. My father offered no such choice. His trusty belt sufficed.

I was whipped so many times that I don’t remember specifics. What I do remember is that the punishment system was rigged in my brother’s favor, as he never got as many whippings as I did. (Perhaps the bigger question, then, is not whether corporal punishment is child abuse, but whether it is evenly distributed among siblings. I’ll volunteer for that case study.)

All joking aside, corporal punishment in my family didn’t do irreparable harm to my brother or me. It didn’t make us violent madmen. It served its purpose quite well: We broke the rules, and we paid the painful price. Did it completely stop us from disobeying? No, but we defied the laws of Papa Sam with a more acute sense of the risks involved.

Because of my upbringing, I don’t raise eyebrows when I hear a child has been whipped for disobedience. That’s just a normal part of childhood, based on the sum of my experiences.

But I don’t agree with those who contend all forms of physical force used on children are “reasonable.” Obviously, if you break a bone or disfigure a face, you’ve gone too far. There are some limits, and parents should be held accountable when they exceed those boundaries.

On the other hand, I don’t agree with the over-reactive group which believes all forms of corporal punishment are abusive. I don’t believe that whipping children (in a reasonable way) is cause for a lifetime of therapy or requires an immediate reporting to childcare services.

Extremists on both sides irritate me. I’m not a parent, and I’m not advocating for either child-rearing strategy. It’s up to each family to determine what works and what doesn’t.

Sure, I’ve got my biases. I grew up thinking most of the kids who didn’t get spanked were brats, and most of the parents who didn’t spank their kids were pushovers. I also got exposed to irony at a much earlier age than the non-spanked kids who never heard their parents claim, “This hurts me more than it hurts you.”

However the Peterson case pans out, I hope we’ll remember that Adrian Peterson’s parenting strategy is not a bellwether for corporal punishment in America.