‘90s Family : Imagine Life With Respect and Caring for Children

Imagine:

A world where adults can strike children without fear of being sued or reported for child abuse.

A world where the phrase, “I’m hitting you to teach you not to hit other people” sounds logical.

A world where teachers and parents are finally free of constantly seeking creative ways to manage and pay positive attention to troubled and troublesome children.

This is the dream of people who want to return corporal punishment to California’s schools and homes, and introduce it to the courts.

Headway has been made. State Assemblyman Mickey Conroy (R-Orange) has written a measure (AB 101) that would lift a 10-year-old ban on corporal punishment in California schools by letting local boards decide whether or not they want to allow teachers to use it with parents’ permission. California is one of 27 states that does not allow paddling. Last week, the bill was approved 9 to 8 by the Assembly Education Committee.

Conroy has another bill (AB 7) that would require parents to paddle their delinquent sons or daughters in open court. If they don’t want to, or if they don’t paddle hard enough to satisfy the judge, a bailiff would take over the job. The bill has passed the Public Safety Committee 6 to 5. Both bills will be heard today before an appropriations committee.

Conroy has said physical discipline must be restored as a way to return authority to adults and control teenagers.

He has friends in parents like Waunidi Changamire, a single mother of three from Redlands. She said she spanked her 17-year-old son, Diallo, when he was younger because it was the only way to maintain her authority in the home. “With a strong-willed child, the best you can do is delay that behavior another day,” she said. The boy said she used a belt and a switch.

The mother believes she could have been arrested for what she did. “What one person calls abuse, another one doesn’t,” she said. “Some people don’t want you to raise your voice, that’s abuse. Some don’t want to see you whack your child on the butt, that’s abuse. It’s totally subjective.”

Now, she said, children threaten parents with calling authorities. “Everybody is afraid and nothing is being done.”

Changamire is trying to “restore the viability of spanking to the home, foster care and the public schools.” She hopes to get a parents’ rights initiative on the ballot to define what is or is not acceptable discipline.

Diallo, like Conroy and many other supporters of corporal punishment, said spanking worked for him. “If I ever have kids,” he said, “I’ll do the same thing.”

Imagine a world in which all children feel that way.

Last month, a Gallup Poll found that in the name of discipline, more than 3 million children were physically abused by their parents. Pollsters defined “moderate” physical abuse as hitting children with objects on parts of the body other than their behinds, throwing or knocking them down and shaking infants younger than 2.

In 1994, 555,531 students were subjected to corporal punishment in a selected sample of school districts in the states that allow it, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Now imagine a world where legislators write bills establishing widespread in-home parenting classes for at-risk mothers of newborns.

A world where social workers have the sympathy and the time to explain and encourage parents to use timeout, explaining, distracting, grounding or taking away privileges.

A world where adults have the courage to model the behavior they expect of children.

Imagine that.

* Lynn Smith’s column appears on Wednesdays. Readers may write to her at the Los Angeles Times, Life & Style, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053.