Two Bits: Wrong to criminalise parents for applying discipline

The Constitutional Court says it is illegal to spank children, even in the privacy of your home. This has prompted an outpouring of indignation, from citations of Biblical sources for its justification to assertions that “it did me good, so it must be good for my children”.

One of the Biblical quotations of the “spare the rod and spoil the child” variety is this one: “Foolishness is bound in the heart of the child, but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him.” Proverbs 23:13-14.

In my family and in those of all of my friends, a good paddling was the least you could expect for doing something wrong like stealing, bullying, lying (it wasn’t me, mom!), digging up the neighbour’s flower garden, stoning his snotty brats or something that seemed equally innocuous and entirely justifiable at the time.

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The prospect of a whipping from my mother or, please no! my father’s strong right arm made my lies to get out of it only more ingenious. But I didn’t always reckon on them having had childhoods as well and they could spot lies, so it was a losing game.

But their punishments never hurt nearly as much as the ‘cuts’ from the professional pain-giving canes applied by the brothers of the religious order who schooled us. Those seriously hurt!

Did those beatings harm us for adulthood? People like to say that what didn’t kill them made them stronger, but then I never experienced a beating that left me with broken bones or internal bleeding. I’d like to think that is what the good judges of the court were addressing, those beatings that get completely carried away. But the anti-corporal punishment lobby will argue that so much as lifting a finger is bad.

I believe a couple of firm smacks on the bum can be completely justified and necessary, but not a savage beating. The child abusers among us need to be stopped and punished, but it would be wrong to criminalise parents for disciplining their children with a smack.

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One year Round Table’s national project was Childline, a phone-in facility for reporting abuse. One evening a local Round Table couple heard a knock at the door.

To their shock, it was a social worker who had been sent around to investigate their beating of their daughter!

Turned out their eight-year-old girl, who could be pretty naughty at times, had got a paddling from her father for doing something wrong. So, she got the Childline number from the stickers we were distributing for Round Table and reported them for child abuse!

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Spring is here and the gardens are full of birds, busily doing their thing. Up in the ‘Berg last weekend the sunbirds were flitting from bush to bush – mainly double-collared and amethyst in our part of the valley – Natal robins (now called the Red-capped robin chat) were scurrying through the undergrowth, and of course the yellow-billed kites are back.

In our Salt Rock garden, a pair of spectacled weavers are busy building their nest in a wild banana right outside the living room window, a short flight from the bamboo palm where they strip off threads of leaves for their intricate weaving business. I am amazed they choose the bounciest possible tree to make their home, which hurls about crazily with each passing puff of wind. At least the chicks will have motion sickness taped by the time they leave the nest.

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Women spend more time wondering what men are thinking than men spend thinking.