1. When I was younger and my parents and I we in the mall on day I wanted something and my mum had told me no and my dad told me no and not to ask again or there would be be trouble and I wined and wined for it 2 more times and my dad took me by the arm and said you are now coming with me and you are going to get it good and hard. He took me to a bench in the mall and I fought and fought not to go with him but he pulled me and we got the to the bench and my dad took off his belt and he started to pull down my pants and again I fought and lost and soon my bare bottom was over my father’s knee and even before the the first time time the belt hit me I started to cry and say no dad no dad and then the belt started to hit me and he hit me for 10 minutes straight after he stopped he said to me now if your behavior does not stop you will get alot worse when we get home and he was right because there was one time I got the belt while I was out and my father got me home and marched me up the stairs and took the paddle off the wall and I got the paddle about half hour just after I got the belt in the mall.

1. This website is a public forum. So long as the website owner allows me to post my comment(s) on the subject at hand, I say that this is my business and I am minding it. I have my opinions about this subject matter, which is near and dear to my heart. And you have yours. Our opinions, obviously, differ greatly.

2. As far as your assertion that I mind my business, well, when it comes to your life, that is what I am doing. I do not know you, have never met you, and have absolutely no relationship with you. That reality being what it is, by circumstances, I am minding my business. More power to you with how you are raising your children.

I will not be assuaged by the anti-spanking group. I say mind your own business. I raise my children my way, and you raise yours (if you have them) your way. I just pulled my five year old over and he’s always honest with me. I asked him how he feels after he’s spanked for doing something bad. If he would’ve told me anything else, I would cease and desist IMMEDIATELY. He says and I quote, “I feel bad.” I ask, “Why?” He says, “I feel bad because I didn’t do what you told me to do.”

Isn’t that it? If they feel good for disobeying you, then there are NO repercussions.

There comes a point when a person, a society, needs to look closely at, and question, many of our long-held beliefs. Whatever the belief: Hold it up to an objective light and ponder whether it is necessary to continue to organise your actions around that belief.

Your beliefs lead to your thoughts, your thoughts lead to the actions that you take. The actions that you take are a testament to the person you are. How do you want to be remembered? As a person who beat [your] children? When you are on your deathbed, and you are playing the movie of your life through your mind, when you get to that part where you treated a child cruelly–whether your own or another’s–will that make you proud?

Specifically, for black people living in America, the lives of our children are, will be as adults, hard enough. A black child is much better served and prepared for facing the world if she/he is loaded down with lots of love and caring and respect and compassion. Yes, children deserve respect, too! Let us rethink this hitting of our children as a way to “teach him/her a lesson.” We really need to rid ourselves of these last vestiges of the mentality imposed on us from slavery.

The following I copied from the author Alice Miller’s website:

http://www.alice-miller.com/index_en.php

Child Mistreatment, Child Abuse: What is it?

Humiliations, spankings and beatings, slaps in the face, betrayal, sexual exploitation, derision, neglect, etc. are all forms of mistreatment, because they injure the integrity and dignity of a child, even if their consequences are not visible right away. However, as adults, most abused children will suffer, and let others suffer, from these injuries. This dynamic of violence can deform some victims into hangmen who take revenge even on whole nations and become willing executors to dictators as unutterably appalling as Hitler and other cruel leaders. Beaten children very early on assimilate the violence they endured, which they may glorify and apply later as parents, in believing that they deserved the punishment and were beaten out of love. They don’t know that the only reason for the punishments they have ( or in retrospect, had) to endure is the fact that their parents themselves endured and learned violence without being able to question it. Later, the adults, once abused children, beat their own children and often feel grateful to their parents who mistreated them when they were small and defenseless.

=========================

Thank you to this website’s owner for allowing me to post my long comment.

The problem was clear to me. The white kids had Mom and Dad, the black kids had only Mom.

Kids need their Dad, a real man who is active in their lives. Something about that baritone make kids straighten up. You can point to exceptions to the rule, but they are only exceptions. These black kids need Dads (as opposed to biological fathers).

I don’t know the family situation of these black girls getting spanked, but I suspect that they come from broken homes. If the parent(s) do not check homework, go to parent-teacher conferences, PTA meetings, etc., the school has to decide how to deal with the kids. Most teachers just give up on them. A teacher can only be as good as the parents.

We don’t know enough about the circumstances to judge this situation.