This is the meme I saw:
You might have seen this flowchart yourself on social media. It’s clever, concise, and grounded. But despite how fortified the argument seems (like a stone wall with no gates), there are two assumptions hidden here. It’s instructive to shine a spotlight on them.
This is not to prove the supremacy of spanking, or disprove the use of reason. It’s just a fair introduction to the steelmen involved. If one is to claim the moral high ground, it can’t be done through flawed and condescending memes.
The first assumption is overestimating how much value children place on “reason.” Using the same logic displayed in this flowchart, we could ask: Should murderers be forcibly detained? Should Ukrainians defend their homes from Russians? Should presidents be impeached for abuses of power? Well no…aren’t they all “old enough to understand reason”?
The logic of this flowchart proves too much and fantasizes about a world where reason is the only legitimate incentive to do anything. Should I use money to buy apples from the grocer? What am I, anti-reason? Commerce is a form of influence independent of moral reasoning. My only chance of getting apples should be to convince the grocer through reason to give them to me freely.
Children are not born with an innate desire for logical consistency, and they do not develop a fully formed understanding of reason once they hit a certain age. “Reasoning” with children before they have built this muscle is akin to speaking in a foreign language. But don’t take my word for it. Ask your 4-year-old how important it is that all their actions are logically consistent with the philosophy of the enlightenment period. Then for good measure, ask your 4-year-old how important it is for them to eat as much cake and ice cream as possible. Don’t withhold any cake and ice cream from them. What are you, anti-reason?
All behavior from kids is influenced, either by parents or peers or their own physiology. And which of those three influences is likely to be the most “reasonable”? If young children are to behave according to reason, then it won’t happen organically. Reasonable behavior will be forced upon them, which leads me to the second assumption.
This flowchart also underestimates the value of doing things we don’t understand. While children aren’t born with an innate value of reason and logic, they are born with (or rapidly develop) an understanding of cause and effect. “I move my hand this way, I touch what’s over there. I put this in my mouth, it tastes bad. I hear this persons voice, I become happier.” Children don’t have to understand why something follows in order to predict that it does, and act accordingly. Infants do this. This is actually the first language that children become fluent in - and much much earlier than any spoken language. What’s more compassionate than for kids to learn the rules of the universe in their own language?
In fact, this is the language that most of us speak primarily for the rest of our lives.
Most social science supports (ironically) the notion that we don’t use reason for much of anything anyways . See Jonathan Haidt’s discussion of the elephant and the rider in The Righteous Mind starting on page 52. Almost always what happens is that we decide what to do based on which actions give us the feelgoods (cause and effect), and then we rationalize our decision later.
“The rider is skilled at fabricating post hoc explanations for whatever the elephant has just done… Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.” -Haidt
Even as adults, our political, social, and recreational preferences are not based on the rigorous process of objective self-critique. Most likely, we were conditioned to them by forces we did not understand at all while it was happening.1
When it comes to disciplining (shall I say “influencing”) children, it is less important that consequences are understandable to them, than that consequences are predictable by them. Raising children is training their intuitions.
“The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord.” -Proverbs 9:10
This statement - for such a short one - does a lot of work. And by taking it each word at a time, we find out that it is so much richer and more profound than some vague instruction to respect God.
Beginning
Wisdom must begin.
Every parent wants their children to relate to their family and peers based on things like respect, love, compassion, courage, and - of course - reason. But this criteria describes wisdom in its final form, and we can’t wait around for people to reach the age of never before we expect them to behave this way. They must playact as if they have all of these things while being completely without them. How is such a thing even possible?
For people who lack the total culmination of wisdom, Fear will suffice. Actions taken out of fear of the consequences become habits. Habits become intuitions. Intuitions become virtues, such as respect, love, compassion, courage, and reason. Through fear, children start practicing these important things without even knowing what, how, or why they are practicing. Then when their time comes, they are practiced. People who make all their decisions out of fear lack wisdom, but children who disregard fear lack the Beginning of wisdom.
Wisdom
The word used in this verse might have theological implications about God’s plan for humanity. But relevant to this conversation is Wisdom as a goal that parents have for their children, even new-agey progressive parents.
To paraphrase a common saying: Obedience is the virtue of following authority. Courage is the virtue of challenging authority. Wisdom is what is necessary to choose one virtue and not the other in a given situation. Otherwise, we have neither obedience nor courage, just a scripted reaction to authority of any kind. Wisdom is the gift of free will itself.
Fear
Untrained, unlearned, and unreasoned with. The existence of several rare and obscure phobias is proof that Fear among the emotions operates by its own set of rules. Yet Fear is also among the strongest emotions. Any desires a person has that are strong enough to overcome Fear must be developed later, and are based on more second-order thinking (justice, hope, loyalty).
Fear is the incumbant ruler of us all, challenging other virtues to rise and displace it.
Lord
A behavioral scientist once told me “If an incentive is strong enough, use it.” So how do we use this?
Fear is universal, but fear of the wrong things incentivizes immoral actions. Fear of poverty causes one to steal. Fear of humiliation causes one to lie. Proverbs 9:10 doesn’t prescribe a surrender to fear. We are to integrate fear of the right powers. For example: the Israelites in the desert who feared starvation should have feared their Lord instead. All the fears that children have of not getting what they want should be subservient to the fear of consequences for their greed.
Now read it again. “The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord.”
Story of Application
Some time ago a child was left in my care whos name I can’t remember, so we’ll call them “Stupid.”
We were driving, Stupid had to go to the bathroom. The amount of time between awareness and culmination of this feeling is notoriously short for children. Fortunately we were just pulling into the parking lot of our destination, certainly with a bathroom inside. In their haste, Stupid got out of the car and began running toward the building, and directly into the path of another car that they couldn’t see.
In hindsight, I wish my own expression had been more forceful, more convicting. “STOP! In the naaaaaame of looooooove!”
But in my panic, what actually emerged was more of a desperate plea in a cracked voice. “Stupid, Wait!”
Thankfully this was sufficient. Stupid froze in their tracks to look at me, and the vehicle missed them by maybe 10 inches or something.
The reason this worked2 is because the child and I had already established what my voice means. Precisely, my voice means EVERYTHING, even when they don’t understand, even when they don’t agree, even when they don’t comply.
In that moment, their reaction to my voice was stronger than the impulse to go to the bathroom, and it may well have saved their life. What would have happened if we relied on the their use of reason?
Stupid did not have the wisdom to perceive that car on their own. Being gripped by the fear of my voice caused them to do the right thing without understanding why. Wisdom was temporarily granted to them by Fear.
Application Without the Story
It is somehow both cliché and taboo to lament that we no longer beat our children. But both sides of this conversation usually lack nuance and reason (again, ironically). So as a final illustration, I propose my own, improved, version of the flowchart:
Appendix: Discussion of Common Objections
Children are small and helpless. Hitting them is abuse, plain and simple.
The fact that children are small and helpless means that adults are responsible for both their positive and negative experiences. And immediately we see that it’s not simple enough to determine that adults who provide negative experiences are abusive. Any parent who wants to give the positive experience of healthy teeth will deny their child candy. And any parent who gives their child the positive experience of unlimited candy is responsible for their negative experience of rotten teeth. Of these two scenarios, the parent who gives their child whatever they want is more likely to be charged with child abuse.
Daniel Kahneman (one of godfathers of psychology) has done some interesting work on the intricacies of subjective remembered experiences.3 What’s important to consider here is that for human beings of all ages, the optimal number of negative experiences is somewhere greater than zero. The only disagreement between myself and advocates of “peaceful parenting” is whether specific negative experiences now will lead to more positive experiences later.
Research shows …
Yeah, this is the kind of thing that is exceptionally hard to research. Not even twins are exactly alike. So for someone to tell me that their study has successfully isolated childhood discipline as the only possible variable between one person who is happy and another person who is slightly less happy, I find tenuous.
An adult who is even capable of hitting children lacks compassion.
Long story short: Consider that their compassion for a future version of their children outweighs their compassion for the version with the shortest attention span.
Long story medium: Physical punishment is high intensity over a short duration, which opens the door to more positive experiences as soon as the behavior stops. Conversely, I’ve seen kids lose an entire weekend to one ineffectual “punishment” after another. If you find yourself responding to the same behaviors over and over again, you can turn up the duration until it takes up all of your time. Or you can turn up the intensity until a particular behavior stops forever.4 How is it compassionate to allow a bad behavior to become a bad habit?
Long story long: I highly recommend people read the section of this essay entitled “Humane, All Too Humane.” (Use the text search function. This essay is long.)
You only hit them because you cannot reason with them.
We pretty much covered this, but one final point: Typical children - until they are on the other side of their teenage years - have a brain chemistry indistinct from adult psychopaths. You have as good a chance of reasoning with them as you do with Charles Whitman.
You hit them because you like the power trip.
This. This is perhaps the strongest argument against physical punishment. Child psychologist Julie Vargas observes that “punishment is reinforcing for the punisher.” For parents who successfully stop unacceptable behaviors, there’s temptation to use those same methods to stop behaviors which are not unacceptable, but merely annoying.
I have not come up with an air-tight check on this temptation. It’s worth mentioning that we haven’t come up with an air-tight check on full scale child abuse either.
In a sense, beating the kids too much and not enough are both an abdication of responsibility. Beating them too much leaves out the grace that all children need, and dishonors God for the grace He shows us. But beating them too little is a lie of omission, censoring lessons about power and authority that children will need when their own time comes. We cannot lose the responsibility we have to children by pretending we don’t have power over them. I’d hate to have a doctor who skipped the beginning of medical school. I’d hate to read a book that skipped the beginning of the story. And I’d hate to have a leader who skipped the beginning of wisdom.
For any adults made uncomfortable by this, I recommend the short essay Meditation in a Toolshed by CS Lewis.
But for the grace of God goes Stupid.
If you’re interested in this kind of stuff, see also Paul Bloom, nerd.
If you ever find yourself deploying high intensity discipline for high duration, that’s child abuse. Something is wrong, please stop and re-evaluate.
If I get your chart right, you only recommend physical discipline in order to get a child's attention and establish yourself as someone important enough to listen to. That fits very well with my experience.
I live in a jurisdiction where intentionally causing children any physical comfort is seen as Unbelievably Immoral. So I have a lot of experience in not hitting my children.
Especially I remember when one of my sons was three years old. In the mornings, he invented a new game: He wouldn't put on his clothes. He thought his new game was hilarious. He laughed non-stop while he wrestled away from me. Extremely funny, he thought. Much more fun than day-care center.
I'm not a petite and weak woman. In fact I'm rather sturdy. But that didn't help me, because sturdy mothers tend to get sturdy sons. My son was too strong for me to force if he didn't comply at all. I also couldn't lift him forcefully enough or shock him enough in any other way. The slightest pinch from my side would have changed the equation for my son and the game wouldn't have been funny anymore. But intentionally causing children pain is strictly prohibited where I live.
So I always asked my husband to handle it when such occasions arose. In contrast to me, he was strong enough to lift and handle a sturdy three year old in such a convincing way that the game ceased to be funny. Through his overwhelming strength he could establish himself as someone important enough to care about.
Thankfully my son ceased with that game rather rapidly. But I think about it once in a while, and about the question it arose in me: Do we really want a system where perfectly healthy mothers are not strong enough to handle a three-year-old?