Stopping Smacking: A Small Step Towards Peace

A proponent of the Referendum on Child Discipline 2009 was being interviewed on the radio. My mouth fell open in shock as I listened to him expounding upon the harmlessness of smacking and the trauma that’s being imposed on perfectly good parents who occasionally smack their children. He made it sound like smacking was a necessary part of child-rearing.

I felt like ringing in to say ‘I have never had to hit my daughter. She has never done anything that would warrant a smack, even if I believed in smacking. What’s wrong with you people?!’ I felt my self-righteousness and checked myself. There I found a few spots of shame: times I’d rather forget, when the frustration or worse, anger had escalated and won expression. I don’t remember what my daughter did, just my bad behaviour, regret and tears. It’s true, I have never hit my daughter – but, when she was a baby I did once plonk her quite roughly back on to her cot next to me. Once, I gripped her upper arms hard when I lifted her from something to put her perhaps on to her bed; I did reach out and grab her pony tail as she ran, against warnings, towards the street curb; I have raised my voice or gritted my teeth and growled under my breath. I also knew immediately what I’d done was not okay and I apologized to her.

I remembered that I have been triggered many times. Some of those times I was teleported to the dimension of strikers and smackers. Momentarily, I hung on the edge of joining them and I understood. Then, I would catch and change the way I was reacting. No wonder people hit children, I would think. How can a world of people, who were hit themselves as children, who have been filled with senseless rules and dictates about what children should and should not do, exactly when they’re told to do it – how can they, with minimal education, low emotional intelligence and little insight, raised in a world where violence and conflict is normalised, swearing, road rage, disdain, jealousy, belittling a part of every day family life – how can they be expected to recognize in an instant an irrational thought and find instead their own cognition at fault, their own behaviour playing out in their child?

And this is where we’re at in New Zealand. There are people like me and my sister who as children, were smacked and whacked, yelled at and put down; who have lived hard with the damage of it, and worked hard to overcome it; who have vowed not to be like our parents. There are no doubt people who had loving supportive childhoods and violence against their children is not an instinct they have to fight against. And then there are those who don’t even know how they are damaged and how damaging their violence is to the next and future generations.

Whilst they fight for the right to smack their children, some humans at the cutting edge of a better future recognize that smacking is just one small act on a continuum of violent behaviours; that a peaceful world, the eradication of poverty even and achieving harmonic living with the environment is dependent upon individual acts of parenting. This is brilliantly explained, for those academically minded, by Robin Grille in his 2005 book ‘Parenting for a peaceful world’ (published by Longueville Media, Australia). For those who would struggle with a 394 page text, let alone comprehend it - we have laws. Let the law stand to protect the children – Vote Yes.