A few moments later, she called back to apologize. But for all I know, you could be Social Services or something. He says spanking has sometimes been the only way to get through to his girls, who are now 12 and This despite the fact that it was almost universally accepted just a generation ago. And if she dares follow through on the threat, she stands to lose friends and the respect of her colleagues and may even find herself the target of a state investigation. This was a lesson Don Cobble, former pastor of a Woburn church, learned the hard way.
In , Cobble was investigated by the Massachusetts Department of Social Services over allegations that his discipline of his 9-year-old son had veered into abuse โ a fine line made finer by the fact that Cobble used the strap of his leather belt. Cobble was surprised by their numbers; he sometimes felt as if he were the only parent who still used corporal punishment.
Cobble had stumbled upon the great secret of modern parenting, a paradox that is just as true today as it was back when DSS first knocked on his door. Even as the percentage of Americans who approve of spanking has fallen dramatically in the last half century, the actual incidence of it has barely budged. Despite that change in attitudes, research by University of New Hampshire sociologist Murray Straus has shown, the population of parents who still spank their toddlers is more than 90 percent.
And sometimes parents even hide it from themselves. A few years ago, a Southern Methodist University psychology professor named George Holden installed audio recorders in 33 homes in the Dallas area. Eugene Rivers, a Boston-based activist who admits his own views on corporal punishment have evolved. Later, TV hits like Good Times would feature parents threatening to smack their kids while laugh tracks cackled in the background. In the late s, a government-commissioned survey found almost all American parents believed spanking was required for raising good children.
It had been that way for decades, here and abroad. Indeed, he later found that, on average, only one article a year on corporal punishment appeared in scientific literature between and President John F. When Straus was teaching a course on the family in , the year the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Kennedy were killed, he learned during a class discussion that almost all of his students had been spanked. Surprised, he checked with students in other classes and found the same results.
