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In the post-Benjamin Spock era, fewer parents than ever seem to be favoring spanking as a method of discipline. One website cites a drop from 59% of American parents in 1962 to 19% in 1993 who use spanking as their main disciplinary method. Though the same source reports that in 1994, "70% of America adults agreed that it is 'sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a good, hard spanking,'" it notes that in also in that year, the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse found that "only 49% of American adults had hit or spanked their child in the previous year."

Spanking is nonetheless still, if not the primary disciplinary method of choice, at least a backup option for many American parents—especially among the conservative Christians. But if trends across the ocean make their way to the U.S., parents who spank their children may soon face legal consequences. In a Europe in which many countries have already made spanking (termed "smacking" in England) against the law, the U.K. is now engaged in a heated controversy over whether to follow suit.

The recent lobbying (scroll to "U.K. spanking ban:") in England to institute an anti-spanking law raises two important issues.

One is that in fact the innocent do need protection. Arguing that child abuse is linked to corporal punishment, British Labour MP David Hinchliffe and others say out-dated nineteenth-century laws allowing parents to exercise "reasonable chastisement," including a degree of force, afford kids insufficient protection from outright abuse. At least one British child a week dies at the hands of parents or caregivers, says Hinchliffe, and child protection agencies seeking to reverse this violent trend are hampered rather than helped by the law.

Not everyone, however, sees the abuse problem as stemming from over-strict disciplinary methods. Leeds-based Caring For Life is a Christian ministry working on behalf of homeless young people, many of whom have experienced sexual or physical abuse. Senior Pastoral Administrator E. M. Smith is less ready to see spanking as the problem or legislation as the panacea. Smith says the desire to end all corporal punishment of children—because children are made in the image of God—"has to be balanced against the biblical view of humankind as not only created by God but also responsible to him. The removal of corporal punishment as one means of disciplining children may lead to an inability to control and thus protect children, or to children failing to develop the self-discipline necessary for their own safety" (E. M. Smith, "Children," New Dictionary of Christian Ethics & Pastoral Theology [InterVarsity Press, 1995]).

This raises the second question: Does a biblical view of childhood and parental responsibility require that corporal punishment be part of our child-rearing style as Christians? And related to this, what level of sanction or punishment is necessary to train children up to Christian maturity? The current abuse and extremes in child discipline certainly represent what Christian parenting should not be about. As Smith puts it, "As the most vulnerable bearers of God's image," children "must be seen not as the property of their parents or guardians, but as individual unique human beings who are themselves responsible to God and who are entrusted to the care of their parents for a time. As such, children must be accorded the dignity which is richly and equally deserved by every human being, created in God's likeness." Such was certainly the attitude of Jesus (Mk. 10:13-16; Mt. 21:15-16).

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June (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48