Wherein I attempt to reconnect with my experience of home as a child…

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Mr. Grimes was my fourth grade math teacher. I think that I had him for other subjects, but mathematics was the one I recall.

He was teaching the solution form for subtraction. In particular, he was demonstrating how you would borrow from the column to the left in order to perform a simple subtraction (cross off the number to the left, decrement it, and put a “1″ by the number in the column you’re working in).

What I noticed, however, was his use of the number “9″ as the minuend (yeah, I had to look that one up). Since it was in the “ones” column, I noticed that you would never, ever need to borrow from the column to the left with a “9″ on top.

So, I raised my hand and pointed this out. I can’t remember exactly the exchange that took place, but I do remember that I ended up feeling humiliated in the exchange. I think I caught him off guard, because I do remember him trying to not appear embarrassed. However, instead of saying, “Oops, let’s choose a better example,” he chose to make me the bad guy for pointing out his poor choice of an example.

Oh, Mr. Grimes… do you still go out of your way to humiliate children in an effort to save face?

I’ve found that there are few areas of discussion more controversial than parenting, and that, within that area, there are few topics that generate more heat than spanking children (circumcision is another “topper” on that list).

I sort of went into the lion’s den earlier today on the subject of spanking, so I’m sort of retreating back to my blog to give some air to the subject as well as to expand on my thoughts.

There have been numerous psychologists weighing in on both sides of the “spanking” issue, some saying that it’s essential for discipline, others recoiling at the horror of it. I only know a bit about the psychology, but I know enough to say that the vast majority of people will bend over backwards, sideways, and into pretzel knots in order to justify how their parents treated them.

The question of spanking is pretty simple for me: in its most simple and direct form, it involves the parent hitting the child with the open hand on the buttocks. The key word is “hitting.” No matter what anybody says, you cannot get around the fact that the adult is causing their hand to move towards the child in such a way so as to startle or cause pain.

The fact that spanking necessarily involves hitting is inarguable. Obviously, if we can’t even agree on a simple definition (and it’s amazing how many people try to contort the argument at this stage), then we can’t go any further.

The question for me, then, is: is hitting a child ever appropriate?

My history may or may not be of relevance, but it may be of interest: I was hit as a child, and far more than simple spanking took place. Not only were implements other than the hand used, but I can remember seeing… feeling their rage as they did no less than beat me.

So, you might say that this is a bit of a sore subject for me.

In any case, my personal feelings aside, I have to wonder, what drives an adult to hit a child? Adults will almost always tell a child that has hit another child that hitting is wrong. That same adult, however, may turn around and hit that child for any number of reasons.

Not only is this incredibly hypocritical, but consider what else is going on in this moment: the adult is many times the size and has many times the strength of the child. Children–small ones, especially–are entirely unable to resist and must eventually endure the hitting. If we have been hit as children, we may lose that sense of perspective. It is quite instructive to imagine yourself as you are now, being approached by somebody four or five times your height and having many times more your strength, and that person immobilizing you and hitting you for whatever reason they may have.

As an adult, we can clearly see that such a person is a horrible monster who is taking gross advantage of their size and power over another human being in order to inflict physical punishment upon them. As adults, we have the ability to reason in this way. However, when a child is thus accosted by his parents, he has the innate ability to reason this out, but the conclusion is too terrifying to behold. His parents? Bad people? Evil people? Horrible people? Monsters? No, that cannot be the case… it must be the child, therefore, that is bad, evil, horrible, and monstrous. Otherwise, why would the child suffer to endure such punishment from his parents, the very people who are supposed to nurture and protect him?

The reasons given for hitting children are manifold; one person even put forward that the intent was to humiliate the child. Humiliation! Parents say that they love their children, and then they turn around and begin hitting the child with the intent to humiliate them? Such people should never have children!

Children come into this world totally defenseless and dependent upon their parents. They do not choose to be born. They do not choose to be kept by their parents. It is the responsibility of the parents to raise the child, to nurture the child, to ensure that the child grow up to be a healthy, functioning adult.

You don’t get healthy, functioning adults when children are humiliated, when children are frightened, when children are hit by their parents.

So why would an adult hit a child? The child has no way of fighting back–he is oftentimes entirely under the adult’s power. There is no greater power disparity than that between adults and children–none. Thus, it is a most egregious abuse of power for an adult to hit a child, for the adult holds all of the power and the child holds none. The adult has the ability to refrain from hitting the child, to seek another avenue for their aggression, but they choose to hit the child.

This is the central problem: the adult who is a parent has said “yes” to having that child born, has said “yes” to taking care of the child, has said “yes” to raising that child to be a healthy adult… and then turns around and uses that power–that responsibility–to inflict lasting psychological trauma onto the child.

If you listen to the justifications put forward by people for the reasons they were hit as children, you’ll get stuff like, “I was spanked, but I deserved it,” “My mother spanked me, but I learned my lesson,” “My parents did more than spanking, but the times they spanked me, it was appropriate.” Those justifications are the justifications of the parents that the children believe for themselves. They believe that they deserved it, they believe they had a lesson to learn (what lesson could that possibly be, incidentally–don’t cross your parents?), they believe that, even though worse physical abuse took place, somehow less severe abuse was appropriate.

All of these beliefs, they do not speak to the child’s experience of being hit. They short-circuit any memories they might have in order to stop the conversation. The fact that people say this while becoming increasingly upset is telling, though it doesn’t prove anything by itself. It does indicate that the conversation is cutting very closely. It is as if they are shouting at a doctor that points out that a limb that they broke long ago did not heal correctly and, thus, their limb is deformed, causing them to contort themselves and possibly causing pain. Not only do they tell the doctor that there is no problem, that their arm is normal, but they may even go so far as to imply that the doctor, with straight and undeformed limbs, is crippled and deformed himself!

Now, I’m no doctor… I’m more like the guy who’s walking along the street, watching all of these people hobble along, and decides to say something.

The reaction isn’t exactly unexpected, of course, though I will admit that the ferocity I faced earlier today did hurt. But they were mere slings; I will continue along unabated. In any case, the way to fix the problem is to break the limb again–to re-experience the pain and fear and anger at their parents for mistreating them so egregiously! I don’t necessarily blame people for not wanting to go through that, but I would only ask that if they do not want to do it for themselves, that they stop telling me that I am crippled and that they do not go forward and cripple their own children.

Not likely, not unless they actually go through the process of uncrippling themselves first.

Finally, I get a lot of people throwing stuff at me like, “Oh, so you want to try to reason with a child?? Good luck!!” I suspect that these people never had an adult try to reason with them when they were kids. I would further suspect that people do not try to reason with them now… there was certainly no reasoning going on in the “discussion” I had earlier today. I mean… nobody even bothered to address the blatant hypocrisy behind: “adults hitting adults is wrong, children hitting children is wrong, but adults hitting children is OK?”

[Edit] – Here are some external references so it doesn’t look like I’m totally talking out of my ass:
www.alice-miller.com
Traumatized Children: How Childhood Trauma Influences Brain Development

Sometimes the mind works in funny ways!

This morning, after dropping my girlfriend off at work, I was driving home, musing over this and that. I happened to start musing on my parents. I was thinking about this particular journal and how perhaps I haven’t heard from one parent or the other because they happen to be reading (or they have read) this… which is about as likely as any other eventuality, I suppose.

I didn’t have much to think about regarding that other than that if somebody had read something that I said that they felt hurt by, they never said a word of it to me. I would hate to think that others are afraid to talk to me about something but, in all honesty, I’m that way a lot of the time, too. It’s something I really need to work on.

In any case, as I continued driving, a song just started playing in my mind. It was portions of “All At Once” sung by the lovely Whitney Houston. As far as I can make out, I haven’t heard that song for years, but the portions of the lyrics that were running through my head were something like this:

All at once...
*singing*
...you'd come back to me.
And that's all that matters now...
All at once...
*singing*
And it hurts me more than you know
So much more than it shows
All at once.

The thing that struck me with this song is that the character in the song is essentially wishing for a love she doesn’t have. Perhaps she never really even had that love to begin with, which is the first thing that came to my mind. In either case, she’s pining when she ought to be mourning in order to get on with her life.

I think the parallels to the parent-child relationship are astounding. In this song, the child is pining for love she never received. Sure, she remembers the good times and how good she used to feel, but she’s probably trying to forget the bad times and how horrible she used to feel.

Especially poignant to me are the last lines, which make the tears begin to well up:

And it hurts me more than you know
So much more than it shows
All at once.

It does hurt more than they know, or at least more than they’re willing to admit if they ever did notice. And it doesn’t “show” because I do try to hide my pain, because that’s what my family almost always does–they try to hide pain, ignore it, laugh it off, say to not be so sensitive, what have you. They dance around the elephant in the room, which is almost always, “YOU TREATED ME LIKE SHIT AND I’M SUPPOSED TO LOVE YOU?” When it comes to me, there’s no curiosity about my feelings, my thoughts, my desires. It’s incredibly tempting to just start reciprocating and not care about them, but I’m not sure that’s entirely possible. We’ll just have to see.

I’ve been hearing the term “de-normalizing” with regards to childhood events lately, but it never really clicked what exactly it meant. This occurred to me (though it is probably a synthesis of what I’ve heard thus far): “De-normalizing” is the process of realizing “the way things were” is not “the way things are.”

Pithy, isn’t it? What I mean by that is that the horrible things that happened to us when we were children obviously did happen–it’s “the way things were.” However, simply because they happened is not reason to believe that it’s “the way things are.”

So, if your father hit you, yelled at you, lied to you, criticized you, neglected you, and had no respect for you, that doesn’t mean that you should make excuses for his behavior. An individual who treats a child like that is not a good person. Any such individual has refused to face the pain in their own lives and has, instead, inflicted it upon his child. In so doing, he damages his child and hampers his child’s ability to break the chain.

By way of analogy, our bodies are generally healthy. When we get sick, that’s a deviation from “the way things are.” There are chronic ailments, of course, but we are aware of these primarily because we can compare them to “the way things are.”

We don’t really have any way to compare our childhoods to healthy ones, so it’s kind of like being a plague victim in a society where nearly everybody else is afflicted with the plague. Some people have it far worse, for sure, but nearly everybody is tainted in one way or another. Since nearly everybody you meet is sick with this plague, coming across somebody who has managed to beat the plague is startling, even frightening. “You mean you don’t have open sores all over your body? What is wrong with you???” Sure, the few who aren’t sick with the plague have scars, but they’re able to do so much more than those who are sick with the plague, their potential seems almost limitless.

The biggest difference between the plague and how we raise our children is that we determine whether or not our children will grow up infected or not.

I confess that I do not know how this will play out… if and when I become a father, will I be able to refrain from the negatives I listed above (all of which happened to me, by the way) and provide a loving home for my child, treating them as I would have wanted to be treated, not as I was treated? Will I be able to act automatically not from the basis of pain, but from the basis of strength and personal power? I certainly hope so; more than that, I fully intend to do so, and when I make mistakes (especially then) be open and honest about it, because it is a secret to nobody.

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