By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
My guess is that there will be a difference of opinion among readers of this column about an article by Christine Sisto on the July 24 edition of National Review Online. Sisto’s topic was whether parents should have the right to spank their children. Notice I did not say “beat.” We are talking about a smack on the hand or the backside — and only by a parent. I’m confident that there would be little support in the country for a proposal to go back to the days when parents and teachers would routinely paddle or use a belt on children as a form of discipline.
But what about that smack on the hand or the backside? Is that “child abuse”? Some may be surprised to hear that there are courts in the United States that have decided it is. In 2011 a Texas District Court judge sentenced a mother to five years’ probation for spanking her child. Sisto quotes the judge: “You don’t spank children today. Maybe we got spanked, but that was a different quarrel. You don’t spank children. You understand?”
In 2012, Delaware became the first state to ban parents from hitting their children. The Delaware law, in Sisto’s words, “redefined child abuse as anything that causes ‘pain’.” Parents who “inflicted pain” on their children could receive a year in prison. “If the child was under three years old, the parent could serve two years.” Texas and Delaware are following in the footsteps of Sweden, which banned all physical punishment of children in 1979.
Is the Swedish model inevitable in the United States? Sisto is not sure. She points to a recent New York Appellate Court decision that found a Long Island father not guilty of “excessive corporal punishment” when he “administered an open-handed spanking” to his eight-year-old son after hearing “the child curse at an adult.” The court held this a “reasonable use of force under the circumstances presented here.”
New York is not alone. Writes Sisto, “New York joins a long list of states that have upheld parents’ rights to discipline their children with physical punishments. In California last year, a federal appellate court ruled that a mother who hit her child with a wooden spoon should not be charged with child abuse. A Florida federal panel also ruled that one spank does not equate to child abuse. In fact, until 2012, it was legal in all 50 states for parents to hit their children.”
According to Sisto, “roughly 80 percent of American parents admit to hitting their children.” Even so, she wonders if “the day may not be far off when giving a child a quick slap on the rear for misbehavior will get a parent labeled a child abuser.”
No question, times change; societal attitudes change. When that happens, it is not always a case of moral relativism. I doubt that even the strictest of modern Catholic parents would want their daughters to go to jail for indecent exposure for wearing a swimsuit more “daring” than the down-to-the-knee models of the early 20th century. There is room for common sense in these matters.
As there is in the spanking debate. If we were to apply Sweden’s standards, my parents and my favorite teachers would have been guilty of child abuse. So would I, as a parent and as a teacher. But a “beating” was not involved in these cases. I am confident that most modern Americans would feel an obligation to call the police if they saw a father whipping his son repeatedly with a belt. It would not matter that the fathers in the old movies did it all the time. Remember the line, “This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.”
The question is whether we want the courts to draw the line in this matter. But if the courts do not, who else should be given the responsibility? We might need a modern Solomon to answer that question.
On another topic: some good, or some maybe not so good news. A new study challenges the accepted wisdom that attending college leads to a loss of religious belief. Cathy Lynn Grossman, writing August 7 on the website of Religion News Service, calls our attention to the work of Philip Schwadel, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Nebraska. “Today,” according to Schwadel, “it’s the least-educated members of Generation X — people born roughly between 1965 and 1980 — who are most likely to leave religion.” He calls this a “clear historical shift.” Schwadel’s study was published in the August edition of the journal Social Forces.
(Schwadel’s study did not include the so-called millennials, Americans roughly between the ages 18 and 30, because Schwadel felt it was too soon to tell how they will “settle on a religious identity.”)
As for the rest of the population, according to Schwadel, “Americans born in the late 1920s and 1930s who graduated from college were twice as likely to drop out of religion than people who didn’t graduate from college.” The postwar baby boomers proved to be “the last holdout of the church dropouts.” For boomers, “a college degree was still associated with a higher likelihood of leaving religion.”
Then the change set in. “For the generation born in the 1960s, there’s no difference between those who did and those who did not go to college in their likelihood of religious affiliation.” What about the middle-aged adults who were born in the 1970s? “Those without a college education are the most likely to drop out. In other words, a college degree used to mean people were more likely to lose religion. Now, some people are losing religion whether they went to college or not, but it’s especially true for those who didn’t go to college.”
What accounts for this change? Schwadel has no empirical data on that question, but he speculates, “Nowadays you can find God on the quad: Campus life has also changed and now offers a lot of room and opportunity for religious connection. The social networks are wider.” Beyond that, “College is more widely accessible, no longer a bastion of the cultural elite. What’s more, cultural trends that started with the elite — including quitting organized religion — have become more widespread. Secularization has lost its elitism — moving across all social classes.”
So should we be pleased — assuming that Schwadel’s findings are accurate — that attending college is not likely to increase the odds that our children will lose their faith? Or distressed to discover that those who do not go to college are just as likely to succumb to the widespread secularizing of our culture?
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford CT 06492.
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