“Today, black parents are still about twice as likely as white and Latino families to use corporal punishment on their children”

Many people attribute the tough love of their parents to their success and the beatings continue, when a kid misbehaves it’s time to unleash the fury and show them that they won’t be doing that again!

But I was a kid who remembers the pain of those beatings, sometimes mistakenly given, sometimes given for very little, the court of parents doesn’t hear out the defence, it just carries out the sentencing.

For many the punishment goes behind a little slap across the back of the legs, it can get realer than real and although we all agree there is a boundary to the amount of pain a child should be inflicted too, many do believe that a hard beating is in order to keep a child in line.

However, I personally do not! I advocate for non-violent parenting BUT I may well be in the minority.

An article in the New York Times caught my attention and the first quote in this article came from there, I wanted to share a few other excerpts.

But if whupping children kept black people out of prison or safe from abusive cops, there would be no mass incarceration or police brutality. If beatings were a prerequisite for success, black people would be ruling the world.

After spending years in therapy, studying the history of corporal punishment and writing a doctoral dissertation on the well-orchestrated matrix of Jim Crow oppression that trapped black children at every developmental milestone, I now have a better understanding of why my adoptive mother punished me the way she did.

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It is a European idea that children are “born in sin” and should have the devil beaten out of them with a “rod of correction.” That brutality cascaded across other cultures through slavery, colonialism and religious indoctrination.

It should not be surprising, then, that black American slaves, who endured the trauma of their own beatings, inherited their oppressors’ violence and, for centuries, passed down these parenting beliefs. This is one of the saddest untold stories in American history — the way in which the victims of racist oppression and violence have hurt the bodies of their own children in an effort to protect them from a hostile society.

Today, despite 50 years’ worth of research on the harms of “tough love” parenting, many black parents still see a slap across the behind or a firm pop on the hand as within bounds. But it doesn’t stop there: Statistics gathered by the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System consistently show that black children are mistreated and killed by their family members at significantly higher rates than children of any other group.

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The truth is that white supremacy has done a masterful job of getting black people to continue its trauma work and call it “love.” That is how, in some 19 states, mostly in the South, you can get so many black parents to sign opt-in forms giving public schoolteachers permission to paddle their kids with wooden boards, even though black students are five times more likely to be hit than white students for committing the same offenses.

This article said a lot to me and the writer Stacey Patton has brought up a lot of points for discussion.

For many beating of kids in the black community is trivial, just search YouTube and there are many real and joke videos about it, such as the one below about white vs black parents!

I understand the need to keep kids in check, the need to let them know they can’t run rings but is the tough love really the answer?

Is it true that the kids that were beaten do better? Do you personally think you being whooped made you the person you are today?

NOW, I am also not telling anyone what to do and I have to note something that will make you want to whoop my ass! I am not a parent, so I can never really know what it’s like to try and control my own kid. That’s why I want to hear from you!

Read the full article on NYT here and please, SOUND OFF below…. This topic may get heated!