Will parents dare to discipline? (The Last Word).

Thanks to the major media, "monster mother" Madelyne Gorman Toogood is turning out to be a threat to all American children, and not merely to her own four-year-old daughter. The widely broadcasted videotape of Toogood's abuse is being parlayed into a campaign to prohibit -- or at least intimidate parents from employing -- legitimate and loving corporal discipline in the upbringing of their children. "Across America virtually everyone, including Toogood, agrees that she crossed the line," reported the Chicago Tribune on September 25th. "But just where is the line? One swat? Two? Or is any corporal punishment of children over the line?"

The article went on to retail worn-out arguments for banning spanking completely. "As soon as you start using violence to settle something with a child, you're saying violence is the way to go," the Tribune quoted pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton as saying. Brazelton is apparently convinced that children fail to distinguish between a disciplinary swat on the bottom and a pummeling to the head for no apparent reason.

The famous jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes once remarked that "even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked." Yes, even a dog can understand that all blows are not alike and that there are sometimes different reasons why discomfort is inflicted. Anti-spanking advocates are really arguing that their children lack a power of distinction possessed by dogs. One might next expect anti-spanking advocates to lecture football players against batting each other on the buttocks after a successful play so as not to be a role model for violence. I wonder if the "no spankers" will subsequently tell us that "time outs" teach children that it is okay to unlawfully imprison people, and that taking away favorite toys as punishment teaches children that stealing is acceptable.

While it is possible to accept that academic pedants and their pacifistic fellow travelers lack the mental capacity to discern the difference between loving discipline and a vindictive beating, children are not so intellectually impoverished. Most children are quite bright, and they easily make these basic distinctions.

"The result of spanking is our children's fear and resentment of us," asserts Murray Straus, the most prominent "researcher" of the anti-spanking movement. Here again the anti-spanking lobby assumes children are intellectual morons, incapable of simple distinctions. The reality is that children spanked for misbehaving will only fear their parents when they misbehave. Should this be controversial? Perhaps Straus believes that children should not be ...