Spanking, Paddling and Padded Rooms: Are School Punishments Getting Worse?
The image of a paddle-wielding elementary-school teacher may seem like an antiquated one to the vast majority of Americans. But this week, a proposed Kansas law—which would give educators (and caregivers) permission to spank students even harder than currently allowed there—is serving as a harsh reminder that corporal punishment, still legal in 19 states, is alive and well in U.S. schools.
More on Shine: Spanking Makes Aggressive, Depressed Kids?
“What’s happening is there are some children that are very defiant and they’re not minding their parents, they’re not minding school personnel,” Rep. Gail Finney, who introduced the Kansas bill, tells the Wichita Eagle Tuesday. She says the law—which would expand corporal punishment to allow spankings that could cause redness or bruising, rather than just those that leave no marks—is an attempt to restore parental rights and improve discipline. [Update: the Kansas bill died in a state House committee Wednesday afternoon shortly after this story was published.]
And while its prospect is raising alarm bells with many anti-spanking advocates there, at least one national expert on corporal punishment finds the proposal oddly encouraging. “Paradoxically, I think it’s a good sign, and I’m totally against all spanking,” Murray Straus, co-director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, tells Yahoo Shine. “It’s a sign of desperation on the part of people trying to hold back the century-long development of more humane treatment of children. Even if it passes, which is unlikely, it’s not going to change the trend.”
More on Yahoo: Physical Punishment Tied to Aggression, Hyperactivity
The decrease in school spankings has indeed been a steady, if slow one—with just less than 185,000 students physically punished in public schools in 2009-2010, down from 223,190 in 2006, according to the latest data available from the U.S. Department of Education’s office of civil rights. It could be a response to the many anti-spanking studies put out in recent years, which have blamed the practice for everything from mental illness to increased aggression in children. Straus, in his 2013 book “The Primordial Violence,” charges it with slowing cognitive development and increasing criminal behavior in kids. Corporal punishment is also formally opposed by organizations including the National Association of School Psychologists and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Still, there are still those who believe it strengthens character and counters permissiveness—especially in the South, which is a corporal-punishment stronghold (and home to nearly every state that allows it). And that, combined with the growing move against it, has created a “widening gulf” between those for and against it, Straus notes. It’s brought many related issues to the fore around the country.
In Oklahoma, for example, where corporal punishment is legal, KJRH reported in early February that some individual districts are no longer allowing it for fear of being sued by parents if bruises show up on their kids. But the topic spawned heated discussion by hundreds on the station’s Facebook page, with the majority of parents supporting spanking. “Corporal punishment is needed to properly raise a child,” wrote one, with another adding, “A good spanking is what most of the kids need!”
And in pockets around the country, the controversial practice of using padded rooms, or “scream rooms,” to discipline kids has been in the spotlight: In December, a New York mom removed her 5-year-old from a public school after charging that its padded room was “abusive.” Earlier, Arizona parents sued over a similar space, called a “cool-down room,” after it was used for their 7-year-old son. The practice has been employed in so many schools across the country, in fact, that a U.S. senator proposed a federal ban on the punishment this week.
“There are just better ways to deal with behavioral issues than just locking kids up in padded rooms,” Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, tells WTIC in an interview Tuesday. The rooms, which can be as small as four feet by four feet, he notes, are used in his state alone to seclude children in more than 30,000 instances—with 40 percent of those students having autism, and a disproportionate number of them being black or Latino. Earlier this month, a Senate Education Committee report called the rooms potentially unsafe and abusive.
“There’s very limited instances in which you have to restrain a kid,” Murphy notes, “but there is absolutely no instance in which you have to lock a kid up in a room by himself.”
Related:
Dog Alerts Parents to Abusive Babysitter
How Schools Are Humiliating Kids to Punish Their Parents
