Discipline is not abuse
It is good that President Duterte has vetoed a bill that seeks to penalize parents who spank their children. For one thing, the state should not intrude into the privacy of the home. For another, and perhaps more importantly, there is a whale of a difference between instilling discipline and abusing children.
Abusing children is reprehensible. As such the state has the duty and responsibility to go after those who do. In fact, there are already a good number of laws that protect children from such savagery. But abusing children is one thing. Disciplining them is another.
There is a need to put into context, as well as get a clearer understanding, of what laying a physical hand on children means. If it is a habitual thing, especially if for unjustified reasons, or worse, when driven by psychological, drunken, or drug-induced impulses, then that is abuse and must be dealt harshly.
But discipline is not habitual. It happens when it happens. And when it happens, especially to responsible, law-abiding and God-fearing parents, there is a terrible feeling of guilt and remorse that descends on them and rips apart the very core of their being that no government-sanctioned penalty can ever hope to surpass.
Parents whose only intentions in disciplining their children are good are never happy to lay a physical hand on their children. These parents are not savages. They are not ogres. They suffer afterward far more emotional pain than they can ever deal their children.
Parents who discipline their children do so because they love them. They would break their backs to feed, clothe, shelter, and educate them. They would even give their lives for their children. What gall, therefore, for anyone, in and out of government, to label those who only want to make black and white clearer to their children as savage child abusers who must be punished.
Abusing children will result in great psychological damage to them. There is no argument about that. But instilling discipline with occasional spanking does not. In fact, many of the generations that went through a home life that did not spare the rod will attest that a little spanking --because at one time or another we all deserve one as children-- can actually build character.
Let us not try to belittle too much the greatness of God's creation. God did not make children that wilt and disintegrate at the slightest pain. He made them all equipped with the coping and adaptive means to meet the harsh challenges of life. Let us not try to be wiser and more caring than the greatest Creator and Arbiter of all time.
- Latest
