California Proposes Law Against Spanking Young Children

Assemblywoman Sally Lieber of Mountain View has said that she is going to introduce legislation in the California Assembly to make it a crime to spank children under three years of age (hat-tip to Rantburg, Frank Pastore's radio program and PJI). Ms. Lieber believes that she is prohibiting child abuse and her comments to the press show that she does not know the difference between spanking as corporal punishment and “whipping” or “hitting.”

I can certainly understand that the legislature has a legitimate interest in preventing actual child abuse. As for actual child abuse, there are already laws outlawing it. It is not necessary to ban all spanking of young children. And there is a certain relative stage of development below which children should not be subjected to actual corporal punishment. Infants should not be spanked. But spanking is a legitimate and important part of child rearing. The state has no business interfering with legitimate corporal punishment that does not physically damage the child and is rightly considered to be morally efficacious by a large number of parents.

A gentle swat on the bottom of a child is often necessary to create a conditioned response to dangerous actions such as running toward the street, stepping in front of cars, failing to stop and come when called, or putting hands near dangerously hot or cold objects. A child between one and three cannot easily be reasoned with regarding a dangerous activity, but will understand and remember that a mild swat was obtained when he or she started to engage in that activity and was scolded by the parent. This sort of conditioning is a vital part of good parenting. In addition, there are times when children, especially between the ages of one and three, engage in deliberate defiance of parental authority. During these rare occasions, a gentle spanking is far more efficacious than other measures. In fact, many measures which are attractive to pacifist child rearers are mentally damaging by contrast to mild corporal punishment.

I suspect that a major reason for this sort of legislation is a common and erroneous understanding of moral principles. On the one hand, there are people who are not willing to accept moral restraint. These people demand the freedom to engage in activities that are destructive to themselves and to other people in society. Criminals, terrorists, or totalitarian dictators and their apologists clearly fall within this category. Some radical libertarians enter into the fringes of this category. At the opposite extreme are people who do not understand how morality works in a fallen world. In a world in which human beings engage in evil acts by choice, violence is occasionally not only necessary but good. It can be an instrumentality of resistance against evil. But the pacifists who reject all use of force seek to ban all violence of any type by any person for any reason. They do not understand that violence must be used to restrain evil. Instead they think that by banning all violence, they will succeed in preventing evil. What actually happens is that actively evil people continue to engage in violence and the pacifists hinder those that would oppose evil with good. But people who do not understand genuine morality from a Christian perspective have trouble understanding and sorting out why some violence is legitimate and other violence is wrong. If you don’t believe in good and evil, you can’t come up with a justification why it is sometimes acceptable to kill people and other times not. But through the Bible and natural law, God has revealed to us some appropriate level of force is sometimes necessary to discipline children, to restrain evildoers, and to punish those who engage in evil acts. Unwillingness to sort these things out is not moral but rather slovenly and destructive.

I believe that this anti-spanking legislation is an arch typical example of the kind of moral confusion I am discussing. But I also think that it is a violation of parental rights. Parents have a right to reasonably discipline their children. This is a fundamental right with which the state has no business interfering. It should be regarded as unconstitutional under the Ninth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution as applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. It clearly interferes with the traditional privileges of parenting.