The most memorable punishment I ever got as a kid was to have to kneel on the floor with arms spread for making my little sister cry. Most other times, what we got for misbehavior was a strike of walis tingting or of our mother’s fluffy house slippers on our buttocks. In school, it wasn’t much different: slap of a stick for cheating on quizzes, chalk to the face for talking during class, a 100-count “sit on the air” for being rowdy.
Later, I would learn that all these are considered corporal punishment and that they are highly debated on (and that “sit on the air” is actually called the “standing murga”—who knew?).
I never even thought much about these practices other than that they were how we were disciplined. But it’s hard not to reconsider them now that all these studies are correlating corporal punishment with violence, low self-esteem, and damaged relationships; now that child advocates are insisting that corporal punishment should be banned completely; and now that my friends, who once bragged about how much mung bean they had to kneel on, have themselves become parents who discipline their children with the “timeout” instead of the tsinelas.
It makes one wonder if we, the ones who were raised under the rule of the tsinelas, could have had it better.
As far as I can tell, we haven’t grown up to become violent criminals; we are mostly law-abiding, socially-tolerable citizens (some even passing as opinion writers). I don’t think I would have paid as much attention in fifth-grade geometry if my teacher wasn’t a known terror and a notorious ear-pincher. That class stands out in my memory as the quietest, most efficient class in the entire elementary school.
On the other hand, I can’t deny that some of my classmates skipped class specifically for fear of the teacher’s disciplinary ways. I also can’t say with full certainty that those whose ears were pinched in front of the whole class weren’t in some way traumatized by the physical pain or the humiliation. At least that’s what the studies would suggest.
Where does discipline end and abuse start?
Amid all the debate and noise about corporal punishment, that question is yet to be definitively answered. Were we abused because we were spanked for taking coins from our mother’s pockets?
Our parents and grandparents back home wouldn’t say so. They still do not buy the rhetoric about banning corporal punishment, because for them, the line between discipline and abuse has always been clear. For them, their hitting was not to hurt us or to take out their frustrations on us or to emphasize their authority over us; for them, their hitting was a way to instill lessons in us. They wouldn’t have laid a hand on us if we did not do anything that, for them, had to be corrected. They wouldn’t have hit us if they believed it would do any real harm.
Besides, it is a common notion among our traditional parents that a lack of physical punishment shelters children from the roughness of life, making them fragile and oversensitive—whiners, crybabies and brats, as they are described. And so one of the lasting lessons that tsinelas kids learn is how to take a slap on the wrist with minimal crying and move on, more resilient and hopefully a tad wiser.
But advocates today consider corporal punishment to be abuse. Why? our parents might ask. If their kids turned out fine—and really, if they themselves turned out fine after being physically punished by their own parents—how could one say that the punishment was abusive?
Here is the real knot: The science behind all those studies and research, pointing to the detrimental effects of corporal punishment, has not permeated centuries’ worth of culture and real-world evidence pointing to the contrary.
How could one say, for instance, that spanking children makes them violent and antisocial, when those very children are now our upstanding doctors and nurses and carers? How significantly could spanking have lowered the self-esteem of those children who are now brilliant lawyers and civic leaders? And if physical discipline, as the traditional method, has not impeded generations from producing successful artists, entrepreneurs, lovers, and heroes, why should that change now?
This is what our parents see. They don’t see the statistics, the correlations, the scientific evidence. Instead, they see us, the products of their hands-on parenting (literally), and in their eyes, we are okay. We are the evidence they could believe most, and we are okay.
But if science is right again in this debate—if the scars of corporal punishment do run deep and tsinelas kids have simply been struggling to cope all this time—it has some more convincing to do.
Steeped in culture and experience, traditional parents aren’t likely to sift through the noise to look for research-based arguments. What should impersonal statistics mean to them when their own personal evidence shows otherwise?
What would serve us all, parents and grown kids alike, is for the logic to fill our consciousness and strike a chord. More education, more consultations with families on the whys and the hows, more personal rationales for positive parenting alternatives—we need these so that the statistics can make sense, so that science can be translated into practice.
Until parents personally understand the case against corporal punishment, the debate drones on. In the meantime, somebody hide Nanay’s Spartans.
* * *
hyacinthjt@gmail.com