I have a lot of opinions (clearly) and I’m obviously pretty comfortable with sharing them. Well, most of them. I leave some topics alone because I’m a “live and let live” kind of person and, if it isn’t hurting anyone, it’s not really my business. Others I leave alone (at least publicly) because they’re extremely nuanced and touchy and it’s easier to get my point across in direct communication than in a post written for wider consumption.

Corporal punishment is one of the latter. As a rule, I do not debate corporal punishment with anyone. Mostly, because, if someone is engaging in it at this point, they’re most likely aware of the multiple reasons why it’s a problem and they’re choosing to do it anyway. Even if, despite all of the available information about its dangers, they somehow don’t know, people get very touchy when they think you’re criticising how they’re raising their kid, so pointing it out wouldn’t help matters.

I tend to think that my daughter is the best evidence I could present as to the fact that it’s not actually necessary to threaten or hit a child to raise them with discipline. She’s mature, kind, diligent, well-behaved and respectful. Her teachers, along with all the other adults in her life, tend to rave about how remarkable she is in that respect. She gets excellent grades and she loves to read at least as much as she loves video games. She’s a good egg.

She’s never been hit or threatened with a lash in her life. Ever.

Yes, she had a (brief) tantrum phase. Yes, she sometimes forgets to do what she’s supposed to. Yes, she occasionally picks up a tone or gets her heart set on something unreasonable. No, we don’t always see eye-to-eye.

But.

The vast majority of the time, she’s just doing her thing without too much input from me. That’s because she knows what she needs to do and, more importantly, she knows why she needs to do it. We don’t fight about homework or studying or bedtime or brushing her teeth or cleaning up after herself because she knows what happens if those things don’t happen. Because we’ve discussed it endlessly and we’ll discuss it all again the next time she starts to think she is capable of staying up until 10pm on a school night.

This has been our dynamic since she was old enough to begin to understand how the world around her works. It’s why, after months of trying to potty-train her with spotty results, I only had to point out that she couldn’t wear pull-ups to preschool for her to finish the job herself.

This tends to perplex people. I’ve been accused of all kinds of things in her short life. Some folks think she is the way she is because she’s afraid of me. Some are sure I have beaten her into submission. Some think I just flat-out lie about her (until they meet her themselves). They’re so committed to believing that an adult needs to bully a child into compliance that they can’t conceive of the real secret:

I simply treat her like a human being. I always have.

Not an adult, mind you. Just a little human being learning about herself, the world and her place in it.

I set my expectations for her based on what is reasonable for a human who hasn’t been on this earth very long and I make those expectations clear to her. I allow her to question them (in fact, I welcome it) so she understands why she should meet them. And I make room for the necessary changes in those expectations as she grows and changes. I’m also open to adjusting them, within reason, based on her own feedback.

That’s it.

It’s not easy. It requires a lot—A LOT—of talking and even more patience. It is relatively simple, though.

However, treating children like human beings is not generally on the menu in our culture. Here in Sweet T&T, children are generally viewed as objects expected to obey unquestioningly. When they don’t, they can expect to be threatened with all sorts of creative violence and if they still don’t fall in line, they can generally expect that the adult who levied the threats will follow through. When the level of violence becomes less effective, they rachet it up to the next level until the child becomes big enough to make this impractical, at which point the threats tend to shift to homelessness instead of violence.

Mind you, not every child is being raised this way. I know I’m not the only parent who can’t see the sense in teaching a child how to behave by attacking them physically. But any time the conversation turns to corporal punishment, the “spare the rod, spoil the child” crew (who have completely misinterpreted the quote) tend to get very loud and those of us who disagree tend to tap out and leave them to it.

So why am I bothering to say anything now?

Aside from the damage it can do to children on an individual level, the more I look around, the more I think that corporal punishment (and its roots in this nation’s brutal origins) is directly connected to the levels of violence we’re seeing around us daily.

Our Prime Minister once referred to Trinidad and Tobago as “a violent society” and he wasn’t wrong about that. No matter who’s sitting at the head of our National Security Ministry or our Police Service, our murder rate continues to climb. The only things that have ever been able to get in the way of its steady ascent were a national State of Emergency and a global pandemic. In May, a woman was murdered at the hands of a male relative nearly every single weekday of one particular week. April had its own set of domestic murders, which included children allegedly being beaten to death by their parents. When in-person school reopened in April, videos of brutal fights between schoolchildren flooded social media. All of that is happening against the usual backdrop of “gang-related” violence, which is practically background noise to us now, with occasional incidents blatant enough to rock the nation.

So yeah, we’re violent. And our knee-jerk reaction to dealing with that violence is to… engage in more violence. We want the death penalty back, despite the fact it doesn’t deter crime and we want the police to play judge, jury and executioner with “pests” even as we know that they can’t and shouldn’t be trusted with that power.

I suspect many of us are just scared and don’t know what to do about the spiralling violence, so we’re grasping at straws. However, given that the proverbial definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results, perhaps it’s time to try something different. Perhaps it’s time to stop and ask why we’re such a violent society.

Maybe it’s time to see if we can connect the dots between the violence we’re inflicting on our children and the likelihood that those children will grow up to be violent or fall victim to violence. If we’re feeling really ambitious, we can lean back a little and see how a single line connects our “cultural” practice of beating our children to colonialism and the slaver’s whip. When we choose to guide our children with violence, precisely what do we think they’re learning? What is the result we expect to get?

The answer to the problem cannot be cuffing our children into submission and murdering anyone who manages to survive long enough to vent the abuse on others. To anyone who disagrees, I have one simple question: How has it been working out for us so far?

Surely we can see that the only thing we’re getting from brutality is more brutality..