We spanked Caroline less than a half a dozen times before she was three, but I never felt right about it. David and I were convicted that we should not continue to spank her. I’m going to share six reasons why we changed our mind and stopped spanking. (Update in 2022 – We absolutely did the right thing with our child. I thank God that He opened our eyes and made us change course.)

Disclaimer: I realize good people who love their children disagree about this topic. I realize that specifically some Christians reading this are going to disagree with me. That’s fine. I’m sharing our family’s experience and our convictions. I’m not a parenting expert. I am a mom in process. I would not presume to tell you what to do with your child. I am simply offering my perspective with the hope that sharing our thought process regarding this topic might help other parents struggling with this decision.

So here are the six reasons.

The Bible does not require spanking

I could write an entire post or series of posts on just this one reason. I’m not going to do that today. I will link to some reading at the end that people might find helpful if they want to read theological explanations and expositions on why some Bible-believing Christians believe spanking is not required by the Bible.

What it boils down to for us is the fact that while Caroline is our child, she is also our (presumed) sister in Christ. I can read a great deal in the Bible (especially the New Testament) that talks about how we are to treat one another that is very clear. I find very little in the Bible that seems to teach the merits of spanking, let alone that it is required. The preponderance of evidence goes clearly away from spanking when one looks at the entirety of Scriptures.

Our child never hit us until we hit her

Caroline never hit us until we spanked her. This, to me, was profound. When we hit her, she hit us. And then, of course, we turned around and sternly admonished her it was wrong to hit and she could not hit us. The message we were communicating to Caroline was we can hit you but you can’t hit us. That makes absolutely no sense in any way.

I know there are people who will say that spanking isn’t hitting, but I respectfully disagree. We now have a very strong no hitting rule in our family. We also have a very strong rule that no means no. When someone says no, we all respect that immediately. (The same thing when someone says stop.) In these ways we believe we are preparing her for adulthood and hopefully instilling in her a very strong sense of personal power, especially as she will relate to men.

Spanking provoked anger in our child

There may be some children who can be spanked and not be provoked to anger. But I am firmly convinced that spanking does provoke some (or many) children to anger. The Bible tells us we are not to provoke our children.

The challenging thing is if a parent starts spanking early as is recommended by experts, she probably doesn’t yet have a firm grip on her child’s temperament. She can’t clearly tell if her child is one who will roll with the spanking to no (apparent) harm or if she has a child who is deeply wounded by the spanking. If a child falls into the group that is provoked to anger by spanking, how much damage is done before the parents figure it out?

(And, no, I do not believe that if a child becomes angry then we need to beat the anger out of her until she is broken and completely submits her will to us. No. Just no.)

Spanking provoked fear and distrust in our child

This is the reason that saddens me the most and the one that makes me wish I could go back and do it over. Spanking Caroline clearly provoked fear and distrust toward us, especially me. She may have been small, but it took a very long time for her to move past this after we stopped spanking. It sickens me physically to think about it. We only spanked her a few times and that was all it took.

Again, spanking some children is going to be disastrous based on their temperament. I truly believe that. Now that she is eight and I have a better understanding of who she is and how she is wired, I can clearly see why spanking would be so devastating to her and completely ineffective.

We considered how adults receive consequences

When adults make mistakes, they are not physically punished. They might lose their job, suffer financial loss or lose a friend, but they are not subjected to spanking or hitting in order to make them learn from their mistake. They suffer the natural consequences of their actions. Furthermore, hitting an adult is battery or assault. Hitting an animal is cruelty. Both can result in jail time. Yet somehow hitting a child is different.

As adults we learn from the consequences of our actions. We believe it should be the same with a child. Is this tricky when the child is younger and doesn’t have fully developed reasoning skills? Yes. Is it more work? Yes. Does it require more of the parent? Yes. Is it sometimes harder to measure the results in the short term? Yes. Does it work? Yes.

Spanking isn’t necessary

The bottom line is that spanking isn’t necessary. There are many other ways to disciple and discipline our child that do not require hitting her or inflicting physical pain. Yes, they often take much more effort and work. But I am so thankful we realized that spanking is not necessary for our child in our home.

• If you would like to read more about not spanking from a biblical and scholarly approach, I suggest starting with the free ebook you can download right now: Thy Rod and Thy Staff They Comfort Me – Christians and the Spanking Controversy by Samuel Martin.
• There are many articles online as well including this secular one I just saw: Spanking the gray matter out of our kids.
• We also had a lengthy discussion in the comments of this post that I wrote about spanking: Highly-sensitive children, shy children, spanking and Voddie Bauchum.

This post is part of my larger collection of essays on raising gifted and 2e children as a Christian parent.