This Monday, May 2nd, James Dobson's organization, Focus on the Family, will be airing two advertisements for their Focus on Your Child membership program. Their rationale, from President Jim Daly, is "The show was all about Focus on the Family principles. It was boundaries and using the time-out chair, respect for authority and good parenting skills."
But is this really what Focus on Your Child advocates?
Whether you go for the reality TV thing or not, Supernanny is not a bad show. It focuses on techniques for tired and stressed out parents dealing with difficult children that actually work to make children more respectful, self-confident, and wanting to be obedient. By employing techniques that take a little more patience, understanding, and respect for the child as an individual, parents are able to get their children to WANT to do well without ever laying a violent hand on them.
Dobson's crew, on the other hand, advocates spanking children as young as 18 months old for disobedience. Based on the "inerrancy" of Biblical scriptures, mostly from a dozen or so passages from the book of Proverbs, calling on parents to use the "rod" to discipline children, the Evangelical Christians go so far as to say that not spanking your children is tantamount to child abuse because it results in children incapable of respecting authority and in increased youth violence. cough-bullshit-cough
A quote from the Focus on Your Child website:
The spanking may be too gentle. If it doesn't hurt, the child won't be motivated to avoid the consequence the next time. "Be sure the child gets the message," Dr. Dobson says, "while being careful not to go too far."
They argue that "going to far" is when spanking is done out of anger rather than loving discipline. As a child who was raised with spanking, I can tell you that it is rarely if ever done when a parent isn't angry. I can count the number of times two hands that I was spanked in my lifetime, and it never went so far as a beating (thank God). My parents were/are very loving and still feel horrible for ever laying a hand on me, but I was a pretty hyperactive and willful child, requiring more patience and creativity than they had at the time. My mom recently apologized to me for spanking me as a child, so I know how horrible it made her feel. So why advocate spanking over methods that make everyone involved feel good about themselves as parents and as children?
And as an aside, these are the same folks who advocate letting OTHERS spank your children for you in your absence. They cite the decline in corporal punishment in schools as a major reason for increased violence and school shootings. When I was in junior high school, in Texas, my campus banned all non-sports related running. During recess, you had to go to the gym or track if you wanted to run. I was walking in front of my teacher and took two quick steps to catch up with a friend, and the teacher, who always had it in for me anyway, sent me to the office for "licks". The principle told me I could take the licks or call my parents. Out of embarrassment, I took the licks. He called in the girls' coach who was a former women's Olympic softball champion, to administer my punishment. She had me put my hands on a table and stare at a painting of bluebonnets, then told me to tell her when the flowers ran together from the tears in my eyes. Three swats with one of those old wooden paddles with holes in it for extra swoosh. Later that year one of my classmates was caught in the boys' bathroom with a loaded handgun. Really effective, eh?
[Updated]: If anyone would like to follow suit and contact Supernanny and, or ABC directly, email addresses are as follows:
supernannyusa@yahoo.com
netaudr@abc.com
If anyone finds other info, please post below.