Spanking children causes long-term permanent damage

This is what child abuse looks like.

My friend, Rake Morgan, has written for many years about the shameful practice in this and other countries of using physical discipline to “control” our children. To Rake’s thinking, all physical discipline is a form of abuse. I agree with him.

Now Rake has noted a new study published recently in the Journal of Child Development that shows that spanking young children causes long-term, permanent behavioral and psychological damage. Here’s Rake’s post:

For years I have been belaboring a point that some adults refuse to accept: any kind of physical discipline of children is a form of abuse. Worse, what starts out as “harmless” spanking escalates over time into serious emotional and physical injury to the child.

Now a new study of toddlers shows that even spanking kids at that early age can have long-lasting consequences.  According to CNN, the study from the Journal of Child Development shows –

Children who were spanked as 1-year-olds tended to behave more aggressively at age 2, and did not perform as well as other children on a test measuring thinking skills at age 3. . . . Spanking, moreover, reinforces negative memories in the child’s mind. Parents should aim instead to build “prominent, happy memories” of childhood for their kids.

The study also concludes that parents who spank are more likely to be younger, less educated, single, and/or depressed and stressed.

Susan Newman, social psychologist and author of “Little Things Long Remembered: Making Your Children Feel Special Every Day,” said parents should discourage bad behaviors by taking away privileges such as dessert, or setting an earlier bedtime. Newman believes that children are too young to understand when parenting behavior is wrong, even at the level of abuse.

Physical violence, Newman says, gets passed down in families because the only parenting skills people know are the behaviors that they saw at home. So, if you want your children to abuse their children, keep hitting them. Your grandchildren will thank you for it!

Here’s another post on the topic by Rake. It gives one of the best explanations I’ve read about the connection between physical discipline at child abuse: Are Your Kids Out of Control? Try Tying Them to a Tree!

Should Iowa, Wyoming determine health care policy for 300 million Americans?

Mike Enzi, Republican Senator from Wyoming, Pop 510,000 (2005)

Charles Grassley, Republican Senator from Iowa, Pop 3 million (2008)

It sounds as if the Obama Administration is finally coming to its senses and is ready to dump the anti-reform tag-team of Grassley and Enzi in favor of health care policies that actually help 300 million Americans, especially the 47+ million uninsured.

After so many years of listening to all the reasons why my home state of New Hampshire and that corn-field known as Iowa should not have the first primary and caucuses for president, it is astonishing that two Republican senators from states with a total population of about 3.5 million should be allowed to have such a major impact on health care policy for the rest of the country.

How David Axelrod and Company could have missed the major lesson of the Clinton reform effort is equally astonishing. It was not that Hillary held “secret meetings,” or that the reform plan was too complicated, or that it was “socialistic,” or that she did not include enough politicians in her deliberations (she did). It failed because the Republicans wanted it to fail. And they wanted it to fail because they do not believe that the poor deserve health care. In other words, like most Republicans, they were greedy and did not want to pay for someone else’s health insurance.

They still don’t. Nothing has changed folks. The GOP is still the party of the rich, the entitled, the haves. And they will do everything they can to keep their stash as safe as possible, the rest of the country be damned.

Grassley and Enzi?

Let ‘em go home and shuck corn and shovel cow shit. That’s where they belong.

Exclusive photo! Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, and Tipper Gore.

When then-First Lady Hillary Clinton held a health care forum at Bunker Hill Community College in 1993, she was joined by Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy and Tipper Gore, wife of Vice President Al Gore.

As the editor of the Hillary Clinton Quarterly, I assigned a photographer to cover the event.  Here is one exclusive photo from that event. I had almost forgotten that we had these pictures. They show us a rare moment in time – and they all certainly seem to be enjoying themselves.

Enjoy!

– Frank

Tipper Gore, Hillary Clinton, and Ted Kennedy at Health Care Forum, Boston 1993.