Spanking Good, Twerking Bad, Beating With Video Cable Just Ugly
Spanking and corporal punishment in general have come under fire over the years. The recent twerking incident has many defending the father, but can’t we all agree that beating your kids with a video cable is just going overboard?
As previously reported by The Inquisitr, a father’s two daughters made a twerking video, the father responded by physically punishing them, and in response he has been charged with child endangerment and corporal punishment (how is the second one a crime in the first place?).
Twerking has apparently become popular fairly recently. Twerking involves wobbling or jiggling the hips and buttocks in a vigorous fashion and people have begun posting videos of themselves doing the twerk. Miley Cyrus explained twerking as “something that comes naturally. It’s a lot of booty action.”
The last time everyone started arguing over spanking and corporal punishment is when a dollar general clerk was arrested for spanking an unruly customer’s child. In that case there really was not a clear choice. On one side, you could say that it “takes a village” and that society should be responsible for the good upbringing of all children. But it could also be fairly argued that it was not the place of the clerk to spank the child. Instead, the clerk should have remanded the child to the parent for punishment.
In the case of the recent twerking incident, I get the feeling that the people in support of corporal punishment are not watching the video. Basically, after the father found his daughter’s twerking he yanked the video cable free from the PC monitor and started punishing. The good news is that he did not use the ends of the VGA cable, which could have some major damage. Instead, he folded the cable in half to use it as a whip.
As we all know, it’s said that “he who spares the rod hates his own child.” Now some could argue the video cable is not too different from the switch that parents have been using for millennia. My own parents used a wooden paddle with holes drilled into it. But there’s no comparison since a VGA cable is essentially a metal whip covered in a thin layer of insulating rubber.
So my criticism comes not in the fact that this father used corporal punishment, but in the manner the spanking took place. Parenting experts advise that when a parent spanks a child they should not be angry. First, the parent should calmly talk to the child about what they did wrong. The child should know that it grieves the parent to be punishing them. After the spanking is over the parent should reaffirm how much they love the child.
The twerking father did none of these things. Yes, the daughters needed to be taught a lesson. Yes, he was filled with righteous anger and was not thinking straight. Yes, it’s pretty messed up to see the government arrest a parent for doing his job, even if done poorly. But can you honestly say that beating a child with a video cable was the right way to go about spanking?
