Punishing problems

Martin and Sam Seccombe believe smacking is okay for 5-year-old Elijah (left) and 4-year-old Georgiana, but six-month-old Talitha is too young and 7-year-old Raphael is talked to instead. Picture / Kenny Rodger

Louise Huggins is part of a minority of New Zealand parents. She doesn't smack. The Blockhouse Bay single mother has not smacked any of her four young children since her eldest, 8-year-old Jonathon, was 2. "It made sense that, if I'm going to be smacking them, they are going to repeat my behaviour back to me," she says.

"I need to teach them that they can't hit me, and they can't hit other children. The only way I can do that is to be a role model for their behaviour."

She is highly unusual. One survey found 89 per cent of children born in Christchurch in 1977 were physically punished at least once by their parents.

Other polls over the past 20 years have consistently found that around 80 per cent of parents still want the right to smack.

Yet a majority of MPs voted last year to introduce a bill from Green MP Sue Bradford to repeal section 59 of the Crimes Act, which allows parents to use "reasonable" force to discipline their children.

Although Bradford has foreshadowed changes, her bill would make parents subject to the general law, which defines assault as "intentionally applying ... force to the person of another".

And that is exactly what advocates of her bill, such as former Children's Commissioner Ian Hassall, want. He told MPs in a submission that physical assaults on children were "endemic" in New Zealand, and the country had to make clear that it was "simply wrong to strike another person".

Advocates like Hassall see the bill, which is due back in Parliament on October 31, as a symbolic statement against all use of force. It would break the whole pattern of life throughout the animal kingdom, including all of human history until recently.

So far only 15 countries, all but one of them in Europe, have banned parents from striking their children. But perhaps this is the next step in our species' progress from the jungle to civilisation.

The Huggins family certainly suggests that it is possible. The family has had its share of stress, with a marriage breakup early last year. In the past year the children have not seen their dad at all.

At one point during the split, Jonathon, then 7, refused to go to school. "I literally couldn't get him in the car. He was kicking and screaming and really upset," his mum says.

Yet she coped without physical punishment: "He stayed at home that morning but he did work round the house - he cleaned up his room, he cleaned the house, he cleaned the car.

"By lunchtime he was ready to go to school. Then we decided that after that, that was not going to happen again."

She feels that her parenting skills have grown with time, with first Jonathon, then Robin, 6, and twin girls Lucy and Samantha, 2.

"I find with the girls that my words are clear enough and direct enough that they understand and they stop [misbehaving]," she says.

If any of the children keep behaving badly and ignore a warning, they go into "time out" in a hall near the front door. Often that is not enough for Robin, and he is sent to his room. "He usually comes out after a minute and says sorry."

Another trick is charts that get new smiley faces every day the children make their beds or brush their teeth or get up at the right time in the morning. If a child gets no more than one bad face in the week, he or she gets a reward on Fridays.

Louise says her rules are "fairly strict" and she is "old-school" when it comes to children treating adults with respect. But when the children do something wrong, "that is just an opportunity for them to learn a lesson" rather than an excuse to be beaten.

"I will say to them later, 'That was not a very nice thing to do, that was not very polite. Next time, don't say something like that'."

When the Herald visited, the older children and some friends had just been to the shop to buy ice-blocks. One of the boys was feeding spoonfuls of his tub icecream to his little sister.

When someone spilled food and Louise asked Jonathon to get a visiting adult to clean it up, Jonathon did it himself. When the adults lost sight of two of the younger children outside, Jonathon found them in a car.

"He loves those girls. He does so much for them. He's a lovely big brother," Louise says.

Research backs up Louise's instinct that children who are not smacked will be better people. A 2002 review of 88 studies since 1938, mostly American, found corporal punishment correlated to aggressive and antisocial behaviour, poor parent-child relationships, and mental illness.

Barnados parent-educators Elizabeth Cameron and Sue Taylor, who run courses for Auckland parents of children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), say children respond better to positive reinforcement of good behaviours than to punishment for what they do wrong.

"For children with ADHD, nine out of 10 interactions they have with people are negative. What effect will that have on the child's self-esteem?" asks Taylor. "To make up for every negative you have to try and have at least five positives."

They suggest that parents set aside 20 minutes a day to play with each child, praising children every time they jump high on the trampoline or throw the ball in the hoop.

They advocate clear, simple directions, charts like Huggins' smiley faces, and cards setting out routines, such as getting up and getting ready for school.

But others believe there is still a place for corporal punishment. Some researchers say the correlation between corporal punishment and aggression may work the other way - it's not that smacking causes aggression, but that aggressive kids are more likely to be smacked.

They also pick carefully through the studies to exclude those which define corporal punishment to include what is clearly abuse. If the studies are restricted to non-injurious smacking with an open hand, the link with aggression disappears. Some evidence even finds that children who are smacked behave better than others.

The Christchurch study of children born in 1977, found children who were only "seldom" physically punished did just as well as those who were never smacked in subsequent mental health, drug and alcohol addiction and criminal offending.

Ian Grant, author of Growing Great Boys, says many boys prefer a quick smack to tedious non-physical punishments such as writing lines. "There are times when a child does something silly and a little pat on the behind does them no harm at all," he says.

Manurewa's Seccombe family agrees. Martin, a doctor at the not-for-profit Rosehill Christian Medical Centre, and his wife Samantha, an occupational therapist who now home-schools their four children, use a range of disciplinary techniques, including praise for doing good and time out for doing bad - and smacking when appropriate.

"There are some things that we consider are serious - hurting other people and other children, lying or being personally insolent or clearly very rude," says Samantha.

Adds Martin: "If we don't deal with that in young children, then not only may they grow up to be violent because they have not learned to behave themselves, but they may become victims of violence because they may deal with people in quite inappropriate ways."

They believe smacking is appropriate for young children such as their son Elijah, 5, and daughter Georgiana, 4. Six-month-old baby Talitha is clearly too young, and 7-year-old Raphael is already at an age where talking is often more effective.

They smack only once, with an open hand on the clothed bottom, and only after clear warnings have been ignored. On average, they each smack perhaps once or twice a week.

"Smacking is not a last resort. It needs to be administered with the parent in the right frame of mind, not when you are frustrated and angry," says Martin.

In his clinic, he sees children who run amok and literally "rip the place up" because they have been poorly disciplined.

In contrast, the Seccombes have learned from families with older children who "clearly enjoy each other's company". They see the same qualities coming through in their own children.

Elijah, for example, has been concerned about another family who had a baby with a disability at about the same time Talitha was born.

"I shouldn't think a day goes past when he doesn't ask us or talk to us about this child," says Martin. "He's a very tender little soul."

Maxim Institute policy manager Nicki Taylor says Bradford's bill would turn good parents like the Seccombes into criminals. Even Huggins would break the law if she physically dragged a young child into time out.

"This bill will apply to parents putting a child in time out and applying force," Taylor says.

Huggins, nominated by Barnardos as a non-smacking parent, still wouldn't like to be told she could never, ever smack her child. "Even though I don't smack, there may come a time when I feel it is the only thing that is going to work," she says.

If there is a lesson in Huggins' and the Seccombes' experiences, it may be that there is no one way of good parenting. Different techniques may work with different children and at different times, so it is no wonder Huggins is reluctant to close off options.

Yet, as Hassall argues, if we keep the law that allows light smacks, there will be those who think much harsher hitting is okay too. He says making all use of force taboo "is the surest way of reducing interpersonal violence of all kinds".

A long-established legal doctrine of "necessity" would still allow practical exceptions - when parents need to use force to stop a child running on to a road, for example, or in self-defence.

"In some respects the issue of the consequences of repeal of section 59 and the equivalent in Sweden is irrelevant," Hassall said. "One does this because it is the right thing to do, regardless of whether it actually reduces the rate of child abuse - because one doesn't want to be assaulted on the street. It's a matter of principle."