The Anti-Spanking Movement

The Self Esteem Movement
Detective Robert R. Surgenor

I was on duty, cruising the city in a detective car, when a call came over the police radio of a student out of control at the local high school. The fifteen-year-old freshman was having a temper-tantrum, screaming and throwing books around. When ordered to leave the classroom, the student refused. The teacher, using what is called in the public educational environment, a "supportive touch," attempted to guide the student out of the room. The student, obviously not happy with being touched in a supportive manner, attacked the teacher. Screaming, "you can't touch me," he pummeled the educator with his fists. Other school employees, upon hearing the ruckus, arrived to assist the teacher being assaulted. The student broke away and jumped out the classroom window to the ground, where he was met by police officers who had been called to the scene by the principal. He then fought with the officers before being handcuffed and driven to the station, all the while trying to kick the windows out of the police cruiser.

It was my job to compile all of the information regarding the student and the assault. This wasn't my first encounter with Paul, an out-of-control teenager who had become very familiar to the entire police department. My first stop was the soft-spoken school counselor, whose attitude towards the punk who just beat up her co-worker was not exactly what I expected. "You know," she said, "Paul has very low self-esteem!" Uh-oh, here we go with the "I feel bad about myself" syndrome. "What do you mean?" I asked. "What does that have to do with Puncher Paul beating up a teacher?" She replied, "Self esteem is everything!"

The current cultural obsession with the self-esteem of today's children has turned into a religion. Parents are being encouraged to bolster their child's positive evaluation of themselves whether or not the "I am a good person" feeling is deserved. There is no better example of this philosophy than in the book written by Dorothy Corkille Briggs, called Your Child's Self Esteem.

The author writes, "Dominating parents breed hostility, dependency, and inadequacy. Their characteristics describe children with low self-esteem. Every spanking fills a child with negative feelings that may be translated into further misbehavior. Scolding is another device for control. It ladles out rejection, shame, and humiliation. Verbal assaults blast self-esteem. Withholding privileges is another popular device for control. Authoritarianism is great training for children who will live under dictatorships, but far from adequate for children who will be expected to think independently. The most damaging aspect of authoritarianism is its effect on self-esteem." This author does not believe in any type of discipline, convinced that it will harm the child's "self esteem."

But there is as much research that indicates that there is a "dark side" to high self-esteem. In 1996, the American Psychological Association published a study in the Psychological Review. In this study, three doctors discovered something very ominous about high self-esteem. These researchers asked the same question that I asked of the school counselor who was trying to explain how Puncher Paul's violent action was a result of low self-esteem. The doctors questioned why many researchers "summarized observations that depicted aggressors as egotistical and arrogant, but then added the conventional supposition that these individuals must be suffering from low self-esteem." I really couldn't have asked the question any better myself.

This report also includes the findings of a study of juvenile delinquency that compared juvenile delinquents against a matched sample of non-delinquent boys. This study discovered "The pattern of findings offers little to support the hypothesis that low self-esteem causes delinquency. Delinquent boys were more likely than control boys to be characterized as self-assertive, socially assertive, defiant, and narcissistic, none of which seems compatible with low self esteem." The study also states "Aggressors seem to believe that they are superior, capable beings. Signs of low self-esteem, such as self-depreciation, humility, modesty, and self-effacing mannerisms, seem to be rare (underrepresented) among violent criminals and other aggressors." The study also states, "In plain terms, egotists might be more likely to assume they will win a fight, and so they would be more likely to start it." Could unjustified high self esteem be a reason why more kids are physically assaulting their parents?

During my twenty years as a police officer, I often observed the effect of an undeserved elevated self esteem. Just ask any cop what happens every night in the bars around town, and they will tell you that fights are a very familiar byproduct of someone who is intoxicated. Why does someone fight when they are drunk that would never think of doing so when they are sober? It is because intoxication elevates that person's self-esteem and self-confidence. Remember we said that a person is more likely to start a fight if they think the will win it! A person with low self-esteem who becomes intoxicated, resulting in a temporary elevation of the self-esteem, is more likely to become involved in violent activity than if they were sober with low self-esteem.

The movement to instill a sense of high self-esteem that is undeserved into our children is a dangerous direction to travel. If a child is acting in a manner that is totally unacceptable knowing that they are violating the rules, are they not being bad? According to Dorothy Corkille Briggs, we should never tell a child he is bad. My question is, why not? Children need to associate bad behavior with a bad feeling. The child who possesses an inflated self-esteem is headed for disaster. Briggs is another "expert" who feels that she knows more than God, who instructs us in Philippians 2:3, "Let each esteem others better than themselves." Remember that there was a member of God's government that had an inflated self-esteem. Lucifer, the second most powerful being in the universe found out too late that "pride cometh before the fall." This is the message that needs to be taught to our children!