(I am a man who’s been parent at home with young and middling children of both genders and has also worked extensively with children who witness violence and men who are violent to their partners; I don’t hit my children or my partner)
From what I see little boys get hit a lot. When I was a child all my male peers were hit by their parents. Most of my 9 year old son’s friends are still being hit by their parents. To my knowledge nobody’s gone out and done one of those yucky ‘count the smacks according to gender’ type pieces of research in New Zealand but keep your ear to the ground in any kind of parent / child environment and you’ll start to hear ‘justifying smacking’ talk about how little boys are tougher, rougher and meaner than little girls. Apparently boys are more physical, have poor language skills, lack emotional intelligence and are aggressive as a natural correlate to their masculinity and hence need a more aggressive parenting style.
As a man with an articulate, perceptive and gentle son who doesn’t hit others but is frequently hit by his peers I’ve come to question these popular truths about boyish masculinity. Along with this I’ve come to question and challenge attitudes to little boys that seem to see them as management problems first and people second. I used to get comments at kindy that it was strange to hear a man call his son darling. I also often felt sad at kindy watching other parents manage their sons superbly by the use of commanding language and tone that lacked nothing except conversational tenderness.
For me there’s a curdled chicken and egg / cause and effect question here that’s very important for those of us who care about children of all genders to consider. Do we hit boys to stop them being mean and hard to manage? Or; does being hit act as a stern life lesson in the masculine arts of unmanageable meanness?
I once heard a powerful story about smacking and what it teaches from a young guy in a stopping violence group. His violence toward his ex-partner meant that he wasn’t able to see his children anymore and he missed them terribly. We got talking about parenting and he described how he loved both his kids (4 & 5) and was always tender with his daughter. He told me earnestly though that he was tough on his son (read hit) because it was part of his job as a father to teach him it was a tough world and he needed to be hard to handle it.
This mans violence were lessons about what kind of person you need to be to get by in the world. (His dad had taught him) He reminded me that violence is purposeful not random. It’s designed to teach. Violence is not really to do with directly controlling people its much more to do with teaching people to control themselves in ways that suit the interests, beliefs and values of the perpetrator of violence. Violence teaches, who to be, how to be and how to relate. Spanking little boys isn’t separate from this. If domestic violence is tertiary level teaching for women, then slapping, spanking, smacking, taps on bottoms etc is early childhood education taken out of exactly the same kind of ugly curriculum of control and domination.
Why do boys get hit?
Because they’re harder to control and naturally aggressive?
Because what kind of men would they be if they weren’t toughened up a bit?
