Spanking

Do not withhold correction from a child,
For if you beat him with a rod, he will not die.
You shall beat him with a rod,
And deliver his soul from hell.

Proverbs 23:13-14

The problem, of course, is that children do die.

One Christian minister includes a disclaimer with his sermon on discipline: "Of course, you must not be too severe. It’s possible to beat a child to death." But even if their bodies survive, their spirits are wounded and something beautiful and trusting inside their hearts has died.

In recent weeks and months, numerous bloggers have discussed the abusive child training methods advocated by Michael Pearl. Below are just three examples of adult children reflecting on the way spanking was utilized in their homes.

Samantha, from her post "Raised to be a Monster":

What is so frightening about these teachings is that they blur the line so badly. They’re insidious, because to parents who have absolutely no desire to harm their children, these teachings, on the surface, seem alright. There seems to be cautious admonishments for parents to have discernment– all the while telling them that if you do not drive rebellion out of their heart you are damning their very soul.... Parents are sucked into viewing their child as the enemy– you are in a constant, never-ending battle for the fate of your child’s soul, and you cannot give up.  

Rochelle, in "When Love Means Hitting":

“I spank you because I love you” is the same thing as “I hit you because I love you.”

Saying this gives children confusing messages about what’s ok and what’s not ok. In fact, more than just abusing the child by hitting them, spanking tells the child that they are worthless and sets them up to more vulnerable to being in abusive situations their whole life, because they don’t know boundaries of abuse.

Quick Silver Queen, writing at The Eighth and Final Square: 

You know, the verse in Proverbs that says foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child but the rod of correction will drive it from him. And the verse that the heart is wicked and who can know it. So the first problem is, they don’t come to parenting with the view that these are people. They come to parenting with the view that these are wicked little sinners who need a radical change, whose thoughts and feelings and opinions and likes and dislikes don’t matter because it is all selfish willfulness.

My parents were taught about spanking as their Christian duty very early in their parenting when someone gave them the pamphlet "Children, Fun or Frenzy?", written by Al and Pat Fabrizio in the late 1960's and still a standard of parenting guidance in many Christian circles.

My obedience to God to train my child requires that every time I ask him to do something, either "come here," "don't touch," "hush," "put that down" - or whatever it is, I must see that he obeys. When I have said it once in a normal tone, if he does not obey immediately, I must take up the switch and spank him enough to hurt so he will not want it repeated. Love demands this.

It wasn't long before we all knew the biblical arguments for spanking. "I'm doing this because I love you", my dad would say earnestly as he pulled out his belt or a wooden spoon. After all, "He who spares the rod hates his son..." (Prov. 13:24) and "whom the Lord loves He chastens, and scourges every son whom He receives."

"For what son is there whom a father does not chasten? But if you are without chastening, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate and not sons." (Hebrews 12:7-8)

When Dad spanked us, the session usually ended with prayer. Spanking was a common subject of conversation when we got together with other homeschooling families. Out of earshot of our parents, we would compare experiences and swap tricks for getting more leniency. At our house, Mom spanked harder, and longer. She thought not crying was a sign of resistance and pride. But screaming at the top of our lungs didn't seem to lessen the spanking's severity.

Some years later the whole family sat through a series of evening lectures at the local Mennonite church listening to Ray Wenger describe how a godly family should look. His own family was a shining example, singing in harmony together in matching dresses. Afterward, my parents got copies of the lectures on cassette. I listened to them when I was bored while doing the family ironing.

In his message on discipline, Wenger gives very specific guidance for hitting children who "resist the parent's will". As soon as an infant can understand words like "no" or "stop", he says, they are old enough to spank. If they are uncooperative at diapering time, for example, "They're very exposed--give them a good crack where it counts."

Wenger believes the rod should be a parent's first resort. (He recommends a 3/8" wood dowel from the hardware store as a "symbol of authority".) “It needs to be severe enough to be worthwhile. The child needs to learn that the way of the transgressor is hard," urges Wenger.

According to Wenger, "Time out" takes too long and requires a busy parent to monitor the child the whole time. Spanking, on the other hand, is quick and simple. And because the technique is in the wrist, a wife "can spank just as effectively" as her husband: "Your wife can learn to do that with great gusto," Wenger assures the Christian dads in his audience. Quoting the Old Testament, Wenger repeats his formula: the rod, combined with reproof, gives wisdom. Withholding the rod deprives the child of this wisdom.

Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child;
but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him. (Prov. 22:15)

Another voice for spanking was the late Denny Kenaston, founder of the Charity Fellowships. Another ATI family gave my parents a collection of Kenaston's sermons, in which he advocates "The Holy Art of Spanking our Children", and "The Rod of Love".

Kenaston's version of spanking is both creepy and utterly theatrical. "Bring the Bible along with the rod", he says, and then recommends the parent start crying with the child before the spanking begins. The parent is to calmly assure the child that the parent is not angry with them, but that the spanking is directed by God: "Open up your heart to this spanking and say, 'I'm going to get everything I can out of this spanking!' Then, "maybe let them have a little prayer... after that, it's time for the spanking." Kenaston does not permit any wiggling or kicking. The child is to put his/her head into a pillow or into the couch cushions and take the spanking quietly. Not one swat or two, but a "thorough spanking": "Spank them till you sense in your heart that the work is done....the work is in the heart."

Kenaston's last step involves the parent kneeling beside the child, weeping, putting an arm around the child, and praying. "Maybe sing a song with them... Tell them, 'You are my dear son, you please me in so many ways, you bring so much joy to my life'... Isn't that how God spanks us?" Kenaston's widow Jackie is now a part of Michael and Debi Pearl's speaking "ministry".

Debi Pearl & Jackie Kenaston

Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis and his brother Steve released a parenting study in 2006. The workbook stated, "Our children are sinners", and went on to quote an 1888 book by John Charles Ryle:

Parents, determine to make your children obey you--though it may cost you much trouble--and cost them many tears! 

They also quoted the more popular Tedd Tripp, author of Shepherding a Child's Heart:

The rod underscores the importance of obeying God.

And John MacArthur's Successful Christian Parenting:

Short, stinging strokes to the backside... should be painful enough to make the consequences of disobedience sufficiently distasteful and unforgettable.

Larry Tomczak, who helped co-found Sovereign Grace Ministries, is another well-known advocate of spanking. In 1982, he published a book disturbingly titled: God, the Rod, and Your Child's Bod.

Sounding like an echo of Bill Gothard, Tomczak explains, "The primary goal in loving correction is to produce godly character..." Tomczak stands by his parenting advice today, despite being named a defendant in a lawsuit alleging decades of abuse, and continues to sell his book The Little Handbook of Loving Correction.


"Were your parents abusive?" my counselor asked.

I didn't know what to say.

For decades, I accepted the answers given. They didn't want to do this; spanking us was what God required. My parents were showing me how to obey by being obedient to him. Like Abraham, they were also showing God how much they loved and trusted him.

Yes, it involved hitting us and causing us physical and emotional pain. Yes, it left bruises that they didn't want others to see. Yes, we closed the windows before spankings so neighbors wouldn't be concerned. Yes, spankings went on and on until a child's will broken. Yes, many meals were interrupted and the rest of us suffered from indigestion. Yes, we stopped alongside the road on trips and the rest of us had to get out of the van so the offending child could be spanked in private. Yes, we kept a wooden spoon by the changing table, and one in the diaper bag, and one in the car. Did I grow up in a abusive home?

In my mid-teens, I gave my first spanking. I had been left in charge, and my toddler brother defied my authority. Having studied Gothard's material on taming lions in a Wisdom Booklet, I quite calmly followed the instructions I'd been taught. I'd seen it done so many times, it felt natural. My sweet and precocious little brother was surprised, and never caused a bit of trouble for me again. The hierarchy had been established.

When I had children, my husband and I discussed spanking. We set limits for ourselves, to keep from repeating anything so drastic as my childhood experiences. But as time went on and we recovered from old wounds, any kind of spanking became increasingly distasteful. We doubted its morality as well as its efficacy, and sought out other approaches to parenting that better suited both our goals and our values.

I regret spanking my children. I regret being harsh or violent with them when there is more than enough harshness and violence in the world. I regret thinking they were born broken sinners I needed to fix.

I am glad my kids still love to cuddle with me now, glad they are learning that inflicting pain is never a valid way to control another person, glad they protest bullying and injustice--no matter who's doing it. I'm glad they are patient as we navigate this adventure of parenthood that is more an education for us than it is for them.

Because of getting to know my children and glimpsing life through their eyes, I am a more compassionate human being.




Related posts:

The Mask of Modesty

Not on Your Side, Debi

13:24

Violence Against Children

Children, Fun or Frenzy

Reflections on my Childhood, Part II

Voiceless Women: Susanna Wesley's Daughters (Part 1)

Were it not for the fame of her evangelist sons, she would be unknown today. But history has made her a paragon, second only to the Proverbs 31 woman as the ideal to which American Christian mothers aspire.
I cannot remember a Mother's Day sermon that failed to mention Susanna Wesley. And yet, the men who hail the mother of John and Charles Wesley from their pulpits never mention Susanna's daughters. If those seven women were to hear their dysfunctional home held up as a model for others, I wonder what would they say?

The Susanna Wesley of legend was a minister's daughter, the youngest of her father's twenty-five children, a pastor's wife, the mother of 19 children-- including John (founder of the Methodists) and Charles (poet and author of nearly 9,000 hymns), a pastor's wife, and homeschooling mom extraordinaire. Almost the Protestant equivalent of Mary, Susanna's piety is for tossing her apron over her head to find privacy for prayer. What would she say if she knew she had inspired an Internet prayer apron giveaway three hundred years later?

Prayer did not shield the real Susanna from life's heartaches. Her marriage was difficult, her daughter crippled, her neighbors cruel. Twice her home burned to the ground. She pushed nineteen babies out of her body and buried nine (including all three sets of twins). She always struggled to afford necessities for her family--let alone furniture, was once abandoned by her husband, lost him to debtor's prison another time, and watched in agony as most of her daughters were abused by their husbands or died in childbirth. Her husband antagonized many of his parishioners and spent out his health laboring over his poetry, or his magnum opus, Dissertations on the Book of Job, a Bible commentary no one wanted to read. 

Samuel and Susanna's children:

1. Samuel, b. 1690
2. Emilia, b. 1692
3. Annesley, b. 1694 (died)
4. Jedediah, b. 1694 (died)
5. Susanna, b. 1695
6. Mary, b. 1696
7. Mehetabel, b. 1697
8. Infant 1, b. 1698 (stillborn)
9. Infant 2, b. 1698 (stillborn)
10. John, b. 1699 (died)
11. Benjamin, b. 1700 (died)
12. Infant 3, b. 1701 (died)
13. Infant 4, b. 1701 (died)
14. Anne, b. 1702
15. John Benjamin, b. 1703
16. Infant 5 (male), b. 1705 (accidentally smothered) 
17. Martha, b. 1706
18. Charles, b. 1707
19. Kezzia, b. 1709

Discipline in the Wesley Household

With her hands full and her husband not much help, Susanna ran a disciplined household of necessity. She later reflected on her principles of discipline and child training, which sound remarkably similar to those taught in the American church today:

"When they turned a year old (and some before) they were taught to fear the rod, and to cry softly. By this means they escaped abundance of correction they might otherwise have had. That most odious noise of the crying of children, was rarely heard in the house. The family usually lived in as much quietness, as if there had not been a child among them.

"As soon as they were grown pretty strong, they were confined to three meals a day. At dinner their little table, and chairs were placed by ours, where they could be viewed. They were allowed to eat and drink as much as they wanted, but not to ask for any thing. If they wanted something, they used to whisper to the maid which attended them, who came and spoke to me. As soon as they could handle a knife and fork, they were seated at our table. They were never allowed to choose their food, but always made to eat such things as were provided for the family.

"Mornings they had always spoon food and sometimes at nights. But whatever they had, they were never permitted to eat at those meals, of more than one thing, and of that very sparingly. Drinking or eating between meals was never allowed, unless in case of sickness, which seldom happened. Nor were they allowed to go into the kitchen to ask anything of the servants when they were eating. If it was known they did, they were certainly punished with the rod and the servants severely reprimanded.

"They were so constantly used to eat and drink what was given them, that when any of them was ill, there was no difficulty in making them take the most unpleasant medicine, for they dared not refuse it. However some of them would presently throw it up. This I mention to show that a person may be taught to take anything, though it is ever so unpleasant in his stomach.  

"In order to shape the minds of children, the first thing to be done is to conquer their will and bring them to an obedient spirit. To inform the understanding is a work of time, and must with children, proceed by slow degrees, as they are able to bear it. But the subjecting the will, is a thing which must be done at once and the sooner the better. For by neglecting timely correction they will be overcome with stubbornness, and obstinacy. This is hardly ever conquered later and never without using such severity as would be as painful to me as to the child. In the esteem of the world they pass for kind and indulgent, whom I call cruel parents, who permit their children to get habits, which they know must be later broken. Indeed, some are so stupidly fond, as in fun to teach their children to do things, which a while later they have severely beaten them for doing. When a child is corrected it must be conquered. This will not be hard to do if he is not grown headstrong by too much indulgence.

"When the will of a child is totally subdued, and it is brought to revere and stand in awe of the parents, then a great many childish follies, and faults may be past over. Some should be overlooked and taken no notice of, and others mildly reproved.

"I insist upon conquering the will of children early because this is the only strong and rational foundation of a religious education. Without this both precept and example will be ineffectual. But when this is thoroughly done, then a child is capable of being governed by the reason and piety of its parents until his own understanding comes to maturity and the principles of religion have taken root in the mind.

"They were quickly made to understand, they might have nothing they cried for, and instructed to speak handsomely for what they wanted. They were not allowed to ask, even the lowest servant for anything, without saying "Please give me such a thing;" and the servant was chided, if she ever let them omit that word. Taking God’s name in vain, cursing and swearing, profaneness, obscenity, rude, ill-bred names, were never heard among them. Nor were they ever permitted to call each other by their proper names without the addition of brother or sister.

"For some years we went on very well. Never were children in better disposed to piety, or in more subjection to their parents until that scattering of them after the fire into several families. In those families, they were left at full liberty to converse with the servants, which before they had always been restrained from, and to run abroad and play with any children, good or bad."

"When the house was rebuilt [after the fire in 1709] and the children all brought home, we entered upon a strict reform. It was then begun the custom of singing psalms at beginning and leaving school, morning and evening. Then also that of a general retirement at five o’clock was entered upon, when the oldest took the youngest that could speak, and the second the next, to whom they read the psalms for the day, and a chapter in the New Testament. In the morning they were directed to read the psalms and a chapter in the Old Testament, after which they went to their private prayers, before they got their breakfast, or came into the family. I thank God, the custom is still preserved among us."

Son John remarked in a sermon years later, "My own mother had ten children, each of whom had spirit enough; yet not one of them was ever heard to cry aloud after it was a year old." Still, harsh discipline was but one of the traumas experienced by the young Wesley daughters.

Childhood Trauma

Susanna and Samuel could not be said to model marital harmony. Emilia once lamented her father's "unaccountable love of discord", and Susanna admitted that she and her husband "never thought alike". Samuel Jr. wished that his parents were as comfortable together and he and his wife were. The children must all have been traumatized in 1701 when their father moved out over a political disagreement with his wife that arose during family prayer. Emily was nine; her sisters four, five, and six. Their parents had buried six dead infants in the past three years.

Samuel had moved back in by July of 1702. He was visiting a sick parishioner when the parsonage caught fire, destroying two-thirds of it. One of the girls got left behind in the burning house, but a sister began calling for her and neighbors were able to rescue her. Someone even thought to save Samuel's books from his study.

In 1705, when little Anne was three and Jack was two, the older Wesley sisters welcomed a new baby brother. Susanna being too exhausted to nurse the child, the newborn was sent next door to be cared for by a neighbor. The baby never came home. He was about three weeks old when the weary woman overlaid him one night, accidentally suffocating him.

Just weeks later, Samuel was hauled off to debtor's prison. Susanna, desperate to settle the debt, sent him her rings to sell, but Samuel sent them back, preferring to trust that God would provide. "A jail is a paradise in comparison of the life I led before I came hither," he wrote.

Neighbors Samuel had antagonized with his politics had no sympathy for the rector's family. They burned the Wesley's flax fields, viciously stabbed their milk cows and called the Wesley children "little devils". The family struggled for three miserable months before Samuel's friends came up with the money to pay his debts. Susanna later confided, "Strictly speaking, I never did want bread. But then I had so much care to get it before it was eat, and to pay for it after, as has often made it very unpleasant to me; and, I think, to have bread on such terms is the next degree of wretchedness to having none at all."

Baby Charles was born premature and did not open his eyes or cry for weeks. He was still the youngest when the Rectory Fire broke out in 1709. Little Jacky (John), his sisters' pet, barely escaped; the family could see him crying, "Help me!" from an upstairs window, standing on a chair, framed by flames against the midnight. Samuel wrote that he gathered some of the children in a circle in the garden to pray for their brother's soul; thankfully, other men were more interested in saving the boy's flesh. Molly and Hetty had been tossed to safety through a broken window. They lost everything but what they were wearing. Their mother was burned as she waded through flames to escape the house. Her first impulse had been to grab what gold and silver coin they had at the time, but her husband pushed her out the door toward safety.

After the fire, the children were dispersed to friends and relatives until the rectory could be rebuilt. Samuel's brother Matthew, a surgeon in London with no children of his own, took in Sukey and Hetty. Matthew was not particularly religious, but he took an interest in improving the prospects of his nieces. Samuel could not afford furniture for the new rectory. Visiting Epworth thirteen years later, Uncle Matthew observed that the house was only half-furnished, Susanna and the girls only "half-clothed". Matthew wondered what his brother had done with his income.

Samuel's daughters struggled to have presentable clothes to get jobs. Dresses that would grant them entrance to the world of literary culture were out of the question, though those circles would have allowed them to engage with men and women of their intellectual caliber. Meanwhile, Samuel spent large sums on books or travel not strictly necessary for his ministry and dreamed of going abroad as a missionary to China or the East Indies. The sisters complained about the "scandalous want of necessaries" and blamed poverty for Susanna's many health problems.

Home Education

Susanna had been educated by her father far beyond what was typical for a female of her time. At the age of 13, Susanna had the confidence to leave her Dissenter father's church altogether and join the Church of England. She grew into a learned and independent-minded woman. She was about twenty when she married the 28-year-old Anglican minister and poet Samuel Wesley. And she did a tremendous job of educating their children at home.

Like other large families, there were inside alliances. Sukey and Hetty were very close. Emilia was fond of her mother and quite attached to her baby brother John. Hetty adored Molly. John and Patty were the most alike; the others believed Patty was Susanna's favorite. (Charles wondered that his mother, for all her wisdom, did not better conceal her favoritism.) But Susanna did try to schedule equal time for the many individuals who made up her brood, and kept in touch by correspondence when they left her nest.

Not surprisingly, the Wesley kids all developed "a strong method of expressing themselves, especially in Poetry". Literature ruled in their home and for the rest of their lives they were always writing and sending poems to one another, for every occasion: comfort, congratulation, grief, encouragement, advice, or rebuke. Their upbringing taught them to fight with their wits, and, with the exception of gentler Patty, the siblings shared a taste for sarcasm and rapier-sharp satire.

All three Wesley brothers followed in their father's footsteps and were ordained. But alas, though Susanna educated her daughters on a level equal to their brothers and far beyond what was expected of their peers, she could not equip them to survive in a culture and family controlled, by divine order, by men. As successful as she was in developing their minds and teaching them the value of language and of learning, she never could offer them the kind of autonomy she had once claimed for herself. Nor could she prepare them to demand respect, to protect and provide for themselves, or to choose healthy relationships.

In many ways, motherhood was a sorrow and a burden to Susanna. To her brother-in-law, she wrote:"

[H]appy, thrice happy are you, happy is my sister, that buried your children in infancy, secure from temptation, secure from guilt, secure from want or shame, or loss of friends! They are safe beyond the reach of pain or sense of misery; being gone hence, nothing can touch them further. Believe me, Sir, it is better to mourn ten children dead than one living, and I have buried many."

Read what happened to the seven Wesley daughters in Voiceless Women: Lives of the Wesley Sisters (Part 2)

"Children: Fun or Frenzy?"

Back in the 1970's, before my parents had attended any of Bill Gothard's seminars, they came upon this 24-page pamphlet which they credited with teaching them how to be Christian parents: Children: Fun or Frenzy? by Al and Pat Fabrizio. They took its instruction to heart and diligently attempted to put its principles, based on scripture, into practice.

My parents were not alone. Children: Fun or Frenzy? appeared in 1969 and, according to Bruce Narramore, was quickly published in four languages. Though controversial in some Christian circles, it was heralded in many more and continues to be marketed (under its new title) today, more than four decades later. Nowhere did it find a warmer welcome than with homeschool parents. Mothers and fathers across the country write of how this pamphlet influenced their parenting: "excellent", "helpful", "great", "one of the best resources", "a GEM".

Widely recommended by pastors and Christian schools, and highlighted by The Teaching Home, the flyer is available for download on the web. A Beka sells print copies as a "must for every parent"; homeschool groups list it on order forms alongside titles by Debi Pearl; televangelist James Robison offers a different edition, with his own grandparenting tips, on his website for a suggested donation of $5. Some companies include it with an order for free. For many years, a church in Oregon passed out the booklet to new parents, religious or not, whose names appeared next to birth announcements in the local paper. Another church handed it out to their newlyweds.

So what exactly did the Fabrizios have to say? Below are some excerpts from this instructional booklet:

The dictionary gives the meaning of the word ‘train’ – "to mold the character, instruct by exercise, drill, to make obedient to orders, to put or point in an exact direction, to prepare for a contest." This is what God wants us to do with our children. 

Do I believe that if I love my children and want to obey God concerning them that I must take a stick and physically spank them when they disobey? I do believe He means just that. 

My obedience to God to train my child requires that every time I ask him to do something, either "come here," "don't touch," "hush," "put that down" - or whatever it is, I must see that he obeys. When I have said it once in a normal tone, if he does not obey immediately, I must take up the switch and spank him enough to hurt so he will not want it repeated. Love demands this.

...Obedience must come at cost and pain. God demonstrates His special love to His sons whom He trains through suffering. "For whom the LORD loves he chastens, and he scourges every son whom he receives. If you endure chastening, God deals with you as with sons" (Hebrews 12:6-7). It is put even more strongly later in this portion which says that if God does not chasten us, then we are illegitimate children.

The pain that the rod inflicts on the body delivers one from the pain his character will suffer later in life because of a selfish will. "Blows that hurt cleanse away evil, as do stripes the inward depths of the heart" (Proverbs 20:30)."  

As I was busy getting breakfast one morning I asked our daughter to put on her shoes and socks. I am sure she intended to obey me, but she got busy playing and forgot. I told her to go in and lie across the footstool, because she did not obey me and I must correct her. I was busy in the kitchen and failed to go in immediately as I should have done. When I did, there she was lying on her tummy across the footstool, waiting for her correction, singing, and swinging her feet. She was waiting in complete rest. She accepted the switch as the inevitable result of disobedience. Each one of our children sweetly receives the switch; they realize we use it to train them, because we love them. And afterward, oh how free we are to show them our affection!

I may be settled comfortably in a chair nursing my baby when I tell my child, "Come here, please." If he disobeys, the motive to have nice well-behaved children is not enough now. It is so much easier to repeat what I said a little sharply. But then I have trained the child to know that I do not really mean what I say the first time.... [The Lord] then gives me grace to get up out of the chair, put the baby down, take up the switch, use it patiently, take my child on my lap and comfort him.

Our youngest boy has a strong temper.  It was revealed long before he could talk.  As a toddler when we crossed his will by saying, “No” to him, he would not directly disobey.  Instead he would throw himself down on the floor and kick and scream.  At first I would go over, pick him up and say, “No, no,” and set him on my lap to make him hush.  However, I realized that, though I relieved the situation for the time, I was not training him to love outside himself. 

The next time he was disappointed by a “No” and he threw himself down and screamed right in the middle of his tantrum I spanked him on his bottom. Then I went to a chair, set him on my lap, made him hush, and loved and comforted him.  He came to the place when his will was crossed, where he would throw himself down, begin to scream and right in the middle of it catch himself.  By the time I got to him with the switch, he was up, walking around, busying himself as through everything was fine.  Of course, he still got the switch because he had to learn to accept my will immediately.  

Do the stories above make you shudder? It would appear from these paragraphs that the Fabrizios would be right at home in the company of Bill Gothard's principle of authority, Michael Pearl's philosophy of spanking, and Larry Tomczak's "art of loving correction".

In one example Pat gives, her husband was convicted of his reluctance to discipline a tearful child, who had gone to bed without giving in to his parents' coaxing. [Coaxing to do what? We are not told.] Mr. Fabrizio went to the child's room, took him out of bed, spanked him, then put him back to bed. We are assured the son slept "more secure in Daddy's love".

Author Zenon Lotufo, Jr. expresses concern about the effect of such "training" on the child:

"He learned to 'live above his emotions'. That is, the fear of punishment surpassed every other emotion, even spontaneous and legitimate ones, that contradicted his parents' will. It is likely that under these conditions, a child not only stops expressing his feelings but also stops staying in touch with his feelings; he begins to want what authorities want, to like what he is demanded to like; his most authentic feelings cause him anxiety and are quickly repressed. There you have an example of 'reverse pinocchization', that is, how a healthy young boy is transformed into a wooden doll..." [emphasis added]   (Source: Cruel God, Kind God: How Images of God Shape Belief, Attitude and Outlook)

As a child raised in such an environment, I could not have expressed it better.

Pat Fabrizio was the primary author of the piece, but her husband Al contributed his thoughts and endorsement. Sometime before 1983, she released what was described as "a more wholesome revision" under the name Why Daddy Loves to Come Home. That title is no longer in print.

I was curious to find out what became of the Fabrizio family of Palo Alto, CA but my Internet search yielded very little.

A contributor on this forum, Lynn Heidebrecht, left the following information for a questioner in 2010:

"Al & Pat Fabrizio are no longer married. Al lives in Mountain View, California, and can be readily found online (he is a musician and owns a publishing business). He has remarried. I'm not sure whether Pat has remarried. Of their four children, I have not heard an update in some time. Last I knew, when the Fabrizios switched their faith from Christianity to Judaism, they moved to Israel and their children served in the Israeli military. One of them died of a snake bite at some point. I could not tell you whether either Al or Pat still espouse the same principles of disciplining children (these came from Pat, mostly). If I were you, I would look to the Bible yourself directly for guidance on raising children, and more to the New Testament than the Old Testament, because Jesus fulfilled the Law, and brought the Grace we all badly need. The Fabrizios method was based on the Old Testament alone, which is not the whole picture."

A musician in the San Francisco Bay Area, Al (Anselmo) Fabrizio of Heartstrings Music, has reconnected with his Italian family roots and now performs the most cheerful and romantic songs on the mandolin. He makes no mention of children. I contacted him via email to inquire if he was the co-author of the parenting pamphlet, but have not yet received a response.

I was steeped in these philosophies of child training for many years. But I am glad to say that my husband and I have broken free and are able to espouse a kinder view of parenting that allows us to teach respect, self-control, and non-violent communication by modeling those traits. Obedience is not a primary value in our home; rather, we aim to raise compassionate and thoughtful individuals who evaluate a claim before they act on it and follow only those who have proven themselves worthy of their trust.