General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Risks of Harm from Spanking Confirmed by Analysis of Five Decades of Research [View all]merrily
(45,251 posts)taken if kids were guppies, or if the Bible said, "Use the rod and spoil your child?"*
As a kid, I was, um, disciplined, so I assumed that was a given of parenting. Thank heaven, before I was married, I heard different from my then fiance's uncle and father.
*A shepherd carried a rod is to show his sheep which direction he was going in and used the crook at the end of the rod to pull them back into the herd if they wandered. If shepherd's used the rod to beat sheep, wouldn't that have hurt the sheep--his livelihood--or forced them to run away? The staff was to defend himself and his sheep from robbers. Hence, we have the Bible saying "Thy rod and they staff, they comfort me." If either or those things were used to beat sheep, that Biblical sentence would make no sense, even to a sheep.