Category: Written

A book launch party for Breaking the Paddle: Ending School Corporal Punishment was held October 30th at the Audubon Center in Columbus Ohio.  Seventy guests attended and fifty books raced off the shelf!

Every school day,  more than one thousand US children are hit on the buttocks with boards called “paddles” for breaking school rules.  A quarter of a million school children are paddled annually.  Paddling leads to physical injuries of children, psychological problems, alienation from school, and lawsuits by angry parents.  Nineteen states allow this punishment, a punishment considered inhumane, ineffective, and archaic in most of the world. Over 100 nations ban it.  The book explores and refutes arguments for keeping corporal punishment in schools.  It provides step-by-step suggestions for parents who wish to protect their children from this barbaric treatment, and provides tools for advocacy groups to get it banned in local, state and federal arenas.  The successful actions of a small group of ordinary citizens in achieving a statewide ban in Ohio in 2009 provides a thread tying the book together.  Through the book, the author seeks to accelerate the banning of school corporal punishment (paddling) in US schools through education and legal reform.

This Hurts Me More Than It Hurts You: Children Share in Words and Pictures How Spanking Hurts and What to Do Instead (Center for Effective Discipline)

The message is most effective when presented in children’s own words and art, and that’s what this book does.  Almost 50% of parents in this country still use physical violence to discipline their children, and the book shows why they should not.
ISBN 978-0-615-45467-2

For over forty years as a Children’s Advocate and reading the abundant research in corporal punishment, at last here is an extraordinary book filled with children’s writings and drawings expressing their feelings on being treated violently. We adults tend to suppress how it feels to be slapped and spanked, yet the majority of U.S. kids are so treated. More than one page of this book brought tears to my eyes.

In my research I have found Zero psychological and philosophical justification for punishing children in any way, much less in hitting them. So 45 years ago my wife and children and I together found ways to eliminate all forms of punishment in our home. In my book “Parenting Without Punishing” I show how, with our Democratic Discipline family meetings, we all shared responsibility for treating each other with civility. Instead of lectures and shaming, the children learned by parents’ modeling the desired behavior. Hence, the kids were, say, never taught manners; instead they were treated with courtesy. They matured considerably sooner than their peers. They are now in their forties, with college degrees and successful in their careers & happy families. This 18-year “research” is my argument that no extra patience is necessary, only understanding the basic goodness of a child, and respecting that. – Norm Lee