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Tired of unruly kids in schools, Temple, Texas has brought back a discipline method banned by most school districts long ago: it’s bringing back the paddle.
But even by Texas standards, Temple is unusual. The city, a compact railroad hub of 60,000 people, banned the practice and then revived it at the demand of parents who longed for the orderly schools of yesteryear. Without paddling, "there were no consequences for kids," said Steve Wright, who runs a construction business and is Temple’s school board president.
Since paddling was brought back to the city’s 14 schools by a unanimous board vote in May, behavior at Temple’s single high school has changed dramatically, Wright said, even though only one student in the school system has been paddled.
"The discipline problem is much better than it’s been in years," Wright said, something he attributed to the new punishment and to other discipline programs schools are trying. Residents of the city’s comfortable homes, most of which sport neighborly, worn chairs out front, praise the change.
Michael Bimbaum of The Washington Post has the story: Link (Photo: Tom Fox/Dallas Morning News)
Previously on Neatorama: Spanking Children Makes Them More Aggressive
"Spare the rod, spoil the child" as the Bible tells us, but does spanking really work as a discipline method? A new study suggests that kids who were spanked were more likely to become aggressive:
The research, involving almost 2,500 moms, accounted for all sort of factors that might affect kids’ behavior, including how aggressive they were to start with.
Researchers asked moms how often they spanked their 3-year-olds and also a bunch of questions about the kids’ behavior. Two years later, the researchers checked back to see how the children were.
Even after factoring in all sorts of parenting risks, including drug use and neglect, the researchers found that kids who were spanked more frequently had a much greater chance of acting out aggressively two years later.
To be fair, there may be other ways to explain their conclusions – and you might not need the clamps, harnesses and whips to replicate that kind of closeness (simply cooking a meal together might do the trick as well). Still, there is a stigma associated with S&M that critics are calling into question.
SPANKING is stressful at first, but it could bring consenting couples closer together. That’s the implication of two studies of hormonal changes associated with sadomasochistic (S&M) activities including spanking, bondage and flogging.
