I grew up in a generation where flogging was just part of the package. You did something wrong, you got flogged, life continued, and many of us from that era will tell you we turned out fine, but I have also watched people from that same era sit with wounds they can't fully explain an irrational fear of authority, a flinch response that never quite went away, an inability to separate love from pain because the two always arrived together in childhood, both experiences are real.
I can't dismiss either one.
Now the Bible Says, "Spare the rod and spoil the child" , me I was raised in a Nigerian Christian home so this verse was not background noise, it was active policy, and honestly? I still think there is something true in the heart of it, because the rod in that context was not an instrument of rage, shepherds used rods to guide sheep, to redirect them, to keep them from wandering into danger, the principle is about a parent who cares enough to correct, a child with no boundaries, no one willing to say stop, no consequence for wrong behaviour that child is not free,that child is just unsupervised.
But I will be honest here about where I think we got it twisted.
We took that principle and ran so far with it that we stopped examining what we were actually doing, because there is a version of physical discipline that is calm, specific, connected directly to a behaviour, given by a parent who is in control of themselves and there is another version that is a frustrated adult hitting a child because they had a long day and their patience ran out, we called both of them discipline, they were never the same thing.
When I look at how kids behave today and people say softness ruined them, I partially agree with the observation but not the reason, Yes, something is missing in this generation, the ability to hear no, the patience to wait, the respect for adults that used to just exist in a room without being demanded, i see it too, but I don't think it disappeared because parents stopped spanking, I think it disappeared because parents stopped showing up, consistently, daily, emotionally.
The parents I watched raise genuinely wellbehaved, grounded children some of them used corporal punishment, some didn't but every single one of them was present, they followed through on what they said, their children knew exactly where the line was before they ever crossed it, the discipline was one part of a bigger relationship that had warmth and communication at its foundation.
What I cannot excuse is using discipline as a cover for losing control, the parent who is never around but reaches for a belt the moment something goes wrong hasn't corrected their child, they have just made the child afraid, and fear produces obedience in the short term and resentment in the long term, I have seen that play out too many times to pretend otherwise.
So will spanking make kids better? My honest answer is that the spanking itself was never really the variable, the relationship around it was, Pain inside a loving, consistent, communicative home lands differently than pain inside a cold or absent one, Context changes everything.
What I think we need to bring back isn't necessarily the rod, It is the intentionality, Parents who mean what they say before punishment becomes necessary, Fathers in the room, Mothers who aren't outsourcing their authority to threats they never follow through on.
The shepherd did not just carry a rod.
The shepherd stayed with the flock.
That is the part we actually lost.
