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Jan. 16, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
49:09
2588 Keeping The Fists In The Family - A Conversation with Robbyn Peters Bennett
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
Thrilled, I am, to have Robin Peters-Bennett, who is a psychotherapist specializing in the treatment of trauma due to early abuse and neglect.
You want this website, stopspanking.org.
That's a charity which you can donate to.
And she's also on the steering committee for the Alliance to End the Hitting of Children, which has a legislative agenda.
You can also find her work and her agenda on Facebook.
So before we get into it, go check that stuff out.
Share the information.
It's really, really important.
So thanks so much, Robin, for taking the time today.
Yeah, thank you so much, Stephen. - So I was interested in the degree to which you started working with trauma and the effects of trauma as a whole, and that sort of led you backwards to the moral and medical issues surrounding spanking.
What was that journey like for you?
Well, you know, it's interesting.
I worked a lot with very severely mentally ill children that were institutionalized, that can't live anywhere else, and what you really run into is how difficult it is to help them.
And a lot of the therapies, like cognitive therapy and many of the depth therapies even, are minimally useful.
And I became aware of Dr.
Bruce Perry's work at a child trauma academy in Houston.
He's amazing.
He's a neuroscientist who has created a brain map, which essentially is a way to devise a neurological brain map based on current functioning of the child, as well as the epidemic Or the historical factors of their upbringing.
And what I started to really understand is for many traumatized children the very early development in utero in the first four years is enormously important.
And the reason the cognitive therapies and some of the talk therapies and even the play therapies are limited is because there's a somatosensory element in early development that's incredibly important.
To be able to soothe.
So it's the stress response system.
And it's really developed in the first four years.
And so if that's damaged, you really have to address that before you try to do more advanced interventions that would be using more of the neocortex and more of the advanced and more developed parts of the brain.
So how did that link to spanking?
Well, I started to realize how important physical touch is And how important the bond in terms of the way we connect and our facial expressions and all those non-verbal ways that we relate to little children, how enormously important that is.
And that there not be a threat.
So really, the study of neuroscience and early development shows us that the mitigating function, which is the parent's bond to the child, is the most important thing in helping the development of the young brain and in preventing A traumatic response if negative things occur.
And so I started to realize that spanking is tied into that in a very big way.
Yeah, I think that's a very important insight for people to understand that the other day I was playing in the park with my daughter and she was trying to climb up a slide and she couldn't and she just burst into tears was so frustrated and so I gave her a big hug and I told her about things that I was frustrated about learning when I was a kid that a lot of my friends were older and I always felt kind of left behind and so on and gave her a perspective for her own Frustration and reminded her that frustration simply means that you really care about something and that it's good to care.
Frustration is also saying that you want something.
I'm not frustrated about my inability to become a ballet dancer because it's not really on my bucket list at all.
Helping her to deal with the inevitable frustrations of growing up and trying to do things has been really important for me as a father.
And I think that this capacity to transmit self-soothing through intimacy and through modeling self-soothing is something I think quite underappreciated to some degree by parents.
A lot of parents seem to be like hurrying their kids along, you know, get up, get ready for school, we got to eat, it's bath time, get to bed.
And I think that kind of fast pace doesn't really help teach the child how to calm down the sort of neurological responses to these kinds of stressors.
Yes, yeah, it puts them in a hyper-aroused state.
Many children are in it all the time, mostly because we are.
But we have a lot more prefrontal capability to moderate stress, even if we don't eat and we don't sleep and we work too much and we watch too much TV and there's too much noise in our environment.
And all those physical irritants, we have ways to cope with.
But you'll see the child is not going to be able to do that.
They don't have the neurological equipment to mitigate that.
And so they're going to really be the first person in the family That's going to be expressing difficulty with that kind of lifestyle.
And, you know, I think about like when you came to your daughter and you had all those things you said to her, but probably it's your facial expression and your warmth and, you know, you touching her and the fact that you're calm and that it doesn't upset you too much that she's having a hard time.
That is a huge communication to little children under distress because when you're distressed, those cognitive aspects of the brain are not available.
They may soothe you to say it, But probably at a deeper level, it's your warmth, it's your calm, it's all of your face that says, I'm okay, so you're okay.
And that's what children need.
And, you know, parents are moving too quickly.
They're violating their own bodily needs in our culture.
And children, particularly little ones that are, you know, two, three, and four, suffer the most for that.
And, of course, that's the most frequent time that children are spanked.
And the sad thing is that really struck me Is that spanking, of course, has been on the decline, thankfully, but not in those age groups.
So that when you are a threat to your child at that age, you are laying down neurological pathways that are going to make their behavior more difficult, ongoing.
We could eliminate so many problems, particularly in adolescence, if we could help parents understand how to ensure a healthy stress response in those first four years.
I don't know if you're familiar with Martin Teicher's work.
We have a video of him.
He was gracious, and he came out to Seattle, and I spent all day filming him.
And he has studied early stress for 20 years on the brain.
And it's really clear that you're setting the stress response in the first four years.
And that state, if it's hyper-aroused, sustains itself throughout the childhood, even into adulthood.
And you know people like that, that are always a little anxious, a little reactive.
Many of us are that way.
It's always struck me.
I was a theater guy when I was younger.
I went to the National Theater School.
We studied a lot of modern And a lot of it has to do with high-stress response people.
I sort of think of Eugene O'Neill's A Long Day's Journey Into Night with the morphine-addicted mother who's continually high-stress.
And of course, Tennessee Williams, Moth Women, the women attracted to the brightness of the light, but fearing it, Blanche Dubois and so on, and the mother in Glass Menagerie.
And these are portrayed as character types, but there doesn't seem to be, there all seem to me, people portray adults as like trees in clouds, trees without roots that go down into history.
And one of the great benefits for me, at least of being a parent, is seeing the degree to which personality goes down deep into early childhood and even into the womb.
And I think because we don't see that, I think we lose some sympathy for kids and teenagers struggling with this stuff without understanding the load that they're carrying based upon what they suffered often very early.
Okay.
Yes, enormously.
You know, when I was talking to Dr.
Taishi, he was talking about the dopamine system and how it develops in the first four years, and if it doesn't develop sufficiently because there's not enough mutual enjoyment, there's too much threat, the child is in hyper-aroused state a lot of the time anticipating punishment, That it doesn't sufficiently develop and you don't really see it.
The child goes through middle school years and is a pretty nice kid.
You know, not too many behavioral problems.
And they hit adolescence and the dopamine system is pruned by 40%.
And so this brain now in adolescence is so much more vulnerable to feeling poorly, to not being able to soothe, to not being able to feel good.
And they're much more likely to binge drink, to use drugs, to be susceptible to heroin, all of those things.
Sonny Shin did a research on adolescence violence.
He was looking at early childhood assault.
The more children are hit, the greater their chance of binge drinking.
And so it's kind of invisible, this tree in the clouds.
You don't recognize that really the problems you have in adolescence are in large part a function of what happened when the child was three.
Right.
And let's talk a little bit about this because I think that I've always argued in this show that we're basically only ever five years away from paradise as a species, which is if we could just get five years of children being raised peacefully and gently and so on.
We would have an unrecognizable world, I think a world free of abuse and war and famine and dictatorship and poverty and all of that sort of stuff.
But I think people are not aware of this connection, which has been known for decades among researchers, but they're having a huge amount of trouble getting this information out to the general public for reasons that I'm sure will.
We'll discuss.
But you've talked about the Adverse Childhood Experiences study.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, some of the scoring mechanisms and the effects it has on people's physical, emotional, and mental health over their lifespan.
Yeah, the ACEs study is amazing.
It started down, you know, with Vincent Folletti and Robert Ando with the Centers for Disease Control.
So Kaiser Permanente, right?
These are huge organizations.
They were trying to understand why...
People that were losing a massive amount of weight, that were really critically obese, were gaining it back again.
And they started asking questions about their childhood.
And so the ACE study is essentially looking at 10 forms of domestic violence.
And they're the basics.
It's emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect.
It's also emotional neglect, feeling unloved.
And it looks at domestic violence, your mother being hit, Someone being in jail, that sort of thing.
And divorce as well, which of course is quite common.
Divorce is a significant factor in the ACE study.
Yes.
And what's really interesting is that there's a dose-rate relationship.
And that's an important thing in science to understand, you know, that the more of those factors that you experienced, there is an exponential relationship to the number of physiological problems you'll have into adulthood.
Things like cardiac disease.
You know, if you have an A-score of six or more, your life expectancy is 20 years less.
And that's just phenomenal.
And so what happened is they started to try to understand what did this mean.
And, you know, the state of Washington has done this study as well.
The Bill Gates Foundation funded it, and they've done that in many states.
And they're the same result.
So this was over like 350,000 people, a longitudinal study for 15 years.
And what they're finding is about 30%, 29% of Americans report being physically abused by their parents as children.
That doesn't include spanking.
You know, the violence is a huge issue.
And so they started trying to understand why are the physiological problems there?
And that's where neuroscience has been really able to lend some understanding.
It has to do with that early development.
And the brain grows sequentially, so early developmental trauma affects ongoing development, and that's where you get this cascading effect over time that is really phenomenal.
Yeah, and the numbers are truly staggering, as you pointed out.
And I'll let you have the numbers on the tip of your tongue.
There's a 1,300% increase in problems with drug addiction, smoking even, ischemic heart disease, cancer, a wide variety of physiological effects.
That arise out of early childhood abuse.
And the numbers are, I mean, worse than smoking in terms of risks for some stuff.
So I wonder if you could help people understand just how significant the increases in risk factors are from early childhood abuse.
Oh, they're phenomenal.
I mean, really, the pediatric group has really acknowledged that this is an epidemic.
You are not, you know, if you're treating cardiac disease, you're really often treating the effects of early stress.
Almost every medical problem that is a leading problem in our nation is linked to the ACEs, the early ACEs adversity.
Suicide is phenomenally much higher.
Try this one, IV drug use.
If you have an ACE score of six or more, you are 46 times more likely to use IV drugs.
It's almost as if if you have no ACEs, you're not likely to use them at all.
It has to do with soothing and stress response, and then there's the lifestyle that goes with that, right?
Smoking to feel better.
Your brain is more susceptible to addiction if you have stress response, self-regulation problems.
And when I say self-regulation, I mean physiologically, where you just get physically anxious more easily and disturbed by Pressures, normal pressures in life.
Robert Andoh of the CDC called this an epidemic.
He said that early stress, early adversity is the leading cause of illness, death and poor quality of life in the United States.
I mean, that is phenomenal.
It's almost so big that I think we don't know how to respond to it.
We don't know where to begin.
Yeah, it's often bothered me that We respond with, I mean, I dare say hysteria, but let's say we respond with significant reactions to things that are low risk.
You know, BPA in bottles, have your kids wear helmets, and that's fine.
You know, let's have our kids wear helmets.
Let's make sure that the baby bottles are safe.
But compared...
To what happens in early childhood with stressors, with too early sending to daycare and so on.
Compared to those stressors, almost everything that's front page news in terms of things to be concerned about as a parent is virtually insignificant relative to this widespread and life shortening epidemic of aggression against children.
Yes, it almost makes those things seem irrelevant.
I was interviewing Dr.
George Davis, who is the medical director of New Mexico's juvenile justice system.
He also is over the Children's Youth and Family Services there.
And we were in the juvenile jail, and it's this enormous concrete structure with barbed wire and chain and really a very costly building.
And he said to me, he said, We are so afraid of adolescents that we feel like we have to build this kind of structure to protect ourselves from them.
But if we'd taken all that money and put it into education and support for parents in the first few years of life, we wouldn't even need this institution.
He calls it the house of trauma.
Nearly every child that ends up in the juvenile justice system has early abuse and neglect.
And in fact, you may get a child in there that seems to come from a really wonderful family, but you'll find that, oh, they were adopted at three, and they were in services before then.
Yeah, I know that we always have to put, in the social sciences, we always have to put the caveat in almost all.
To me, it's functionally all.
For someone to say, well, I became a criminal, but I had a great happy childhood is exactly the same as saying, my arm is broken, but nothing happened to it.
This is simply not physically possible, in my opinion.
Again, I'm not an expert, but I know we always have to put the caveats in, but for me, it seems to be, and again, it doesn't mean everyone who's traumatized ends up there, but in my opinion, And experience everyone who's there.
Because it's self-reporting.
You have to rely on the self-reporting, which can be falsified for reasons of emotional defenses and so on.
You rely on the reporting of parents who, of course, if they were abusive, would have incentives to minimize or avoid the abuse history and reporting of it.
But to me, it is functionally, everyone in those institutions is there to a large degree because of prior trauma.
Again, I know we have to put the caveats in, but I'm always concerned about the caveats because then people don't...
I'm concerned with people finding it out for this kind of stuff, but I think it's fairly consistent.
Yeah, I used to run a psychiatric program as well as I was the clinical director of a residential treatment center for children and adolescents that are so...
So distressed that they can't live anywhere else.
I never met one that didn't have a profound early experience of abuse.
Not one.
Of course, they had what you'd call potentially genetic vulnerabilities, but they were always epigenetically, environmentally induced.
Just for those who are dropping into this part of the conversation, this is the idea.
When I was growing up, it was like genes or environment.
Your genes were like fixed.
They were like the mountain.
And the environment was like the wind swirling around it that might shape it a little bit.
But I think that the more modern understanding, which has been fairly well verified, is that genes switch on or off depending on environmental factors, some at least.
And so people who have a susceptibility to aggression who are not exposed to violence, that gene for aggression will not switch on.
If they are exposed to violence, then the gene for aggression will switch on.
And so it's, you know, the idea of saying it's genetic or environmental seems to be more and more of a misnomer because the two are an ecosystem that influence each other.
Absolutely.
Yes.
Now, Now, I'd also like to chat a little bit about what is called spanking.
And as a philosopher, euphemisms really bother me.
You know, I'm with Confucius that the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names.
Spanking is a word that seems to be invented to avoid the accurate term of hitting.
Or, I would actually say assault, because if you did that to any adult, if you, you know, pulled down their pants and hit them on the buttocks for displeasing you, that would be charged, you would be charged as assault.
And this would be in a relationship where the person was free to leave at any time, whereas, of course, children, the most helpless, the most dependent, adults generally choose their Their spouse is no child chooses his or her parents and is in no legal position to leave and has no economic independence and so on.
And so it is the most helpless and dependent relationship.
My argument is that's where our moral standards should be highest.
But it seems we've invented this category which applies nowhere else to the act of physical assault called spanking.
And it seems that that's a very defensive term.
The people say, well, I'm not hitting.
I'm not physically abusing.
I'm spanking.
As you've pointed out, one, spanking generally is a precursor to physical abuse, but if I understand your case correctly, spanking is in that same category, regardless of whether it leads to that from a legal definition.
Yeah, I don't say that spanking can lead to physical abuse.
What I try to say is it can lead to criminal physical abuse, in other words, the legal term for it.
And I think that's important to parse that out because I believe that The human rights of children and their right to be free from violence is the human rights issue of this generation, and it encompasses so many things that we do to children that we would never do to anyone else.
Spanking clearly is hitting, and it's intended to evoke pain and to make the child frightened in order to conform.
It's a behavioral intervention, not a relational one.
And I think that the word does allow parents to feel okay about it.
And, you know, that's happened from the first time they were spanked, that I'm doing this for your own good, that this isn't the same as any other violation.
And so it's mind-bending, and it does sort of allow us to dissociate and lose connection to our children and not to feel them anymore.
Through this sort of defense.
I read an article on torture and the kind of language that they use for people that are administering the torture.
And they use euphemisms as a way to protect themselves from the trauma that they're inducing and also experiencing through mirroring neurons, of course.
It creates a disconnect inside of the perpetrator or the parent.
And I know that's a harsh word to use, but I've spanked my stepson, so I understand that's a hurtful thing to say and to have to look at, but it is a perpetration, it's a violation, and it injures us as well as our children.
And it is one of the, as far as I can think of, it's the only act of assault Which can be claimed, at least within the minds of the assaulter, to be an act of love.
So a man who hits his wife doesn't tell her he hits her because he loves her and it's good for her.
He hits her and he may say, well, you made me do it or I was really upset or I was drunk or I was frustrated or I was having a bad day.
So he recognizes it as a bad thing and then he may justify it or create defenses about it.
But to my knowledge, this is the only act of violence which is portrayed to the child and probably to the parent in his or her own mind as an act of love that is virtuous.
In other words, whenever I publish stuff about spanking, people are always crowding the comment section saying, well, in my day, kids were spanked and they were respectful.
Now kids are going wild and they don't care about anything because good spanking would really help them.
It is still considered a virtue in a way that spousal assault has never been.
I mean, even in the Middle Ages, it was illegal to hit your wife.
So it is one of these things where we not only justify it after the fact, but we praise it as virtuous before and during the act.
I think that's unique.
It is unique, and it's incredibly powerful.
I was looking at some statistics on domestic violence, and I think in the last 12 to 15 years, it has dropped by 64%.
There's a lot of factors as to why that is, but one of the prevailing opinions is that it has to do with shaming and making it socially inappropriate, so it's not considered bravado or okay.
With children, I'm lovingly reaching out to mothers.
I feel where they're coming from, and I want to give them alternatives, but I am Turning to society and saying, you are to blame.
Even if you don't hit your child, if you say it's okay, you're essentially promoting an idea that some hitting is okay.
There's a woman who's grossly mentally ill in New Mexico, Albuquerque, the other day.
She killed her nine-year-old child.
And, you know, the news got hold of her while she was walking into the court or wherever she was going.
And they asked her, you know, what happened.
And she said it was an accident.
I was trying to discipline him.
That's crazy.
There should be no confusion.
I've made that case many times that when you are physically striking a child, if the child turns, you could hit the genitals.
If the child squirms and falls off your lap, you could hurt the neck or the spine.
The child could kick and hit you in the eyeball.
You are introducing a random element of aggression into a very physically proximate relationship.
And it really is a sorcerer's apprentice situation, even if you have the best of intentions within your own mind.
It's really hard to tell exactly where this is going to go.
And of course, the moment you start going down that road of using aggression, if you have a particular style of child, or maybe the child has particular epigenetic sensitivities, the child may then begin the process.
Of rebellion, of backtalk, or whatever it's called, in which case you either have to escalate or abandon the process.
And all too many parents say they double down.
It's like, okay, well, if you're going to rebel against me because I spank you, then you must be broken.
You must be turned to the right side.
And the interventions become even more ferocious.
And where that ends is usually in some sort of criminal proceeding, either for the parent or the child.
Well, and long before that, I think this really is a men's issue in a really profound way, because what we know neurobiologically is that boys are more transactional.
And what that means is that, and perhaps they're wired this way, that they're more likely to externalize the reaction to the original aggression with aggression themselves, or just kind of hyper behavior or difficult behavior.
Girls are more likely to internalize and dissociate and go into more of a kind of a spacey, turned-in kind of stance.
And so as a result, boys get hit a lot more.
And the problem is that the parent is operating out of the primitive brain.
Because to strike a child is activating your own aggression, your own lower brain, that really we need to work very hard to mitigate and to inhibit.
So as soon as you do that, you've lost your own cognitive capability to think clearly.
You've lost your ability to have empathy.
You can't feel how hard you're hitting the child.
You feel threatened.
And you know, when it comes to domestic violence, I've worked a lot with men and often they'll say, I said, what is it like when you hit her?
And he'll say, I felt powerless.
Here's a man so much bigger and he feels powerless.
And I think this is what parents feel as well.
And so, really, they are developing, and there is evidence to show the more aggression, the more development in the lower brain.
Physiologically, the brains look different, and so you are essentially passing down your brain map, so to speak, by aggressing your child.
The goal is to remain calm without aggression.
You see there's some people say I'm calm and I spank, but you have to dissociate a little bit and split psychologically to do that because you have to lose contact with the child in order to hit them.
And so that to me is also destructive for the parent and the child as well.
It also sends a kind of confused message to the child that This person's calm and they have a calm face, but they're hitting me.
So now they have a paradoxical attachment to you where they love you, but they're afraid of you.
And that just carries on throughout life.
Yes, it is.
It is tragic.
I think that empathy...
I mean, I know that there's a lot of biological centers for empathy.
I think there's 11 or 12 different centers within the brain that have to coordinate to produce empathy.
I also think that it is like a muscle.
I mean, if you exercise empathy, it will tend to grow.
And spanking or that kind of aggression against children is doing exactly what your children don't want them to do.
In fact, they really strongly don't want you to do it.
So you really do have to turn off your empathy.
In fact, you have to become anti-empathetic in order to spank.
And I think that is really quite a harmful thing to do as a parent.
You're training yourself to only care about what your child wants in order to do the opposite, which is really kind of the opposite of empathy.
Sadism is the opposite of empathy.
Not caring is not the opposite of empathy, but I think that turning on these cruelty centers within the brain, I think, is very damaging in the long run.
Yeah, and you know, I'm so worried about little children, because what we wire in their brains then has such a profound and enduring effect.
And what you're wiring is a sort of perception.
They may not have an explicit memory.
They probably won't.
Most people can't even remember what they did when they were spanked as children.
They can sometimes remember the traumatic event.
And that has a lot to do with where memory is laid down when you are in a hyper-aroused state in a threat mode.
And spanking is very threatening, even though it seems minor, because the child can't escape.
So they can't They fight and they can't take flight.
They have to freeze.
And that's a much more severe response in the brain.
And it develops inside of them a perception that the people I love are sometimes not safe.
This child might grow older and not even know where that belief came from.
But it's just something they know about life.
And what a terrible thing to believe about life, that any time you engage with an authority figure, you have to be afraid or worried or they might turn on you.
Rather than thinking of authority figures as a place of safety and support, Yeah.
No, I mean, that's the one place that you should always be comfortable and secure and know that your interests are going to be taken care of.
And tragically for, I mean, some of the statistics, 94% of three- and four-year-olds have been spanked at least once during the past year, according to a recent study.
74% of mothers believe spanking is acceptable for kids ages one to three.
One to three to hit a baby, basically, to me, is...
It's incomprehensible.
I mean, that really can't be a moral issue.
That is puppy dog aggressive training that actually would be inappropriate for a dog.
I mean, if you want to create an aggressive dog, spank it as a puppy.
And the same thing seems to be true for all mammals, ourselves included.
But the prevalence of this, and this is more true of the U.S. than I think most other Western countries with the exception of the U.K., And here in Canada, it's still legal from the ages of 2 to 12 to hit children as long as you don't hit them in the face.
And trying to change that.
Let's talk about trying to change some of this.
It does seem to be so embedded and it seems to be a harder thing to change than almost anything else in society.
I mean, the progress that was made 100 years after the first inclinations that slavery was immoral was enormous.
I mean, in half the world, slavery had been abolished within the first 100 years.
If you look at women's issues, the degree to which they've changed over the Second World War period, it's been enormous and hugely beneficial.
But boy, you know, this issue of spanking.
I mean, a lot of the research that I've read about goes back to the 1940s.
And yet it is still so extraordinarily prevalent, particularly in the U.S.
So why is this one such a hard mountain to move?
Thank you.
I think it's really hard to move because what we're dealing with is trauma.
And, you know, as parents, many of us have been spanked and many of us have been physically abused.
And so we have, in order to cope with that, many of us, if we haven't spent $20,000 or $30,000 in psychotherapy, which is wonderful, I've done that myself, cope by splitting off from these early memories.
There's a wonderful woman in New York City, Asada Kirkland, who wrote a book called Beating Black Kids.
She's amazing.
And she gets with the parents and she says, I want you to tell me your first experience of violence.
Your first experience.
And of course, this is very hard work.
And she empathically connects with these mothers and listens to what happened.
Yeah, my first experience is my brother was hit with a belt.
My dad hit him and I was so terrified.
And she has them draw it.
And she says, now tell me what you would have wanted to be different.
And they talk about, well, I wish he had gone and taken a walk and come back when he was calm or, you know, talk to my brother.
And then she says to them, what do you want to do differently with your children?
This isn't just giving research.
You see, it's like I am working on this documentary and we've done some clips on research and that's all very interesting, but in a way, a mother will feel shamed by the data.
But when you really talk to her and find out what happened and have an empathic connection to her suffering and say, yes, that should never have happened, that's horrible, and be present to her grief and her trauma, then she can get connected to herself.
And when she can be connected to herself, then she can have a connection to her child and recognize that her own inability to manage rage, to get out of control, is connected to her own upbringing.
And the problem is, little children in particular are very activating to a lot of adults.
I think most adults are terrified of toddlers because they're so physical.
You know, they soothe in a physical way mostly.
You can use a lot of cognitive stuff, but a lot of it's just about getting into reverie with them, touching them, holding them, mirroring them.
I have so many really smart, capable mothers that come to me and they don't know how to mirror feeling.
They know how to problem solve.
And they're really good at it and they're super smart, but they're just flooding the child because they don't know how to touch.
They don't know how to get close.
And a lot of that's their own ambivalence about touch because of their history and their memory of touch that sometimes it hurts.
So I think the biggest problem here is that even the pediatrics and the Academy for Adolescent Psychiatry It has not really come out very strongly against spanking.
They have in their policy statements, but they haven't done much about it.
And I think the big part of that is 60% of pediatricians still think it's okay, because they're traumatized.
You can have a doctorate, an MD, and still have an ACE score that's pretty high.
And so I think it's really a very deep psychological process that we have to engage with mothers.
That's why the money should be going to early development And care providers to help love these mothers and listen to their stories and help them through the cathartic experience of enormous shame.
There's enormous shame.
Certainly, yeah.
Mothers and fathers, I think, both need these kinds of histories.
I agree with you.
I think that a lot of people are really terrified of infants, and particularly when children get active and what is called resistant, which actually just means independent and thinking for themselves.
And I also think that toddlers are incredibly fascinating because they have no concern whatsoever for culture.
I don't mean jazz or anything like that, but the not very rational beliefs of their elders, let's say.
They don't care.
They don't care that you believe in whatever religion you believe.
They don't care that you want them to go to church.
They don't care that school is considered a beneficial institution for a flourishing democracy.
They really don't care about any of that stuff.
And it challenges our own fundamental core beliefs about what is good, what is necessary.
I mean, there's no way, I think, that if we really cared about children, we'd design schools to be the way they are.
I mean, these are just things we inherited from a more brutal history.
And so I think that kids really challenge a lot of the core beliefs of parents.
As adults, we all have this polite thing where other people's beliefs, we don't challenge them and so on.
But I found that my daughter is like, well, why is that true and why should we do that and what's wrong with this?
And it's like if you don't have any kind of good answers or can't admit your lack of answers, I think that there's kind of an aggression that comes up from when propaganda or culture is challenged by the innocent empiricism and rationality of children.
I don't know if that makes any sense to you, but that's certainly been my experience.
Yes, it absolutely makes sense.
I think I was just talking to my girlfriend the other day about how little children will just say what comes off the top of their head.
You know, my girlfriend was raised where her mother would make a list.
And when Dad got back from work, he was gone all week, he'd spank all of them.
And she couldn't even remember what it is she did wrong.
They'd be laying in bed worrying.
And what this creates is a worry about spontaneity.
Can I just be me?
Can stuff come out of my mouth?
I don't know what I'm going to say.
And that you're going to hang in there with me, and you're not going to assault me or crush me or abandon me.
You're just going to think about it and go, hmm, yeah, and we're going to work with these crazy ideas that just come right out of us.
If you're raised in a real authoritarian way, you're taught to censor everything, and you cannot censor toddlers.
They don't have that capability, and so they're just raw and spontaneous and open and alive.
And we're afraid of that because we've been crushed under this pressure To conform to what other people expect.
I remember when I was a kid in Sunday school, I, you know, when I heard the story of Jesus walking on water on the ocean, I think it was on the ocean.
I remember, I remember thinking, well, did he get knocked over by the waves?
Did he walk like the waves kept moving?
Was it tough for him to keep his balance?
Like I was really trying to figure, like if his feet could not go below water, the water keeps moving.
And I remember asking all these questions and just feeling this cosmic chill in the room, like this was really bad.
And, you know, I'm just trying to figure, I'm told this story, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but let me see if I can try and figure it out.
And it really was, I mean, the response, of course, was more social and humiliation, trying to get the other kids to laugh at me and stuff like that.
But I always, you know, I was told, think about things.
Don't just, you know, try and show your work kind of thing, was I was told in math class.
And I I'm just trying to figure this stuff out.
And I think people then are like, whoa, I guess that is a good question.
I've never really thought about that.
You know, people kind of freak out about that stuff.
And the tragedy is we lose all of that rational creativity that children has as a culture by trying to squeeze them into this box of what may be just prior errors.
Yes.
So, I wanted to give you the chance to talk about the projects that you have ongoing.
As far as I understand it, you're working with the daughter of the judge who beat her, I think, so savagely.
Not that you can ever beat someone not savagely.
In a video, I actually did a show about that.
You're trying to do a documentary on this stuff.
When we talk about spanking and child abuse, we do run into, of course, the open wound of racism and race relations.
In America, which makes it more challenging.
Blacks and Hispanics are physically assaulting their children more than, say, whites and Asians, which I think is An important thing to address.
I think it could do a lot to explain disparities in criminal sentencing, disparities in poverty, disparities in income, disparities in opportunity, and would be very empowering if this message could be brought to whatever groups there are that are hurting their children more.
But it is a challenging topic to talk about.
How is this process of trying to get the word out through this medium going?
It is challenging, and I think probably that's why documentary film is the best way to go, because you don't have to Get on your soapbox, which I love to do, but I'm not going to do that with this documentary.
You know, it is higher in some of the minority environments, particularly in the African-American community.
And I think it's because spanking is a part of transgenerational violence.
It is the tradition of violence being passed down.
I talked in my TED Talk about my grandmother would have to get a switch off the peach tree.
And I think a lot of folks in the South will talk to you about that.
And then it gets sort of watered down to a belt or a fly swatter or just the open hand.
But Asada Kirkland, who is an African-American woman in Harlem, she works in the projects and speaks directly to mothers all the time.
She says herself it's an epidemic.
And she took the cover of her book that says Beating Black Kids and wrapped it around the garbage cans and stands around on the street and waits for people to talk to her.
She's marvelous.
The documentary film is intended to do two things.
One is to give information, which I think is important.
But my experience is that information is not enough.
I think we need someone to relate to.
It's why I told my own personal story about my son, which I have enormous shame about.
I was extremely upset about being able to share that.
It's not something I wanted to do, but I thought, you know, how else can other mothers come around unless they know they're not alone?
And that we make mistakes that we can grow and change.
And I think documentary film, this documentary is going to capture these mothers that go through this training program with Asada.
We want to follow them around in their house.
We want to talk to them.
We want to get to know them and watch them go through this evolution with her.
She does this amazing program.
It's just life-altering for a lot of these parents.
So that the viewer can really get a view into what is this and And to also be able to identify with some of these mothers who really are doing the best they can.
And just to raise the greater social issue, which is that when we allow this to be okay, when we say as a society, this is all right, we are giving permission to parents who have a problem self-regulating, who have trauma histories, who are overwhelmed.
We're telling them, yeah, hit your child.
And these mothers already feel extremely anxious.
Many of them are very isolated.
I'm shocked at how much isolation there really is in our culture, how little involvement there is of grandparents and aunties to help raise children.
And I don't want this to be pointing the finger at mothers.
I want to point the finger at society and say, what are you doing to help these moms?
Because there's no person more motivated to help a child do well than their parents.
Particularly when they're pregnant with their first baby.
There's the dream right there, isn't it?
I'm gonna make it better than what it was like for me as a child.
And why are we wasting that enormous opportunity?
Because we just want these kids to behave, and yeah, as long as you don't hit them too hard, it's crazy.
And so I want to really bring this up for people to really think about and to feel, not just to think about, to really feel it.
Yeah, I think certainly the undoing of Prime, certainly based on my own fairly extensive experience in therapy, the undoing of early trauma is definitely partly an intellectual exercise, but more fundamentally it is an exercise of emotional reconnection.
And that is some of the most challenging work, because the intellectual understanding will not necessarily challenge any of your relationships.
But emotional connection does.
If you have relationships founded upon emotional rejection or abandonment or even abuse, then emotional connection to your true humanity and empathy puts a significant challenge in those relationships.
Not just your relationship with yourself or your culture or history or religion, but your relationship to your family, relationship to those around you.
Fundamentally changes or is challenged and sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse when you go through that kind of work That's a lot of money and a whole lot of destabilizing for people who already feel like they're barely holding it together So it is it is a significant challenge Yes, it is Well, I really, I mean, chat with you all day.
I really, really appreciate your time.
I want to remind people, please, please check out StopSpanking.org, the Alliance to End the Hitting of Children.
You can find Robin's work and her associate's work on Facebook.
I certainly agree that the Harlem Project for Improving Parenting is a fantastic charity.
It's one I support.
And I hope that people will really, really think about this, about the degree to which this is still joked about.
I did a It's a tragedy.
It's a tragedy.
It's very tough.
If you tried that with any other group, it would be appalling.
But we have to speak for kids.
Women can speak for themselves once given a voice.
Minorities can speak for themselves once given a voice.
We really fundamentally can't give children a voice.
We adults are going to have to speak for them.
They do not have the megaphone of independence and economic freedom.
And we are simply going to have to dip in and speak for them.
If we can do that, if we can build a wall to protect childhood, that wall will protect us as adults.
Wouldn't we love to have a society with fewer rapists and thieves and murderers and false politicians and lying priests and whoever?
That would be great, but that is our job, to build that fence around childhood to protect the children, which is the greatest act of self-protection that we as adults can achieve, but we are going to have to do it for them.
They are the one group who, at least in the present time, will be unable to speak for themselves.
And it is really our job.
And I hugely appreciate the work that you're doing to bring this awareness and the empathy to this, I think, most essential of human tasks.
I want to say, Stefan, that I think it's critical that we speak to our family members.
It's the hardest thing because that's the root of our own trauma.
But talk to your brother if he's hitting his child.
Talk to your neighbor.
Speak up for the child.
Speak up for the child in the moment that it's happening.
Even if they don't stop, that gives a child a seed of truth that, in fact, this is wrong.
It's not my fault.
I'm not bad.
We really have to keep this in the conversation with the people we love and care about the most.
The letters I get and the emails are usually people that are afraid to share my work with their family because they don't want the conflict and yet that is where the heart of the matter is and that is where each of us can do such a profound thing for our civilization is just start with our own family and our own little communities and lovingly stand up for the children and help the mothers find alternatives.
And, sorry, I was going to give you the last word.
And prepare for parenting.
You know, I'm always shocked.
And people who call into my show, I do like six hours of call-ins a week, and people call into my show and basically said, I had children and crossed my fingers.
And, you know, and I said, well, when you had to go and buy a car, what did you do?
Oh, I spent weeks on the internet.
I read reviews.
I read the best, you know.
And it's like, ah, which is more important, raising your children or buying a car?
I mean, people will often put more work into buying a computer than in preparing for parenting.
But prepare for parenting.
Read best practices.
I'm a big fan of...
Parent effectiveness training.
I've had people from that movement on this show as well.
Read the books on how to negotiate.
Read the books on child development.
Read The Philosophical Baby by Alison Gopnik.
Read all of the things that babies are capable of doing.
Babies at the age of seven months are capable of choosing good behavior over bad behavior and recognizing it in others.
The idea that you need aggression in a state of pre-reason for children is scientifically and developmentally completely invalid.
And so prepare for parenting.
Really, it is the most important job you'll ever take on, and it's the one you should be the most prepared for.
There are lots of courses, lots of books, lots of resources.
The work for being a good parent starts long before sperm meets egg, and I really, really encourage people to do that.
Talk to your own parents about how they disciplined you as a child and how they feel about it.
If it is a family cycle, talk about it not just with those who have kids, but talk about it with those who had kids, especially if they We're harsh with you.
This is the best way to try and break these cycles because you sure don't want to expose kids to your parents if your parents are still on the abusive side.
So it's a huge preparatory task that people, I think, just kind of figure they know innately or something like that.
But, you know, you need a license to drive a car.
Pretend you need a license to be a parent and study accordingly.
I think it's because they think they're supposed to know and they're bad if they don't.
So we have to give parents permission to not have a clue.
It's okay not to have a clue.
Reach out to your tribe.
Let us help you.
And just as you wouldn't use a computer from 40 years ago, don't use the parenting practices from 40 years ago.
Upgrade is key.
Well, again, I could chat with you all day.
Thank you so much, Robin.
I'll put links to all of the work that I can find from you in the show and in the video.
I'll send you a link if you'd like to share it.
But I really, really appreciate the work that you're doing and the time that you spent with us today.
Thank you.
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