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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
12:37
Do Not Hit Your Children with Belts
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Hi everybody, it's Stephen Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I hope you're doing very well.
It is the Sunday show, December the 11th, 2011.
Ho, ho, ho, ho!
Bald, relatively clean-shaven Santa brings you Christmas thought goodies in his sleigh bells.
Again, I like to pass along the good news, good stuff that this show garners with your help and support and participation.
So this is something that a fine lady wrote to me or posted on the internet.
She said, many, many thanks go to Stefan for helping me to convey the importance of non-violent parenting to my husband.
While I could talk all day about the benefits and implement them, while I dealt with our seven-year-old son, he still had the, well, sometimes they just need to be spanked, etc.
mentality.
He never understood why our son would listen and respond well to me when I spoke calmly and rationally, but not when my husband tried.
Consistency being the key, a child doesn't trust a sometimes rational adult.
Since having him watch Stefan's videos, he saw the mirror image of himself in our son's reactions towards his father.
And I am so very grateful that we are completely on the same page now, not only for my husband, but also for our son, who is the true beneficiary.
And she also posted something just to clarify.
She said, our kids are four and two.
I stay at home and have been the main disciplinary parent.
I have tried to explain to my husband that yelling and threatening don't work.
He just gets annoyed with that way of thinking and has said that, we will try it your way until it stops working.
Then I will have to get the belt.
To which my response is to be completely resistant.
He uses the, I was raised with the belt and I turned out fine, excuse.
I don't point it out to him, but he is a very irritable person by nature with a short fuse.
I just say that I wasn't and also turned out fine.
It's hard for me as a person who tries to constantly learn and move forward to even begin to accept that hitting your child is ever an answer.
It is an easy outlet of frustration and not one of intelligent recognition of psychology and behavior.
It is passed down from generation to generation and hopefully I will be here again telling you he has begun to see that there are other ways.
Well, I think that is unbelievably and powerfully and movingly heroic.
You know, heroism is something that is so misdiagnosed and so misportrayed in the culture.
I mean, the cultural depiction of heroism is like Fake boobs.
You know, they're big, they're tinny, they're gross.
You might be able to rest a coffee cup on them, but you wouldn't want to let them near anyone who needs a drink at a very young age.
And it's all distorted.
It's made ridiculous.
You have to have a cape and superpowers to do something heroic, or you have to be in a war to do something heroic.
But that is not true.
Heroism is available to all of us, all the time, in standing up for the protection and welfare of children.
I've no doubt that this woman is testing the limits of marital accord, of marital getting along together well, and I hugely admire that.
And to the husband, I hope you don't mind me talking, you know, man to man, if you consider someone with an accent like this vaguely manly.
But, dude, taking a belt to a two-year-old and a four-year-old?
That is not good.
That is really not good.
That is only going to teach them terror and obedience to fear.
And they are going to look upon you as a man who can turn into a terrifying monster seemingly at random.
And that is not the relationship that you want with your children going forward.
And the exercise, of course, that I think helps people overcome this approach to discipline is, I mean, just imagine, you know, you get a memo at work, you get a memo at work, and that memo says, from now on, anyone who is found to have made a mistake at work,
to have sent a document out with a typo, to have gotten to have sent a document out with a typo, to have gotten a bad review from any customer or client, or to have not received a very good mark on a performance evaluation, we have found a giant 60-foot robot that is going to come in and pin them down on its situation, we have found a giant 60-foot robot that is going to come in and pin them down on its shaking knee and hit them hard with a massive piece of leather, thick leather with studs that is about a foot thick leather with studs that is about a foot wide.
And this will be on their vulnerable buttocks or legs or some other painful area.
If you were to get a memo like this you would think that this would be absolutely outrageous, legally actionable, a complete violation of any reasonable norms of employment.
But this is how you will appear.
to your son and to your daughter when you come at them with a belt.
Remember, you are about ten times their size.
You are about ten times their size.
You would never imagine using your physical power to hit a woman who was half your size.
You would never imagine using a physical power to hit a man who was half your size with glasses.
That would be an admission of failure.
When you have great strength, the lightest touch is evidence of the greatest maturity.
I would say particularly with men.
Men have greater strength.
Men have greater power.
But it's the light touch of our great muscles that is the true heroism of a mature and masculine soul.
So you need to not think about hitting your children with a belt.
You need to not think about hitting your children at all.
And I know that you feel that you came out fine, but the fact, just look at this possibility, the fact that you're willing and Except as rational and healthy, hitting a defenseless, helpless, dependent child for a mistake.
And there is nothing, and I say this as a stay-at-home dad to a three-year-old, highly active three-year-old, there is nothing that a child can do at that or any age that is anything other than a mistake at that time.
Or if it is a resistance or a problem, the first place to look is the cause within your own parenting.
We do not meet children as adults.
We shape children.
And remember, a good carpenter never blames his tools.
A good potter does not blame the wheel or the clay, but rather the shaping of his own hands on that which he is attempting to build.
And the first place that a parent needs to look when frustrated and angry is into the mirror, because we are the primary drivers of our child's development.
And we are the hands that mold the clay.
We are the gentle chisel that chips at the statue of adulthood we wish to create.
And to use violence in that is simply going to split that which you are trying to grow.
And it is going to cause, in my opinion, irreparable harm in your relationship with your children if they feel that if they can make mistakes you can come roaring down on them with massive whips of punishment against their tender flesh.
And then how are they going to return to playing with you?
I mean, imagine if some giant, Andre the Giant Stranger, decks you on a bus or physically humiliates you, even just by pulling down your trousers or your pants and pinching your buttocks on a bus.
Would you want to go for drinks with that person the next day?
The simple reality, my friends, is that I want parents to have great relationships with their children.
I really want parents to have great relationships with their children.
And the move towards the extension of personhood to children is already underway and is utterly, completely and totally unstoppable.
The extension of full personhood.
Personhood with whipped cream and cherries on top.
Extra personhood because of their weak and dependent and helpless states.
Extra personhood is on its way to enveloping children and it's not going to take long.
It is not going to take long.
for it to be complete.
This has already happened with blacks.
This has already happened with other minorities.
This has already happened with other religions.
This has already happened with women.
The natural extension of personhood to humanity, to aspects of humanity, to areas within humanity that have formerly been denied, it's already happened to slaves.
There's no slavery anymore.
Women are considered equal.
Minorities are considered equal, and rightly so.
This extension is unstoppable.
It is irreversible.
It is going to happen.
And your children are going to grow up smarter than you, they're going to grow up smarter than me.
My daughter is already far smarter than I was at her age and there's no question that that is going to continue.
They're going to grow up smarter with greater abilities for concepts and therefore for memory and therefore for empathy and therefore for morality and they're going to be aware Given the prevalence of information about spanking and other forms of corporal punishment on the internet, they're going to be aware that this was considered wrong by significant sections of the population.
They're going to know from their own mother that she considered it wrong and tried to talk you out of it.
So what I'm begging you, my friend, please, please do not roll the dice and hope that this movement is somehow going to reverse itself.
That this is some sort of tidal work that is going to draw this truth back into the ocean depths to be lost forever.
No, this is going to continue to extend and expand.
It is irreversible.
Do not take that chance.
For the immediate satisfaction of inflicting a will-based power on your children out of frustration and anger, do not give yourself that cheap and base satisfaction at the expense of the long-term relationship that you can have with your children.
Don't succumb to that devil.
Don't give in to that temptation.
Because your children will grow up wiser and better than you, as my children will grow up wiser and better than me.
Don't have them when they grow up.
Look upon you as a medieval brute who did not listen to reason.
Don't let that happen to your relationship with your children.
Sit down with them.
Apologize to them.
Make the commitment not to raise your voice, not to hit them, not to threaten them, not to punish them, but rather to encourage them and to enroll them in the success called cooperation and listening.
Nobody can listen to that which is shouted.
Nobody can learn from that which is struck.
And nobody can grow in the acid rain of overhanging power.
Do not teach your children to succumb to power alone or they will remain effective slaves long after they leave your shadow.
Because there will be lots of people in the world who will want to frighten them and bully them and beat down on them.
Do not teach them that language.
Do not teach them submission to power.
Because we need strong souls to fight the encroaching storms of power in the world.
Don't break them before sending them out to others who will be happy to keep breaking them.
But have them grow up strong and whole and proud and in love and worshipping you and adoring you as a shelter from the storm, not as the random lightning that splits them in two.
And not only will your children love you for that, but the future and the free people that upstanding unbroken souls will create will thank you and your children as well.
So I hope that you will listen to this and thank you so much for listening to this.
And now let's move on to the Sunday show.
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