Positive parenting?

A GP friend was finishing a home visit.

He had been examining a middle-aged woman and was just putting his stethoscope away. Having noticed her smile and wanting to find a pleasant word as he departed, he commented: ‘What lovely teeth you have’. Nothing could have prepared him for the response. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘they were my mothers’! The winning smile turned out to be composed of a china set from years gone by, which just happened to fit perfectly. Not everything that looks good is all it seems to be!

For many years now there has been a self-satisfied smirk from anti-smacking pressure groups against those of us who believe, as the Bible tells us, that a ‘potch’ (Yiddish for a mild but suitably painful slap on the backside, delivered out of love and concern) ought to be among a parent’s options in disciplining our children. ‘Positive parenting’, which eschews all such techniques and beamingly suggests that children only ever need encouragement, is made out to be so right and the use of a smack met with a supercilious ‘we don’t do violence in our house’. Even Christian parents have bought into this seemingly ‘more loving’ way of doing things. However, the smile is beginning to prove false for ‘positive parenting’.