Why Some Parents Love the Whip Too Much
But that excuse also is rejected by such experts as Dr. Alvin Poussaint, the black Harvard psychiatrist who advised Bill Cosby's "The Cosby Show."
"There's an overuse of beating kids -- corporal punishment," he said at a conference on black youth violence that I wrote about in 2006. "So that you have 80 percent of black parents believing you should beat them -- beat the devil out of them. And research shows the more you beat them, the angrier they get. It is not good discipline."
"Violence begets violence," Poussaint said, pointing out that disciplinary practices at home may help to explain why expulsion rates for black children in preschool have been as much as twice the rate for white and Hispanic children.
Even Peterson acknowledges that his discipline went farther than he intended, according to his attorney. Police say he whipped his 4-year-old son so hard with a switch made from a tree branch that he caused numerous cuts and bruises to the child's back, buttocks, ankles, legs and scrotum, plus defensive wounds to the child's hands.
Yet during a Sunday interview with Jim Rome on the CBS pregame show "The NFL Today," Barkley raised an argument that I know was on many people's minds. "I think there's a fine line, Jim," he said about childrearing. "I've had many welts on my legs."
Yet Barkley eventually noted that the pictures of Peterson's child were "disturbing." He also agreed with Rome that maybe we as a society "need to rethink" this issue.
Many of us are. I tried spanking our son in his preschool years, but he's too much like me. He only grew more angry and defiant. But the kid was terrified of time-outs. The prospect of spending more than 10 seconds in solitary confinement -- away from friends, TV, books, computer or video games -- brought instant compliance.
Every child is different, of course. Barkley is right about how "we have to really be careful trying to teach other parents how to discipline their kids." But it's still a worthy cause to pursue.
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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.
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