Question: I am worried about how my husband interacts with our children. Most of the time he is great but when he is stressed out he can really be difficult. He yells a lot and on occasion hits (potches) the children. He says there is nothing wrong with that and that it was never considered wrong for a father to potch and is part of chinuch. I think it's horrible and will ruin the children emotionally. Can you please settle this issue for us.
Your effort to seek outside guidance is commendable. I question, though, if this will be resolved via this column, especially if your husband didn’t have a fair chance to present his case. I would like to utilize my space to share some general guidelines that I have heard from Gedolei Torah as well as research-based perspectives on this issue.
Hitting one's children on a regular basis as a means to enforce discipline is ineffective and likely harmful. The Lakewood Mashgiach (Harav Solomon) told me that hitting cannot be out of anger, resentment, or vengeance: furthermore, the child must be able to absorb the message behind it. Otherwise, it is both prohibited and abusive (see also the chapter on hitting in the Mashgiachs’ “With hearts full of love”). Rav Shlomo Wolbe in his Sefer Zriya Ubinyan B’chinuch writes that hitting is not an effective way of controlling children’s behavior. He says that children in previous generations had stronger character and were able to endure more than the children of today.
Similarly, researchers on spanking (defined as an open-handed hit on the behind or extremities) such as Kazdin and Gershoff find that the more children are spanked, the more likely they are to defy their parents and to experience increased anti-social behavior, aggression, and mental health problems. Furthermore, children who were hit frequently were more likely to endorse hitting as a means of resolving their conflicts with peers and siblings.
However, to say that it should never be done is inconclusive from both a Torah or research perspective. For example, in the Hebrew edition of Rav Wolbe's Sefer, Zriyah Ubinyan B'chinuch, he allows for it under extenuating circumstances. The noted researcher Alan Kazdin after reviewing the spanking literature strongly discourages regular usage of spanking as a discipline technique. However, he admits that there is no evidence for negative effects with mild, infrequent spanking (e.g., one time/month) in the context of a warm parent-child relationship (see also the work of Robert Larzelere on conditional spanking).
May you and husband find the way to be michanech your children al pi darkeihem in a manner that with the passage of time lo yosur meihem.
Originally appeared in Yated Neeman