Quotes from 'Spare the Child: The Religeous Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse'

Article Table of Contents

• Introduction
• From a section titled “Rationales”:
• From a section titled “BREAKING WILLS”
• Footnotes

Introduction #

Here’s quotes from Spare the Child: The Religeous Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse, by Philip Greven. It was written in 1989, same year I was born, 35 years ago as of 2025.

It’s sometimes nice to be able to share quotes with people. Photos of pages from books work only so well. Some books, many books, I’m able to read via my kindle paperwhite + the library. So it’s free to get on my kindle, and I can simply highlight text with my finger, save it as a highlight, and when I next sync books to it from the library, those quotes end up in my goodreads account, attached to the book. Sharabale, if I so choose. It’s how I get quotes like this. So paper books take a bit more work, but sometimes only a little extra effort. Until recently I didn’t know the above Goodreads/Amazon/Library book workflow and thought I had no way to get quotes off the kindle en-mass.

I invite you to skim, see what lands with interestingness.

From a section titled “Rationales”: #

page 68

… child is crying, not tears of anger but tears of a broken will. As long as he is stiff, grits his teeth, holds on to his own will, the spanking should continue, 43

But how long is long enough? When will the child’s will be truly broken? What sounds indicate to a parent “not tears of anger but tears of a broken will”? Hyles [the author of the above quote] does not say. What is remarkable, though, is the imagery of breaking wills, for that language links him with previous generations of twice-born Protestants who also sought to ensure that their children had no wills of their own.

Often a distinction is made between a child’s will and his or her spirit. Roy Lessin, for example, declares: “A correctly administered spanking will break the rebellion and stubbornness in a child’s will but will not break his spirit.” James Dobson ¹ a psychologist and the director of the multimillion-dollar organization in California called Focus on the Family, whose books on child-rearing (especially Dare to Discipline, which has sold over a million copies) have been enormously popular among evan-gelical Christians, explores the issue of children’s willfulness in The Strong-Willed Child: Birth Through Adolescence, thus joining a long line of corporal-punishment advocates obsessed with the wills of children. As a man who believes that “pain is a marvelous purifier,” Dobson has no hesitation in recommending that parents use “spankings” to control and to suppress their children’s willfulness and rebelliousness.

The language of warfare is invoked at times in these treatises on will-breaking and punishment. Dobson, for example, uses the imagery of battles in his books such as Dare to Discipline, in which he notes:

The child may be more strong-willed than the parent, and they both know it. If he can outlast a temporary onslaught, he has won a major battle, eliminating punishment as a tool in the parent[‘]s repertoire. Even though Mom spanks him, he wins the battle by defying her again. The solution to this situation is obvious: outlast him; win, even if it takes a repeated measure.

Similarly, Fugate invokes the imagery of rebelliousness that arises from the willfulness of children:

If the child’s rebellion has been the defiant resistance of his parents’ authority, he should be chastised until he chooses to give in.

From a section titled “BREAKING WILLS” #

The focal point of evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant child-rearing always has been the emerging wills of children.* Breaking the child’s will has been the central task given parents by successive gen-erations of preachers, whose biblically based rationales for discipline have reflected the belief that self-will is evil and sinful. From the seventeenth century to the present, evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants have persistently advocated the crushing of the will even before a child can remember the painful encounters with punishment that are always nec-essary to accomplish such goals.

The theme of breaking children’s wills was voiced even before the Pilgrims had taken firm root in America. John Robinson, who had been their minister in Holland but did not accompany them on their voyage to the New World, acknowledged in his essay of 1628 on the education of children that “It is much controverted, whether it be better, in the general, to bring up children under the severity of discipline, and the rod, or no. And the wisdom of the flesh out of love to its own,” he rec-ognized, “alleges many reasons to the contrary. But say men what they will, or can, the wisdom of God is best.” Citing Proverbs to confirm his point, Robinson noted that

surely there is in all children, though not alike, a stubbornness, and stoutness of mind arising from natural pride, which must, in the first place, be broken and beaten down; that so the foundation of their education being laid in humility and tractableness, other virtues may, in their time, be built thereon. This fruit of natural corruption and root of actual rebellion both against God and man must be destroyed, and no manner of way nourished, except we will plant a nursery of contempt of all good persons and things, and of obstinacy therein. 37

Robinson’s language of breaking, beating, and destroying is no accident, as his advice concerning children’s willfulness makes clear:

* ⁠In For Your Own Good, Alice Miller extensively quotes German and other European sources from the eighteenth century to the present concerning the breaking and controlling of children’s wills. The texts’ interchangeability with those from English and American sources is indicative of the omnipresence of such views throughout both Europe and America for many centuries. They are so much alike that any reader who compares the quotations in this book with those in Miller’s surely will be conscious, as never before, of the pervasiveness of what Miller labels “poisonous pedagogy.”

For the beating, and keeping down of this stubbornness parents must provide carefully for two things: first that children’s wills and wilfulness be restrained and repressed, and that, in time; lest sooner than they imagine, the tender sprigs grow to that stiffness, that they will rather break than bow. Children should not know, if it could be kept from them, that they have a will of their own, but in their parents’ keeping: neither should these words be heard from them, save by way of consent, “I will” or “I will not.”

A century later, Susanna Wesley used the same harsh language while recommending a similar course of action to Christian parents in her famous letter to her son John: “To inform the understanding is a work of time, and must with children proceed by slow degrees, as they are able to bear it; but the subjecting the will is a thing that must be done at once, and the sooner the better,” she insisted. Her advice still resonates:

When a child is corrected it must be conquered, and this will be no hard matter to do, if it be not grown headstrong by too much indulgence. And when the will of a child is totally subdued, and it is brought to revere and stand in awe of the parents, then a great many childish follies and inadvertencies may be passed by. I insist on the conquering of the will of children betimes, because this is the only strong and rational foundation of a religious education, without which both precept and example will be ineffectual. But when this is thoroughly done, then a child is capable of being governed by the reason and piety of its parents till its own understanding comes to maturity, and the principles of religion have taken root in the mind.

Subduing and conquering wills in the Wesley family required repeated infliction of painful beatings, beginning in the cradle and continuing throughout childhood, a process Susanna Wesley also recounts in considerable detail in this letter. Physical punishment clearly seemed to her indispensable to her aim of conquest.

[…]

[Philip Greven is quoting someone else:]

The child can decide on his own when he wants the chastisement to cease. Whenever he is willing to submit to the parent’s will, he can profess his willingness to obey. He should be given the opportunity for an honorable, but unconditional, surrender. [emphasis added].

In his book God, the Rod, and Your Child’s Bod: The Art of Loving Correction for Christian Parents (1982), Larry Tomczak (a charismatic from a Polish Catholic background) describes a battle of wills with his eighteen-month-old son which took place in a parking lot. When his small son refused to hold his father’s hand, as he had previously been trained to do, Tomczak says that “He was defiantly challenging my authority.” He adds, “What followed in the parking lot was a series of repeated spankings (with explanation and abundant display of affection between each one), until he finally realized that Daddy always wins and wins decisively!” Apparently, only repeated acts of force could compel this small boy to submit to his father’s authority and comply with his will. But the issue of winning clearly was paramount.

Win or lose: These are seemingly the only alternatives available to such parents. No choice is offered children except to surrender their wills to the wills and superior force of their parents. In the warfare between parents and children, the parents expect to win. If not, the war continues until such time as the children submit and obey. Only by giving in to the adults can children escape the pain and suffering brought about by the application of the rod or other implements in the name of Christian discipline.

Whether thought of in terms of breaking wills or shaping them, the obsession with authority, control, and obedience remains paramount.

Evangelical writers have been preoccupied for centuries with authority and obedience, and the image of authoritarian family government often shapes their arguments in favor of harsh discipline for children. Early in the nineteenth century, one anonymous evangelical advocate of the rod offered this advice: “To insure, as far as may be, the proper behavior of his children, let every parent make it his inflexible determination, that he will be obeyed-invariably obeyed.” He added, “The sum and sub-stance of good government is to be obeyed; not now and then, when the humor suits; but always, and invariably.” “The connexion between your command, and his obedience,” this writer noted, “should be the unfailing consequent of the other. “

Footnotes #