A Mom Shares What Inspired Her To Stop Spanking Her Kids

For as long as there have been children, parents have had the unenviable task of disciplining them. You have to do it: if you don’t they’re going to grow up to be entitled little monsters. That said, there’s no one way to do it and for many people, their solution has been spanking.

But one TikTok creator, Abigail Winters (@abbywinters80), shares an experience that made her rethink the time-honored physical approach to discipline.

“Spanking is lazy parenting, and I say that as a former spanker,” she begins. “When I was in training to become a foster parent is when it clicked for me.”

As a foster parent, she explains, you’re not allowed to use corporal punishment in your home. At the time, Winters did employ spanking with her child, and figured she would just try something else since it didn’t make sense to have different forms of discipline for different kids.

“But then in our classes, we went more in depth about what happens to children who are spanked and it was the attitude of the other parents that really course corrected for me,” she continues. “Because the other parents would say things like ‘Oh I can’t wait until I can finally adopt my own and I can discipline however I want.’”

Aside from even the idea that Winters felt it was antithetical to the idea of fostering to “root for adoption,” she was perturbed by the idea that they wanted to spank a child and upset to see them dismissing new techniques entirely out of hand. “[It] made me go ‘There’s something wrong here; why would anyone be excited to hit a child?’ ... It was literally looking in those other parents’ faces who were making those kind of comments that made me resolve that spanking is horrible.”

Of course, it was helpful to have “really good training” immediately following to help Winters find other ways to help kids manage big emotions or learn to understand the rules.

Of course, breaking free of old patterns isn’t easy. “You have to push the boundaries of probably what you’ve been raised in to really find other solutions,” she concludes. “And so, having to reach for that knowledge, having to expand in that way does require a lot of effort. It requires a lot of rewiring and it’s just lazy when you refuse to do that.”

There have been countless studies done on corporal punishment in children, the majority of which point to the fact that it’s not only ineffective but detrimental to a child’s emotional and even brain development. The American Academy of Pediatrics strongly discourages physical punishment like spanking when correcting or disciplining a child, and yet it remains a common practice in the United States.

It can be hard to break patterns of behavior, particularly those built over generations, but if you are a parent who spanks and doesn’t want to, there are resources available to help you find other solutions for you and your children.