Confession #3: I spanked my child.

He never crawled. He went straight from a lightning fast, efficient inchworm to suddenly standing and walking before age 1.

‘A Behavior Problem’

It started with book recommendations like “The Strong-Willed Child” and gentle (but firm) suggestions by a preschool teacher to have him seen by a doctor. He was my first born, and I had no meter by which to gage his energy force. All that I knew was that he was exceptional. Well, that and the fact that I was exhausted every day being his mom. Oh, and that people were talking.

We cut processed sugar and food dyes.

We adjusted bedtime.

We diffused lavender.

We did sticker charts.

We did time-out.

We read the books and went to groups and took [bad] advice, and yes, we spanked our son. We spanked, near daily for a season, to address his “willful defiance” and so as not to spare the rod. We even talked with him about what he did to warrant the spanking, and gave him a hug afterward. [puke]

In my American-bible-belt-midwestern-young-mom view of human behavior, all that was needed was some good old-fashioned discipline and we would, by God, nip this in the bud.

LOL.

As a mother x4 over now, I am ashamed of the previous paragraph and do not want to publish it. But what is a confession without the whole story?

I recognize that there are at least two camps when spanking is mentioned:

1. Spanking worked for me. Insert: You did it wrong.

2. You traumatized him. Insert: You did it wrong. 

Either way, it is not lost on me that we, the parents whom he depended on and trusted, piled on him at only age 3. We modeled…in real time…to an impressionable brain…and a tiny body…how to hit and manipulate a person when you want something from them.

He did not break in the way that we anticipated.

My son and I have processed his early punishments, as adults, in the wake of his addiction and incarceration. He has offered forgiveness to me, sincerely, but I still cannot forgive myself. I can only offer my soul the time-tested mom pardon: There was no manual.

He was the kid who was blamed for every mess, every missing thing, every other crying child. I do not know how he stood up with the size of the target on his back during those years. Everything was always his fault. Even extended family members yanked him by the arm and yelled at him, “Look what you did, you little jerk.”

In my fear, I parented to avoid the worst-case-scenario.

We got here anyway.

Like a Sheep to Slaughter

Church directives for managing ‘disobedient children’ were abhorrent. Other parents had terrible, horrible, no good, very bad advice. There were no podcasts. There was no online community for parents ‘like me’ discussing children ‘like him.’ No smartphones, let alone inspirational parenting perspectives in my feed.

And public school was the worst decision that I ever made for my son.

In elementary school he was labeled “distractible,” “impulsive,” “defiant.”

By middle school we had a diagnosis or two. We did counseling. He had a 504 plan.

By high school he was a pariah.  

In fact, in 2014, my son was expelled from his high school under a zero-tolerance policy.

The phrase “pipeline to prison” isn't a political slogan, and it does not just highlight urban concerns. My son's journey happened in a rural public school district where the demographic is mostly white, country folk and pickup trucks outnumber cars in the school parking lot.

This story couldn’t be more country, honestly.

He left work one summer afternoon (where he'd been bailing hay) to attend football camp with his team on a college campus. Yee-yee. I drove him there. He arrived in his dirty work clothes, changed, and then shoved his work stuff into his overnight bag to rush out to the first practice. When the cops were called a day later to the campus to investigate the smell of weed in the college dorms, they searched everyone's belongings. The (work) knife was located in the bottom of my son's bag inside of his work jeans pocket. He didn't have it out, he'd never shown the knife to anyone, he never harmed or even threatened harm to anyone.

The cops simply took the knife; no charges were filed. BUT, under our state’s (then) “Zero Tolerance” policies, his local-yocal, cape-wearing high school administration enacted an expulsion process for possession of a weapon “at a school function.”

He was expelled the summer before his sophomore year.

[Sidebar]: When a child is expelled from a public school, they are not allowed to attend any other public school. Most private schools, if you could afford them, will not consider expelled students for enrollment either. And this pre-dated organized online educational options.

More Discipline

So, my son went off to military academy. In another state. Parenting him ended, in the traditional sense. He left years before most mama birds prepare their babies to leave the nest. He was kicked out, flailing toward hard ground.

This was our first forced separation, and a major level-up in punishment.

6 weeks of boot camp with no contact from home. Inspection at dawn. Middle of the night drills. Mess hall meals. He was 16 years old. Banned from his former school grounds and functions (e.g., his sibling’s sports games and his girlfriend’s homecoming) and all that he had known since birth in a small town. It was us here and him, over there, a state away. Black sheep, indeed.

His ‘friends’ moved on.

Other parents gathered pitch-forks.

One called the cops.

The school board refused to reinstate him.

And so, my son lashed out the night before heading into his second year of military academy by logging into Facebook one last time to give a middle finger to the community that had kicked him out. He simply typed “Fuck You” -and tagged 43 ‘friends.’ Then he eloquently penned his penultimate literary prize-winner: “Snitches get stiches.”

Enter the Big S System

The obvious reason that my son is in prison is that is he broke U.S. or State laws for which he was arrested, charged, and sentenced.

In a nutshell, that is true, and you can stop reading if that disqualifies us from kind considerations. But his current status is, like the sum of any person’s output, linked to both his opportunities and the failings of the community that raised him.

If my son were graduating from Yale, jumping out of planes for the military, marrying well, or stepping into a 7-figure salary with a beautiful social media feed, there would (in the least) be honorable mentions of the adults and schools that helped him get there. Well, he is not graduating Yale but I would still like to shout out the school and adults who “helped” shape his early experiences in the world. You know who you are.

My son entered the American legal system at 16 years old.

He was first charged, as a teenager, with 43 counts of Malicious use of a Telecommunications Device for his Facebook post. With the increase in panic over school bullying and smartphone use on the rise, the local prosecutor had a shiny toy with which he was eager to play. My son (who had been subject to real bullying for years) pled guilty to these charges under the premise that he would “get probation” and the charges would be dropped after successful completion of more punishment, and of course, payment of fines. The State always gets their cut.

Like so many pre-frontally challenged young human beings, he was not ever going to be successful on probation.

He had already started using alcohol and weed to manage anxiety. In forced isolation, he found harder drugs and darker acquaintances; he met the people more than willing to enjoy and exploit his black sheep status. It was only a few short steps to irrational thought and outlaw living. He isolated more, and the cycle intensified.

And so the story goes.

Punish Vs. Accountability

I recognize that taking advice about discipline from a mother whose son is incarcerated might seem foolish. Skepticism is fair. I can only offer you my experiences, observations, and abject failures.

So, for clarity, what I am not saying is that my son is blameless, nor that he did not need forms of correction, reorientation, and accountability. I, in fact, believe (even now) that we need criminal courts, law enforcement, and facilities that confine unsafe individuals. Contrary to what some may read into my points, it is my position that we need more accountability than ever.

But accountability is different than punishment.

Accountability is voluntary and requires ownership as well as an effort toward repair for the damage you cause others or shared space. Punishment is passive, and usually coerced. It does not require connection nor reorientation in order to be completed.

The goal of accountability is internal change. The goal is punishment is to effect an outward presentation.

“A U.S. Department of Justice analysis of recidivism rates in 24 states concluded that 82 percent of individuals released from state prisons were rearrested at least once during the 10 years following release. Within one year of release, 43 percent of formerly incarcerated people were rearrested.” [Source]

Let's get real.

If stricter punishment worked, our prisons would not be bursting at the seams with our corrections departments in disarray.

Dear Fellow Gen-Xers

No matter what mission statement writers claim, we are a punishment-driven (not an accountability) culture.

If you are Gen X or above, you likely feared a belt in childhood. And friends, in spite of our pride in the self-sufficiency of our generation and claims that we grew up “right” because we regularly got backhands to the face and drank water from hoses in the backyard, American Gen Xer’s early adulthood years witnessed the highest prison population numbers seen in our country’s history.

Social media comments and daily news reels chant for heads on spikes. We love diminishing people by calling them “a felon” or “a criminal” (recent elections come to mind). Our core institutions have punishment sealed into their handbooks. Visit a kindergarten. We still sit tiny kids in the hall or in the “reflection room,” apart from their peers, to assist them in Coming to Jesus in some upside-down pep talk of shame. Get right or face isolation.

Most will choose the isolation. For those who continue not to fit into the box with all of the other shining widgets by middle school, go elsewhere. We don't care where, unless it's count day.

Note: Our state rescinded its Zero-Tolerance policies in 2017. Where it used to be mandatory to expel for certain behaviors, it is now left to the discretion of administrators. Guess what? We still permanently excused 1,396 students from education in our state last year. That is 49 more students than the year my son was expelled. [source]

Lessons

My job in this blog is to discuss my personal experiences, so I’ll stop here. This week's paid content will focus more on "what can be done" with difficult, outside the box kiddos. Hint: I am a former public school employee and a clinical psychologist.

Mostly, it is my sincere hope that we cease talking about “behavioral kids” and “troubled youth" with divisive eye rolls and laser-like blame of parents. Are there “bad” parents out there? Sure. Do kids from “good families" do “bad” things too? Our prisons are full of them.

So, think of me the next time someone says, “WHeRe WeRe ThE PaReNTs?!” Most of us were right here, doing the best we could.

And, if nothing else, one more bit of added value for your time: Do not tell anyone on social media to fuck off, no matter how frustrated nor justified you might feel. It is, as you now know, punishable by law.

*This week's paid follow-up will land on Monday. Stay tuned!