Parenting in 2020: Using Donald Trump as a moral object lesson

Before bedtime, discussion with my son turned to talk of morals and ethics. I want him to aspire to both justice and compassion -- and sometimes (according to my Mennonite understanding of how the world should work) that means having compassion for people who act unjustly.*

*I don't expect other people, especially victims of injustice, to do this. It's how I roll.

Talk turned to Donald Trump, of course.

How do you have compassion for Donald Trump?

My usual approach -- when I am the person I want to be -- is to look for redeeming qualities in the person I find frustrating. Most people are a mix! Even many genuinely terrible people have some redeeming quality.

I cannot discern a redeeming quality in Donald Trump. Not as a public man. Not as a private person, at least from what I know of him that way. (Which is too much.)

Which means I don't know how to have compassion for Donald Trump. 

It's not a matter of him deserving it. It's a matter of me practicing an ethic that I aspire to. And he defies my understanding of how to implement my ethic.

So my answer to my son is: This is where I fall short of my values. I don't know how to have compassion for Donald Trump. All I can tell you is to aspire to justice, and try not to let your anger at injustice -- however justified that anger may be -- warp your soul.

Mostly, I would like not to have to have Donald Trump be an object lesson in my parenting.

Spanking, revisited

My last post on spanking generated quite a bit of discussion at my Facebook page. My position—then and now—is that I have spanked, but within a very strict framework that limits spank-worthy situations. And, I added, not everybody has control enough of their emotions that they should use spanking; it's too easy to let anger take over and turn a swat on the behind into something abusive.

Let me revise and amend my remarks, in light of this New York Times story about spanking advocates Michael and Debi Pearl, and their followers who apparently killed their child.

Debate over the Pearls’ teachings, first seen on Christian Web sites, gained new intensity after the death of a third child, all allegedly at the hands of parents who kept the Pearls’ book, “To Train Up a Child,” in their homes. On Sept. 29, the parents were charged with homicide by abuse. 

More than 670,000 copies of the Pearls’ self-published book are in circulation, and it is especially popular among Christian home-schoolers, who praise it in their magazines and on their Web sites. The Pearls provide instructions on using a switch from as early as six months to discourage misbehavior and describe how to make use of implements for hitting on the arms, legs or back, including a quarter-inch flexible plumbing line that, Mr. Pearl notes, “can be rolled up and carried in your pocket.”

Spanking advocates? I think "beating advocates" is more like it.

Listen: The subject of child discipline is highly fraught, and it's really easy to sit in judgement of people who do it differently than you. But let's be plain: If you read books about how to make weapons to hit your child, you are probably an asshole who doesn't have sense or compassion enough to be a parent.

Is it time to outlaw spanking?

The Welsh assembly seems to think so. And admittedly, I thought the idea sounded silly—like a bit of overwrought European do-gooderism, until I hit upon this quote:

Christine Chapman, one of the backbenchers who put forward a motion to the assembly to outlaw smacking, said she was delighted that members had backed the principle of a ban. She said: "This is a moral victory, an important step. But in the end we must get legislation against smacking."

Chapman said the UK was "out of step" with many countries around the world that had outlawed slapping. It was against the law to hit adults and it was "nonsensical" that it was deemed acceptable to hit children, she said.

And that's a good point. Generally speaking, it's illegal for me to hit a person not in my care—but it's legal (within parameters) for me to spank a small, mostly defenseless person who depends on me for life?

I haven't spanked my 3-year-old son for while. But. There was a short period of time, after he turned 2, in which he started hitting people when things didn't go his way. We tried everything we could think of in the non-violent spectrum: Time-outs, stern talks, that kind of thing. But he only stopped when I made the decision to respond to his hits with three quick swats to his backside, followed by a time-out. His hitting behavior subsided quickly after that; he doesn't really resort to fists today. And yes, I'm aware of the irony of teaching my son to stop hitting by ... hitting.

I certainly don't think I was abusing my child; and anybody who ever tried reasoning with a toddler will understand the challenges of doing so. What's more, I restricted the swats to a very specific scenario: He doesn't get spanked for other misbehaviors, or because I'm annoyed. For me, limited spanking was effective.

But "effective" is not the same thing as "right," of course, and I find the Chapman's logic about the illegality of hitting adults to be somewhat compelling. On the other hand, if an adult hit me and I responded by flipping him over and delivering three quick swats to the backside, what would the charges be? Would I even be charged? Tough to say.

In the end, I suspect most parents can find a proper route for their families. I think I have—the fact that I haven't spanked my son in a long time suggests to me that my parameters were correctly and effectively deployed. But your mileage may vary. And in any case, we have laws on the books aimed at the abusers among us, people who strike their children out of malice instead of a sense of guiding correction. That system is imperfect, and it obviously doesn't save every child from harm, but I don't think the best response is to make a criminal of every adult to delivers a smack to the butt of an obstinate child. There should be limits, but there shouldn't be a prohibition.

Do President Obama's Supreme Court nominations discriminate against parents?

Via Julie Ponzi, Jules Crittenden wonders why Barack Obama can't nominate "soccer moms who went to a state school" to the Supreme Court:

I’d add that President Obama seems bent on packing the court with people who never had children, and would suggest that if you haven’t had your sleep disturbed for years on end; haven’t subjugated everything in your life to someone else’s interests … as opposed to subjugating everything to your career interests … and neve changed a diaper except, say, as a boutique experience; if you haven’t seen your hopes and dreams grow up, charge off in their own direction and start talking back to you; if you haven’t dealt with abuse of authority and human rights issues sometimes encountered in dealings with obtuse school officials, class bullies and town sports leagues; then there’s a high risk your understanding of life may be somewhat … academic.

It’s a humbling experience, parenthood. As well as an inspiring one that gives life meaning. It also, as a friend of mine once put it, makes you sane. Even while it drives you crazy. Put another way, it’s part of the maturation thing.

This sounds suspiciously like pining for a conservative version of "empathy" as a Supreme Court criteria (as Ponzi herself kind of suggests). But nevermind that. The real question here is: Why shouldn't childless Americans also be represented on the court?

Lots of people, after all, don't have kids. One estimate in 2006 suggested that 20 percent of women ages 40 to 44 or childless -- a pretty healthy proportion. But of the court's current membership, only Sonia Sotomayor is without children. (Antonin Scalia has nine kids. Statistically speaking, he more than makes up for Kagan and Sotomayor all by himself.) Bringing Kagan onto the court would mean that just more than 20 percent of justices are childless. So it all works out.

As it happens, I think it's fine to bat around these kinds of questions when looking at justices. I think the conservative approach to judicial philosophy -- were it practiced with any kind of rigor -- would reduce judging to a sterile intellectual exercise, where input A gives you output B. Lots of time, that is the case. But the Supreme Court decides the cases that are more complicated than that. And because law is made by, interpreted by and affects fallible human beings, I think it's naive, at best, to suggest that life experiences won't play a role in judging. So let's look at those life experiences! We'd think it weird if we had a courtful of childless justices, after all. It would also be weird if we had a court that only had parents on it.