No-cane parenting: How to hold boundaries

Hitting your child in the name of discipline does not work and can backfire. There is a harder but better way to raise your children.

- Kelly Tay

Parents, the line has been drawn: If your child walks away from disciplinary sessions with cane marks on their skin - that’s abuse.

So says the Ministry of Social and Family Development, adding to Minister-in-charge of Social Services Integration Desmond Lee’s remarks that “excessive physical discipline will be considered and reported as abuse”.

The Government's clarifications couldn't have come at a better time.

While Singaporeans have been rightfully outraged by the tragic death of Megan Khung, the four-year-old who suffered more than a year of horrific abuse by mother Foo Li Ping and her then boyfriend Wong Shi Xiang, I wonder if the furore has turned our attention away from a hard truth: that our scrutiny should extend beyond extreme cases like abused-child deaths, and also include commonly used and widely accepted disciplinary tactics that still cause harm — even when no bodily welts are left behind.

NO SCARS DOESN'T MEAN NO HARM

Caning, for instance, is still socially accepted in Singapore — and in some quarters, actively advocated. In fact, many people (young and old alike) have told me that my decision not to cane my kids is “irresponsible” - since they believe you can raise a successful child only by hitting them.

These deep-seated beliefs persist, despite research showing that childhood beatings are ineffective in teaching moral values, and consistently associated with more aggression, less emotional regulation and poorer self-esteem. These negative effects have been found to last well into adult life.

Apart from physical punishment, there’s also psychological punishment — blaming, shaming, threatening, demeaning, ignoring and emotionally blackmailing children.

In my work with parents, I’ve seen cases where children have been locked outside of homes for crying, or denied their next meal because they dropped food at their previous one.