Spare the quarter-inch plumbing supply line, spoil the child

Saying no to "timeouts," some fundamentalist Christians "train up" their children by carefully hitting them with switches, PVC pipes and other "chastening instruments."

By Lynn Harris

Read more: Spanking, Life

Illustration by Mignon Khargie / Salon.com

May 25, 2006 | As a young, new, Christian parent, Meggan Judge, 26, of Anchorage, Alaska, was looking for guidance in raising "Godly children." She found advice that clicked for her when a friend loaned her a popular -- and controversial -- Christian parenting book called "To Train Up a Child," written in 1994 by Tennessee pastor Michael Pearl with his wife, Debi, who claim to have raised five "whineless" children. At the book's core is the notion that when parents "train" a child to obey early on, even before he or she is able to make conscious, or conscience-based, decisions, home will be a place of peace and harmony. Here, the term "train" is a reference to Proverbs 22:6: "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it."

Neither Pearl has advanced training in child development or a related field. "These truths," the tall, white-beaded Michael Pearl, 60, writes in his book, "are not new, deep insights from the professional world of research, [but] rather, the same principles the Amish use to train their stubborn mules, the same technique God uses to train his children."

As you may have guessed, the Amish do not train their mules by giving them "timeouts." Judge and her husband followed the Pearls' advice when trying to train their infant son Noah not to grab forbidden objects: "Switch their hand once and simultaneously say, 'No.' Remember, you are not disciplining, you are training. One spat with a little switch is enough," reads the book. "They will again pull back their hand and consider the relationship between the object, their desire, the command and the little reinforcing pain. It may take several times, but if you are consistent, they will learn to consistently obey, even in your absence."

Problem was, Noah didn't learn so fast. By the time he was almost 2, neither the word "no" nor a swat on the hand were getting through to him. "I remember thinking how stubborn he was, and that he was a smart baby and should understand what we were doing. He was obviously being defiant. Obviously, I wasn't switching him enough," Judge says sarcastically. "So I did it more." Contrary to the Pearls' advice to use an object and never, ever to strike in anger, Judge used her hand, so as to better gauge the strength of the blows. When her hand got sore, she used a wooden spoon.

By this point, Judge had another baby -- and, though she didn't realize it at the time, a case of postpartum depression. One summer day it became clear to her that the Pearls' advice and her own rages were a toxic combination: Judge had to lock Noah in a separate room for fear she would "beat him senseless," she says. "I just wanted to know when that damn 'peace' the Pearls talk about was going to come."

While the Pearls are well known in fundamentalist Christian circles, they were largely unknown to the secular world until March, when their discipline methods were tied to the death of a North Carolina boy and the alleged abuse of two of his siblings. As reported by Mandy Locke of the Raleigh News & Observer, the children's adoptive mother, Lynn Paddock, 45, a devotee of the Pearls' teachings, is currently behind bars. She is charged with first-degree murder in the death of 4-year-old Sean, who suffocated when wrapped tightly in blankets, reportedly to keep him from hopping out of bed. She is also charged with felony child abuse in connection with welts found on two of Sean's other five siblings. Nowhere in the Pearls' book do they advocate restraining with blankets; however, Sean's siblings had apparently been struck with a particular type of "rod" recommended by the Pearls: a length of quarter-inch plumbing supply line.

Paddock's attorney, Michael Reece, confirmed to Salon that Paddock owned "To Train Up a Child" and was a devotee of the Pearls' teachings. He maintains that Sean's death was accidental and that there's a difference between corporal punishment -- which he acknowledges may be "unpopular" -- and abuse. And actually, Paddock's connection to the Pearls may serve as part of Reece's defense of his client. "She's following a recognized philosophy even if it's not a mainstream one. The only one who advocates the PVC pipe is Pearl, " he says. "You can pull a switch off a tree all day long. There's no other reason to buy a PVC pipe -- that's clearly from him."

For the Pearls and advocates of Christian child "training," obedience is next to godliness. For their detractors, fellow Christians and home-schoolers among them, corporal punishment is akin to child abuse -- and to them, the Paddock case proves it. ("Christian," here and throughout, indicates fundamentalist or evangelical Protestants.) Outrage sparked by the case has fired up the blogosphere, bringing impassioned new attention to what is actually not an entirely new debate. Parents, religious and otherwise, have argued the merits and dangers of spanking since the invention of children. When it comes to physical "training" as essential to "biblical" child-raising, the Pearls are neither pioneers nor renegades; for fundamentalist Christians, corporal punishment -- or, as the Pearls prefer, "chastisement" -- is neither a fresh nor a fringe concept. But what's clear is that today, the controversy over biblical child-rearing is more than a family matter. Especially to its supporters, child "training" is yet another battleground in the culture wars.

As the Pearls, their advocates, and supporters of similar Christian parenting approaches appear to see it, child "training" serves, in part, as a bulwark against "modern," liberal, secular, permissive, "child-centered" parenting -- the touchy-feely stuff of timeouts that, they suggest, spoils children into believing in a boundary-free world that revolves around them. "Pearl and others in their camp associate permissive parenting and the assumed moral laxity that it produces with non-biblical, humanist or naive understandings of human nature. It's 'us,' the true believers, against 'them,' the secularists and anyone else who has fallen under their influence," says Mark Justad, senior lecturer in religion and society and executive director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Culture at Vanderbilt University. "It's all part of the larger picture of returning our whole culture to godliness." Or at least preserving godliness in one's own family, safe from the "crusade" launched by "spanking abolitionists," safe from the influence of the corrupt, and corrupting, secular world.

"If you want a child who will integrate into the New World Order and wait his turn in line for condoms, a government funded abortion, sexually transmitted disease treatment, psychological evaluation and a mark on the forehead," writes Pearl in "To Train Up a Child," "then follow the popular guidelines in education, entertainment and discipline, but if you want a son or daughter of God, you will have to do it God's way."

Next page: According to the Pearls, the rod is "magic"