By Dr. Stacey Patton

It’s National Child Abuse Prevention Month again and so I’m getting down to work.  The more I do anti-spanking activism in Black communities, I keep hearing a constant refrain: “We whoop our children out of love,” and “We whoop our children to keep them out of prison.” 

I understand that parents are doing the best they can with the tools and resources at their disposal and so I’m learning to practice loving kindness and greater empathy in my work.  But it is clear to me that far too many Black parents “love” their children the way that America “loves” us.  And the ways in which we treat our children’s bodies MUST be understood within the social and political context of white supremacy.  Meaning that white supremacy REQUIRES black people to participate in the dehumanization process of their children.

And we’ve been doing a great job.

We are a group that has adopted and fiercely defended a hurtful tactic that is meant to protect our children, not savage them.  I understand that whooping children has long functioned as a kind of defense mechanism, but it is also a function of a parent’s own rage and self-hatred at being forced to endure living in a society that questions your humanity from the womb to the grave.

But when we hurt our children’s bodies, what kind of message does that send to them and to those people in the world who fundamentally hate them?  It says to them – “I have no right to bodily integrity,” “My voice doesn’t matter,” “My experience doesn’t matter,” “I should expect violence,” “I should expect people to hurt me,” “I am a problem,” “I am feared,” “I am hated.”

“I whoop you because I love you” was a constant refrain I heard out of the mouth of my own adoptive mother and elders in the community where I grew up.  Now that I’m an adult and I continue to do the hard work of emotional and spiritual healing, I’ve come to realize that all those whoopings I received as a child may have been administered by my adoptive mother, but they did not originate with her. 

That kind of painful punishment originated with white supremacy, a history of cultural and physical violence that devaluated black life at every turn.  From slavery through Jim Crow, from the school-to-prison pipeline to racial profiling, the innocence of black children has always been a dream deferred.  Childhood has been one of many things denied to black kids and this message has surely entered into black homes.  So has the yearning to protect our young from the pernicious impact of racism.  The intensity of this fear and the focus on insulating black children from the dangers of racism is part and parcel to the history of blacks in America.

As for those who argue that whooping a child will keep him or her out of jail . . . Welp, let’s see how effective that parenting strategy has been for black folks since the post-emancipation period and the rise of the carceral state.  Consider the following facts:

We keep whooping our children while people of color make up about 30 percent of the United States’ population and account for 60 percent of those imprisoned.

We keep whooping our children even as 1 in every 9 black men is incarcerated in comparison to 1 in every 106 white men.

We keep whooping our children even as, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1 in 3 black men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime.

We keep whooping our children even as individuals of color have a disproportionate number of encounters with law enforcement, indicating that racial profiling continues to be a problem.  

We keep whooping our children even as the Department of Justice found that blacks are approximately three times more likely to be searched during a traffic stop than white motorists, and blacks are twice as likely to be arrested and almost four times as likely to experience the use of force during encounters with the police.

We keep whooping our children even though municipalities like Ferguson, Missouri target black communities with traffic stops, court fines, arrests and harrassment for low-level offenses to raise revenue.

We keep whooping our children even as students of color face harsher punishments in school than their white peers, leading to a higher number of youth of color incarcerated.

We keep whooping our children even though they represent more than 70 percent of those involved in school-related arrests or referrals to law enforcement, and make up two-fifths of confined youth today.

We keep whooping our children even though recent data by the Department of Education shows that African American students are arrested far more often than their white classmates, making up more than 70 percent of arrested or referred students.

We keep whooping our children as harsh school punishments, from suspensions to arrests, lead to high numbers of youth of color coming into contact with the juvenile-justice system and at an early age are sent to adult prisons.

We keep whooping our children even as the number of women incarcerated has increased by 800 percent over the last three decades, and women of color have been disproportionately represented, with African American women being three times more likely than white women to be incarcerated.

We keep whooping our children even as the war on drugs has been waged primarily in communities of color where people of color are more likely to receive higher offenses even though they are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites, but they have higher rate of arrests.

We keep whooping our children even as they remain overrepresented in the nation’s foster care system, which has become a breeding ground for the juvenile justice and adult prison system.  In some states, like California, nearly 70 percent of adult prisoners have had contact with the foster care system as a result of child abuse.

The abuse and control and mass incarceration of black bodies in America is tied to this country’s racist roots, which is tied to profiting from the sweat and muscle of black bodies.  The fact is, black people are worth more in prison than free.  It is absurd to think that all these disparities I mentioned above persist because black people don’t whoop their children enough.

Irrespective of the reasons – rage induced by racism, a desire to save children from the streets and a jail cell, a yearning to ward off black death, a responsibility to protect – the abuse hurts!  Not to mention, “bad parenting” is used to justify mass incarceration, schools suspensions, splitting apart of families by child welfare professionals, and yet the abuse that purportedly protects inadvertently exacerbates the pernicious harms of racism.

This piece was originally published in The Washington Post on November 26, 2014.

This piece was originally published on ForHarriet.com.

by Dr. Stacey Patton

I’m not saying that you’re a bad parent if you spank your child/ren. But if you are raising a daughter, you might want to know how your decision to use physical punishment might alter the architecture of her brain and negatively impact her sexual development.

For nearly two decades, there’s been extensive research on how physical discipline, unpredictable environments, and chronic stress impacts children’s brain development. Constant hollering, belittling, threatening, and hitting your child sets off biochemical responses to stress that can change the physiology of your child’s brain and lay the groundwork for a low I.Q., a quick temper, aggressive and delinquent behavior, depression, suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, an inability to regulate impulses, dysfunctional relationships, and early intrusive sexual thoughts and activities.

Earlier this summer I presented at a two-day conference on corporal punishment hosted by the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine where I was introduced to the research of Dr. Leslie Seltzer, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin’s Child Emotion Lab. Seltzer and her colleagues are part of a cohort of researchers that have been studying how stressful parent-child contact can overload a child’s body with certain hormones. One of those is cortisol, a hormone that helps the body prepare to fight, flee, or freeze in response to danger or even the threat of danger. Children who are spanked don’t have the option to flee or fight – they must submit to the pain and violence without grabbing, blocking, or defending against the assault to their body. Corporal punishment triggers the release of cortisol.

Having elevated levels of cortisol for a short period of time is okay, but if this fear response is experienced repeatedly it can damage a young brain and lead to diseased neural networks. Researchers also say that repeated elevations of cortisol can result in a child becoming sensitized to fear, making it easier for them to experience danger and pain and normalize abnormal behavior. Think about how many adults who were hit as children can’t remember the trauma and fear they actually felt at the time but say that being hit was a “good” for them because they’ve only held onto the rationalizations used to justify the violence against them.

In her lab experiments where she placed adolescent boys and girls in a stressful situation and then took samples of their saliva and urine, Seltzer surprisingly found that girls with histories of harsh physical discipline didn’t experience the cortisol rush that we would expect. Instead, that group had a huge spike of oxytocin, known as the “comfort” or “cuddle” or “love” hormone that causes people to feel emotionally bonded to each other, and acts as the body’s built-in counter to stress.

Seltzer and her colleagues discovered that when placed under a stressful situation, the oxytocin levels in girls with a history of harsh physical discipline nearly tripled from their baseline, which was already three times higher than the baseline levels of girls that had no history of harsh physical discipline. (The researchers found no differences in hormonal changes in the boys they compared.)

Oxytocin is a powerful hormone that gets released into the bloodstream when you experience warm feelings like love, trust, security, attachment, comfort, and protection. Our levels of oxytocin surge when we hug, kiss, have sex, give birth, and breastfeed. A surge in this hormone known for sexual pleasure is not the sort of thing you expect to happen to a girl when she is threatened or hit by a parent or guardian. 

So how does this happen, and why is this a hormonal recipe for disaster for girls?

When you threaten or hit your daughter, her limbic system – the part of that brain that controls emotions, memories, and arousal – gets activated into a state of hyper-vigilance and readiness to respond to danger. Her amygdala gets the message that danger is coming and generates an emotional response that releases oxytocin. Over time, as her brain develops, this ripple of hormonal changes can permanently wire her brain to cope with this harsh treatment. Her nervous system will run on a continuous high because she will constantly anticipate more threats.

Hitting your daughter can not only impair her sense of trust and self-confidence, it is embarrassing, humiliating, and sends confusing messages about boundaries and her right to bodily integrity. Eventually, your daughter may experience emotional and cognitive numbing as she internalizes distress and aggression. Her self-esteem will be wounded and her spirit will be broken even as she develops a “hard” or “tough” or a so-called “strong black woman” exterior at an early age. 

Researchers have found that adolescent and teenage girls who have histories of harsh physical discipline have been found to have higher levels of intrusive sexual thoughts, consumption of porn, and masturbate more frequently. Having higher levels of oxytocin causesearly puberty and removes inhibitions around her decisions to engage in risky sexual activity. The stress of being threatened and hit has damaged her brain and so she may struggle to compartmentalize her sexual preoccupations, control her impulses, and refrain from temptation.

If you repeatedly subject your daughter to threats and hitting, she might end up coping with this stress by seeking out ways to escape it. She may find other forms of support, namely relationships which might put her at risk for engaging in risky sexual behavior, teen pregnancy, and choosing aggressive, violent partners later in life.

The irony is that so many parents whoop their kids thinking it will keep them from being “bad” and prevent these very behaviors! All children need discipline, but not the kind that rewires their physical and mental hard drives for at-risk behaviors or damages their ability to function in healthy ways.

Spare the rod. TALK with your child. LISTEN to them. Hit the keyboard and learn some things about child development so that you won’t place unreasonable expectations on your kid(s). Try to understand, even when their behavior makes you angry or scared. They’re growing up and don’t know what to do. As their parent, you are growing up with them. Hitting, cursing, yelling, and threatening damages that precious parent-child emotional bond, and potentially causes the kind of problems you’re just trying to prevent in the first place.

This article focused on girls, but hitting is equally damaging to boys. In my next piece I will discuss research that shows how boys who are hit by their mothers also experience brain alterations that put them at an increased risk of hitting their significant others later in life.

By Stacey Patton, Ph.D.

The following piece was originally published on ForHarriet.com.

“I’m gonna spank my child when he acts out. I got my butt whooped when I was a child and today I’m fine!” 

I recently heard a 40-something-year-old black woman say this during a heated debate over physical discipline of children. Let’s call her Sista A. 

Sista B responded: “Girl, please. You didn’t turn out fine. You grew up to be somebody who thinks it’s perfectly okay to hit a child. There’s something wrong with that,” she said as she gently tap, tap, tapped a finger against her own forehead.

“BOOM!” I said smiling as I gave Sista B a fist bump. 

And she’s right: scientific research over many decades overwhelmingly concludes that getting hit as a child damages the way your brain develops, messes up your mental wiring, and distorts how you remember and talk about traumatic events. 

Think about how most black Americans talk about corporal punishment for children:

• “You have to spank them or they won’t respect you.”
• “I whoop my child to keep him/her from going to jail. It works, because I’ve never been in trouble with the law.”
• “The Bible says ‘spare the rod and spoil the child.’ God is on my side!”
• “Spanking is discipline. It’s not the same thing as abuse.” 
• “Spanking equals love and protection.”
• “If I hadn’t been whooped, I’d have ended up dead or in jail.”

Over time, some people who hated and resented being spanked as children come to view it as desirable, even necessary because their brain can’t recognize being hit as a harmful act of violence. Some people joke about the pain that once made them cry. Many allow religious, cultural, and social justifications to trick them into doubting their healthy childhood belief that it was and felt wrong for them to be hit. As adults, they fervently believe that being whipped was so good for them that they will repeat this cycle with their own children. The core belief still dominant in black American culture is that hitting your child equals good, responsible parenting. 

From my own childhood experiences, I remember those phrases – “This is for your own good.” “I beat you because I love you.” “I beat you so the white man won’t beat you or kill you.” “This hurts me more than it hurts you.” “I brought you into this world and I can take you out.” 

One reason I might have escaped some of the brain damage and never stopped feeling that the beatings were wrong is that I was five years old when I was adopted into the abusivehome, and had never been hit prior to that time when I was in the foster care system. In other words, between the critical periods of age zero to four, my internal hard drive had already been set to process being hit as frightening and wrong.

Over the past few years I’ve grown impatient with the oft-repeated tired justifications for hitting children, especially among black Americans, given the troubling data on the number of abused black kids entering into the foster care system, parents going to jail, and the hundreds of kids who die each year as a result of child abuse. In many of these cases, the child victims were undoubtedly loved by their parents or caregivers who hit or killed them. The perpetrators had faulty wiring in their own brains that caused them to associate physical discipline with love and use violence to get their child to obey.

Let’s look at the data. In 2012, the most recent year of available data, the Administration for Children and Families reported that:

• Black children had the highest victimization rates in the country, comprising over 140,000, or 21 percent of all abuse cases. 
• In 2012, 403 of the 1,593 fatalities were black children, representing 32 percent of the victims. 
• Most of the victims were under age 4.
• The majority of the perpetrators of abuse, and murder, of black children were black women under age 44. 
• See the 2012 report here. 

Let’s talk about how black women under age 44 are most likely to abuse their children. Their intentions might be good, but their reasoning is deeply flawed. But we have to stop for a moment and seriously ask: How much of that flawed reasoning is due to the rewiring of the mothers’ brains that resulted from being hit in their youth? The research shows that a parent’s warmth and nurture does not mitigate the negative impact that hitting has on the brain. 

Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Martin Teicher, who studies the impact that stresses like abuse and neglect have on children’s brain development, says as a child grows, there are moments when there are regions of the brain that are particularly vulnerable to stress. 

One of the most stress sensitive areas of the brain, he says, is the hippocampus, near theamygdala in the mid-brain, which is the center for emotional management and is used for learning, storing and retrieving memories. This part of the brain continues to produce important neurons after birth and stress can suppress this function, ultimately slowing down or impairing our ability to control emotions, take in new knowledge, and think at our best. When a child is exposed to trauma and stress (including spankings that don’t leave scars or other serious physical injuries), that part of the brain increases in volume and can alter a child’s normal brain development. The effects might not be apparent for years until after puberty.

And what are those effects? 

Researchers at the Yale School of Medicine have found that children and adults who have been subjected to child abuse and neglect have less grey matter in their brains than those who have not been ill-treated. Medical professionals have consistently found a link between corporal punishment and increased aggression in children, low academic performance, vulnerability to depression, and antisocial behavior.

Dr. Teicher compared people who were spanked and those that were abused and found that they shared the same alterations in their brains, belying the popular myth that there’s a difference between discipline and abuse and its impact on children. He found that both groups of physically disciplined children had the same risks of developing drug and alcohol abuse, depression and aggressive behavior, decreases in I.Q., and other forms of cognitive impairment.

“We know that the brains of adults who were abused as children are different,” says Nadine Bean, an associate professor in the graduate social work department at West Chester University.

“Shrinkage in the amygdala and hippocampus impacts how one regulates strong emotion, how one processes memories, especially traumatic memories,” she says. “It may be that adults who were whooped as children actually do not remember the most horrible aspects of these experiences. What they may remember is the distorted justification of these experiences from their parent or caregiver.”

Professor Bean says this is similar to Stockholm Syndrome. “If you fear for your safety, your life, then you begin to believe to acquiesce to your abuser’s drivel,” she says.

Children who are hit by their parents can develop a very distorted view of love and attachment. As adults they don’t always know how to interpret healthy forms of love, they only understand being beaten. If you were hit as a child and grew up to be someone who hasn’t developed depression, addictions, suicidal thoughts, aggressive or other anti-social behaviors, but you’re one of those people who looks back and says that getting whooped was good for you and you vow to hit your own kid because it worked, then that is still evidence of brain damage.

“’I was beat and I turned out fine.’ I’ve heard that all of my professional social work life. They make think they are fine, but sadly aren’t,” Professor Bean says. “And, it isn’t just black people, this cut across races, ethnic groups, and socio-economic status. We have met because your child is having trouble in school or is acting aggressively within your home or neighborhood? Ok, you’re fine. Can we explore this a little further?”

Molly Castelloe, a psychology and performance expert who writes for Psychology Today hasrevealed how hitting damages the brain in other ways by teaching a child that learning occurs through punishment.

“This form of discipline pretends to be educational, but is actually a way for parents to vent their own anger. Spanking involves the learned misrecognition of injury as education,” she argues. “Figures of cultural authority, such as parents and teachers, may be construed as purveyors of sadism rather than knowledge. Corporal punishment undermines compassion for others, for oneself, and limits the mutual capacity for gaining.”

The problem is generational, Castelloe says. People parent the way they were parented. In other words, “the cause of this form of educational violence is often hidden in the repressed history of the parents. When adults do not understand the connections between their previous experiences of injury and those they actively repeat in the present, they perpetuate a destructive cycle and inflict their own suffering on their offspring.”

The result — a new generation continues to carry the damage that has been stored up in the mind and body of their ancestor. The cycle, Castelloe and others maintain, can be broken when parents and caregivers work to become consciously aware of, and honest about, their own childhood pain so they don’t transmit historical violence to their children by hitting.

My hope is that black communities will begin to shift the conversation away from the ethics of using physical violence, the radio jokes and hair salon banter, the literal interpretations of Old Testament scriptures, and focus on the science which is clearly telling us that this practice is harming our children’s brains – and our communities.

I’m sharing this piece that I wrote for www.forharriet.com earlier this week.  While the aim of this piece is to demonstrate how the fixation on white babies and a white future through controlling white women’s reproductive activities is connected to discrimination and amped up violence against people of color, I felt it was important to share with STK’s audience.  Parents, black or white, who are raising children of color need to understand the context under which they are raising their sons and daughters…..

By Stacey Patton

The GOP’s war on the most intimate aspects of women’s lives is undoubtedly real, but it is not being applied without discrimination. 

Let’s be clear—the primary targets of the right wing’s rhetorical and legislative attacks are, and have always been, white women. The war on white women is really a push for more white babies. And, that push goes hand in hand with amped-up racial profiling, vigilante policing, mass incarceration, school closures, hoarding of resources from communities of color, and blatant disregard for violence directed at African Americans and their children, including the unborn. 

More white people are dying than are being born, a trend that is projected to continue. Meanwhile, the birth rates for people of color remain stable or high, primarily for Latinos. The trick for the modern American situation is to prevent people from seeing that the war for more white babies and the war against people of color are related. But the two phenomena are inseparable.

What we are witnessing is not new, but rather a familiar pattern of desperate efforts to preserve white domination through strength in numbers. It is an historic fact that when radical demographic shifts take place in the United States they are accompanied by white supremacist fears of being outbred and crowded out by immigrants and people of color, and losing majority rule. 

And so here we are again. America is undergoing yet another periodic age of white fear and cradle competition. As the white population marches toward a less than majority status, the constant fear of biological extinction has infected our political discourse, policy decisions, and everyday racial interactions, whether in the comments sections of news sites or in the streets.

For those who remain skeptical about the association between fears of white race suicide and emphasis upon women’s reproductive roles, consider the words of famous and respected persons such as Teddy Roosevelt, a champion of race purity who with little embarrassment called black Americans “a perfectly stupid race that can never rise.”

Responding to the falling white birth rate, in his 1906 state of the union address Roosevelt blasted elite native-born white women for shirking their national civic duty to be mothers of the nation by engaging in “willful sterility—the one sin for which the penalty is national death, race suicide.” In his eyes, a white woman who avoided having babies was a “criminal against the race” and “the object of contemptuous abhorrence by healthy people.” 

Later, in a 1913 letter to the prominent eugenicist Charles B. Davenport he wrote: “Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind…. Some day we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty of the good citizens of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type.”

Roosevelt’s declarations came at a time when more women were pursuing education, seeking careers, voting rights, greater voice in public life, and control over their own fertility. All of these factors supposedly made women physically unfit to be good wives and mothers. Doctors of the era argued that the pursuit of higher education, participation in sports and professional life diverted too much blood to women’s brains from their reproductive organs. 

Meanwhile, all this discourse was attendant by race riots, lynchings, unpunished rapes of black girls and women by white men, and other forms of genocidal violence. In 1918, in Valdosta, Georgia, an angry white mob hung an 8-months pregnant Mary Turner upside down by her ankles, doused her with gasoline and set her on fire. While still alive, a man in the mob split her swollen abdomen with a hog knife, and stomped the fetus to death before the rest of the mob riddled Turner’s body with bullets. That same year a mob of whites hung Maggie and Alma Howze from a bridge near Shutaba, Mississippi. Both had been raped by the same white man and were pregnant with his children at the time of their lynching.

Consider also Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood who believed that eugenics and birth control could prevent “biological and racial mistakes.” This contradictory historical figure saw no problem with seeking funding and support from the Ku Klux Klan. The eugenics movement was about encouraging the “fittest” to reproduce and directed toward eliminating undesirables. While thousands of black females, white “degenerates” and “ morons” were legally sterilized in the early 20th century, smut suppressors like Anthony Comstock led successful campaigns to make it illegal to send birth control literature through the mail.

Flash forward to the Obama era.

Since 2011, state legislatures across the country have introduced hundreds of provisions from “heartbeat bills” and fetal pain laws, to encouraging violence against abortion doctors and reducing women’s access to birth control and abortion services. Some right-wing politicians have even sought to redefine rape in a way that would force female victims to carry the fetus to term. Their twisted rationale is that an unborn child should not have to die because of a rapists’ crime.

Last April, Kansas Republican Gov. Sam Brownback signed a bill that bans sex-selection abortions, blocks federal tax breaks for abortion providers, forbids them from giving educational talks to students, and declares that life begins “at fertilization.” 

What will we witness next—a new bill introduced, in a majority-white state of course, declaring that life begins when a man gets an erection? Will Republicans start citing Genesis 38:9 to criminalize men for masturbating and “spilling their seeds” to prevent conception? Okay, I’m being facetious here. But in fact, almost nothing is directed against controlling the sexual behaviors of men, including rapists, unless of course you are a black man accused of some sexual indiscretion with a white woman. But generally, the burden of sexual morality is placed on women. 

Perhaps the worse political gaffe came from Indiana Republican Richard Mourdock, who said he opposed aborting pregnancies conceived in rape because “it is something that God intended to happen.” Are these politicians and their supporters so desperate to boost the population of white babies that they’ll even take those conceived through rape?

While Republicans and Democrats debate the war on women, they have remained conspicuously silent about the intensifying war on black adults and children. If you want a demonstration of the devaluing of black children even as white women of our time are forcibly pushed towards procreation, just do a quick Google search of police assaults against pregnant black women and you’ll see what I mean. There are news stories and graphic videos of visibly pregnant women being cursed at, punched, tasered, kicked, and body slammed to the ground by white police officers. 

Though most of the babies were born uninjured, 17-year-old Kwamesha Sharp wasn’t so lucky. In June 2012, Sharp lost her unborn child when a Harvey, Illinois police officer slammed her to the ground and kept his knee pressed down on her abdomen for an extended period of time. According to court documents the arresting officer, Richard M. Jones, said he didn’t care that Sharp was pregnant. In a few of the other cases, the women were arrested and charged, and the officers’ superiors backed their actions. 

A new video recently surfaced on social media showing a young black mom, who may have been drugged and raped, being strapped down to a chair inside a Warren, Michigan police station, where one officer kicked her and another chopped her hair off with a pair of scissors. 

In addition to physical attacks, black mothers have been fined and jailed for “stealing” education for their children by enrolling them in safer suburban schools. Black parents have had to bury their children. Their names have made headlines: Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Kimani Gray, Darius Simmons, Jordan Davis, Renisha 

McBride. Meanwhile, mass school closures in Chicago, Philadelphia and other urban districts across the country have disproportionately targeted and destabilized children in poor black and Latino communities.

The war on black children and teens is especially mean-spirited. A litany of examples makes me think of what civil rights doyen W.E.B. DuBois wrote in 1920: “there is no place for black children in this world.”