Q:
Should parents hit their children?
A:
Let me tell you something. What I’m going to say now is my own opinion. But it says in the tanach that if you love your children, you should smack them. Of course today, unfortunately, it’s a wicked world. A meshuganeh world.
I know a nice boy. A frum boy, a frum family, a nice frum father. His father hit him; this is a boy of thirteen, and he calls the police. Can you imagine? A boy calls the police on his father! It’s a terrible thing! And the police came to speak with the father. The police should have come and hit the boy! “What are you bothering us for? Your father has a right to hit you!” But no, they wouldn’t say that today. They make a committee, child abuse, psychologists visit the home. Meshuga’im!
Another case. A girl went to yeshiva, a frum girls’ school. The school has a dress code and this girl decided she didn’t want to follow the dress code of her school. Finally they said that she has to leave the school. So I said to the parents, “Why don’t you give her a slap and force her to follow the dress code?” So they told me, “Well, she has emotional problems.” So the girl became worse and worse. This school expelled her. She went to another school. They expelled her there too. And now they have even bigger trouble with her.
If you want to save your child, sometimes one slap could save your child. One of my own children once didn’t dress properly when he was young. I gave him a good slap and never did it happen again. The child never did it again and he grew up frum and happy. He even thanks me for what I once did to him. A good parental slap is a bracha min hashamayim, it’s a blessing from heaven.
Of course, you must do it with chochmah, with wisdom. You can say like this, “My child, I love you. I love you very much, but for what you did, I have to hit you. I should hit you four times, but I’ll do you a favor; I’ll only hit you two times instead of four. You’re getting a bargain!” Whatever it is, there’s no such thing as not obeying. A child must obey.
Unfortunately today, it’s such a crooked and wicked world, that they say,” I’m going to call the child abuse committee.” We once had that here too. People in our shul once called in the child abuse people against a couple. And the couple was so angry that they moved away from us because of that. And they were right! Don’t use the child abuse committee at all. These are wicked ideas that the modernists have thought up in order to solve problems that in the olden days were solved very easily. Look at the world outside; they haven’t resolved anything with their committees. The world is getting worse and worse every day because of them.
TAPE # E-240 (October 2000)
