Spanked: How Hitting Our Children is Harming Ourselves is a historical and cultural analysis of the long-accepted practice of hitting children for learning and obedience. The book begins with understanding who spanks and how the practice of using a hand to hit the buttocks of children evolved.
Erickson explores the cultural factors from historical magazine articles and parenting books to contemporary beliefs that support this type of discipline. The book invites an exploration of who we are as parents, and as a society, and what family leadership really means.
Book group questions for families, professionals, and organizations lend the book useful for conversation and dialogue in libraries, living rooms, offices, and classrooms. Erickson gives readers an open platform to discuss respectfully what we are really communicating when we spank children. The book gives parents, health care providers, educators, social workers, faith leaders, and anyone interested in power and family dynamics a platform to respectfully discuss what spanking communicates to children.
Besides reading Dr. Maruggi and his co-authors Sonja Hagander and Megan Borgert-Spaniol interviewed children from different traditions about the most meaningful aspects of their faith traditions. The book highlights their perspectives as well as famous individuals like Dorothy Day and Muhammad Ali and organizations like Sewa International and Bread for the World whose religious convictions are visible in public life.
But a new study in the American Educational Research Journal finds that some of these choices may be causing teachers moral injuryβthat is, the feeling that they or their colleagues are making decisions that go against their deeply held values.
