Child Disciplining, Gendering and Symbolic Interactionism

Abstract or Introduction

The salient question for our society is, how can parents cope with this when stereotypical gendering is deeply inculcated into the broader society, and meets resistance even from those who intellectually know the benefits of breaking with a given mode of instruction, yet can’t or won’t break with the way they were socialized as children? And, more grippingly, what if this conflict is present within the home when parents disagree about the value of gender neutral upbringing and concomitant issues of discipline?
The daunting nature of changing the gendered norm is exemplified in the continued prevalence of corporal punishment in our society. Study after study finds that, “almost all children in the United States are spanked by their parents at some point in their lives.” (Sims 170) Though the number of parents who frequently use corporal punishment has diminished in previous decades, the decline is negligible relative to the evidence of its psychological harm on children, its contraindication for changing behavior, and its outlaw in schools and the like. More intriguingly, the use of corporal punishment has not declined in kind with its fall in intellectual support: in fact, it has remained constant. Though the approval rating of spanking declined from 94% in 1968 to 68% in 1994, fully 94% of parents surveyed in 1994 reported spanking their child at least once. (Walsh 82) This suggests that better than a quarter of the population has utilized a psychologically damaging and ineffective form of punishment on their child(ren) even though they are intellectually opposed to it. Additionally, a substantial plurality of both spankers and non-spankers consider the opinions of doctors and other experts on the subject more valuable than that of their parents and other relatives.