Religious Child Abuse Manual

[Rhea]

When my kids were young I had heard a lot about the Pearls and the Ezzos. Creepy, abusive people who claimed that religion made them feel the way they do and religion gave them a mandate to behave this way, and that religion was their reward.

People say, "oh, that's not my Christianity," but it is these people's Christianity and the self-approval they give themselves IS from the old testament of the book they love and worship. What could be bad about religion? Well, if the religion teaches in its book that authoritarianism is divine, some good and strong people will discard ("cherry pick," "cafeteria") away that terrible advice. But many others will not. And the book will instruct them to do terrible things.

Any book that highly praises a man for being willing to murder his son has to be acknowledged for being at high risk for misuse.

Critical review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2278405447

Tedd is condescending and arrogant. He makes it seem like he knows everything about child rearing, and has the audacity to say that if you don’t hit your children you do not take God or the Bible seriously.

Some of what he says borders on legalism. He says that he doesn’t think a girl should go to dance classes, because she will learn idolatrous standards of beauty.

Ted Tripp says children who obey parents will be in a circle of protection where they will be blessed and have long life, but how can this be true when I’ve known kind, faithful, and generous people who died young, or who have seemed to suffer misfortune after misfortune throughout their existence?

Another critical review from this web-site https://www.facebook.com/TendingLambs/ quoted below

Shepherding a Child's Heart by Tedd Tripp is a heavily recommended parenting book in the church. It takes only a little digging to see that Tripp's parenting guide is eerily similar to one that the Pearls or Ezzos might produce, and it even contains elements reminiscent of Gothard's material (such as his 'umbrella of protection.') Here are some of the more alarming quotes from SACH.

"Acquaint your children with authority and submission when they are infants. This training starts the day you bring them home from the hospital." p 156

"The function of the rod and communication is rescue. You must move your child from the peril of rebellion and disobedience back into circle of safety. The child has not just disobeyed mommy or daddy. He has disobeyed God." p 158.

"Obedience defined...
without challenge
without excuse
without delay." p 160

"It is easy to think unclearly about obedience. When you say to your child "Dear, I want you to go to bed now." there is only one appropriate response. It is not 'May I finish coloring this page?' It is not 'Why do I have to go to bed so early?' It is not to ignore you entirely. There is only one obedient response, it is to go to bed without delay. If you accept any other response, you are training your children to disobey. Remember what is at stake; that it go well with your children and they enjoy a long life." p 161

"When they disobey, they are moving out of the circle of God's blessing into a place of grave peril." p 162

"When does a child need a spanking? When you have given a directive that he has heard and is within his capacity to understand and he has not obeyed without challenge, without excuse or without delay. He needs a spanking. If you fail to spank, you fail to take God's Word seriously. You are saying you do not believe what the Bible teaches about the importance of these issues. You are saying that you do not love your child enough to do the painful things that God has called you to do." P 171

"The "How" of Spanking
Take your child to a private place where he can be spoken with in privacy.....
Tell him specifically what he has done or failed to do....
Secure an acknowledgment from the child of what he has done.
Remind him that the function of the spanking is not venting your frustration or because you are angry, but to restore him to the place in which God has promised blessing....
Tell the child how many swats he will receive. (this is an important signal that you are in control of yourself)
Remove his drawers so that the spanking is not lost in the padding of his pants. This should be done at the last possible moment. They should be returned as soon as you are done. It is best to lay the child across your lap rather than over a bed a chair. This puts the spanking in the context of your physical relationship....
After you have spanked, take the child up on your lap and hug him, tell him him how much you love him, how much it grieves you to spank him and how you hope it will not be necessary again. This keeps the spanking referenced to restoration, not retribution. At this point, there should be complete restoration between you and yoru child. If he is mad at you, if he refuses to receive your affection, then something is wrong....If the discipline has not yielded a harvest of peace and righteousness, it is not finished. On some occasions we have had to say to our children "dear, Daddy has spanked you, but you are not sweet enough yet. We are going to have to back upstairs for another spanking." p 173-174

 

[southernhybrid]

I'm pretty sure I read about this awhile back. It's disgusting. My own father used to beat us with a belt, but it had nothing to do with religion. He was raised by mentally ill parents, and his mother was very abusive. It was very common to spank or beat children when I was growing up. I stood up to my father and got him to stop the beatings, but my sister suffered from his abuse for years. He did become religious when I was about 6 or so and those beliefs might have made him feel justified in how he punished us. My mother was a convert to evangelical Christianity when I was about 5, but she refused to spank us. She was never spanked as a child, so that might have been why. My father was always trying to get her to hit us with his belt because she said it hurt her hand to spank us. She refused to use the belt.

I will say this. My reaction to how I was treated, was to decide that I would never hit my own son. His father disagreed with me about that, but I told him I considered spankings a type of child abuse, so I won. While I don't think it happens anymore, when I first moved south, it was very common for mothers to carry around a stick to use on their children if they misbehaved. Spanking or beatings are still common here, among people in the lower socioeconomic classes. If the beatings leave a mark, DSS will sometimes get involved, but it's done very inconsistently. I honestly don't know how much of this is tied to religion or culture. I just hate it for the children who are victims.

When I volunteered in a local elementary school about 20 years ago, kids were still being paddled by the principle at times. This is still legal in many states, although I don't know if it's done very often. That really upset me, especially because the only two boys that I remember being paddled were black kids that came form very dysfunctional, poverty stricken homes. It's wrong to hit kids. I wonder if the origins of this came from religion. It's very sad that it's still going on today.

Oh wait. I just remembered something. My own son was hit by his teacher once when he was in 2nd grade. I marched up to the school and told that teacher never to hit my son again. She said something like, "spare the rod and spoil the child". You can imagine how that made my blood boil. I think I told her that I was an atheist and I didn't hit my child and didn't want anyone else to either. She started to cry and I felt sorry for her. She was an older black teacher and I was a young, outspoken white woman. I told her not to be upset. I just didn't want it to happen again. The good thing that came out of my complaint was that the principle decided that the children in the school would no longer be subject to any type of corporal punishment. The reason my son was hit was because, "he wasn't paying attention in class".