(If you are a troll who has been psycho-sexually harmed by spanking, I beg you not to troll on this blog.)

Watching parents and their babies and children at Mars Hill today, I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Mark Driscoll encouraged parents to register for the Ted Tripp conference, lauding him as an excellent parenting speaker. I am afraid of what will happen to those babies and children if Mars Hill parents take Tripp’s advice.

I have blogged a lot about babies, but it is now time to find out what our excellent parenting expert teaches about spanking children, and I’m going to focus on little girls, one of the most vulnerable groups for sexual predation.

Let’s say that a father is spanking his little girl. Here is the process that Tripp recommends:

1. The father takes the little girl to a private place.
2. He strips the little girl of her pants or pulls up her dress. He pulls down her underpants exposing her bare buttocks (and most likely genitals)
3. He lays her across his lap. We will talk about why he recommends this in a moment.
4. He slaps her naked buttocks painfully with his hand.
5. He spanks her until the little girl is “sweet” and “submissive”. Perhaps he will ask her if she is going to be “sweet” now, or if she needs to be slapped on her naked buttocks again.
6. The two hug and proclaim their love for one another.

No one can deny that this is what Tripp teaches. It is stated in his book, Shepherding a Child’s Heart.

Tripp recommends baring the child in order to increase the pain of the spanking. But the
Stop the Rod website asserts that Tripp teaches: “God demands that parents spank bare bottoms, even infants, and that this brings ‘intimacy’.”

Tripp recommends putting the little girl in a position of physical closeness on the father’s lap in order to “put the spanking in context of your physical relationship” (page 151, Shepherding a Child’s Heart). This disturbing statement would be at home on an adult sexual bondage website and we all know it.

Out of the hundreds of men who are being given this advice at Mars Hill Church, do you think there are some for which this combination of purposeful exposure, closeness, slapping and seeking submissiveness of little girls will be a problem?

Is it possible that the practicing of Ted Tripp’s spanking techniques will trigger something in a certain percentage of fathers who have latent inclinations that they do not even know about?

Many people who are “not really opposed” to corporal punishment imagine spanking to be a perfunctory swat on the backside of a child who just ran in the street or lit the house on fire.

But Ted Tripp’s spanking method is a ritualized process, which emphasizes bare buttocks, physically positioning the little girl to be in contact with the father’s body and the goal of the little girl’s loving submission to the father at the end of the process.

Mars Hill will be exposing these teachings to hundreds of fathers of little girls next week. Are you as worried as I am?

Even for those who do not oppose corporal punishment, there are three scary aspects to Ted Tripp’s advice which could lead to potentially abusive situations for children and babies. As these factors combine, they become increasingly dangerous to children.

Let’s look at these three problems with Tripp’s teaching:
1. Spanking is applied based on the parent’s perception of the child’s attitude or motivation.
Fear, sadness, shock or pain may cause the child to give the appearance of rebellion. Additionally, Tripp seems to invest in a sort of magical thinking that the parent can always know the child’s attitude or motivations.

2. Spanking is good for pre-verbal infants and toddlers.
Pre-verbal children are very vulnerable to abuse, because they are unable to express themselves and do not understand how to placate or submit to a parent. We must also include disabled children, such as those with autism, retardation or Asperger’s Syndrome.

3. Repetitive, painful spankings seemingly have no upper limit.
Tripp advises to spank and spank and spank again until a child is “sweet” (what “sweetness” is will depend on what the parent wants: a happy smile, cessation of crying, a willing hug, or some sort of sense that the parent gets that the child has submitted). An implacable parent may not accept any response as valid “sweetness”, especially if he or she wants to keep spanking.

One father reflects on the spanking process taught in Tripp’s book:

My wife and I were not against spanking - so we figured we could look into implementing his disciplining steps. Basically his steps are:
1.) Describe to the child what they did wrong, or how they disobeyed
2.) Remind them of Eph. 6:1
3.) Give them one spanking
4.) Hug them and tell them that you love them.
5.) If the child's heart does not seem right repeat steps 3 & 4 until it does.
6.) Pray with the child.

We were not crazy about step 5 - seemed more along the lines of "The spankings will continue until you behavior changes".

This father was right in being worried. Luckily, he was wise enough to discern a problem.

Let’s look at a possible scenario with a combination of these three problems. A baby wants to look at the cat in the windowsill while he is sitting on his father’s lap. He leans over to see the cat. The father perceives this as rebellion (the baby is refusing to sit in his lap). He takes off the baby’s diaper and slaps bare skin several times. The baby screams in pain. The father lifts the baby up, but the baby is frightened and in pain and does not stop crying when comforted. The father perceives a “heart attitude” of rebellion, and that the child is not “sweet”. He takes off the baby’s diaper again and slaps bare skin again several times. Once again, the child is not placated by comforting. The father spanks again. And again. And again. He spanks the child until he is finally exhausted and stops crying and falls asleep.

The father has followed Tripp’s expectations. Repeated spankings have made the child quiet and “sweet”. When the father changes the baby’s diaper later, he notices that the marks he left are still swollen on the baby’s bare skin and are painful.

The father’s treatment of this baby was abusive and the baby had no cognitive or emotional ability to understand what had triggered this painful punishment, or how to make it stop.

Ted Tripp will be teaching up to 1,000 young parents at Mars Hill Church in six day

Ever notice how an old song keeps popping up as other bands cover it?  Maybe it starts as a punk song, then a heavy metal artist covers it, and then, who knows who?

 

Christian parenting is very much like a frequently-covered song.  The same melody pops up over and over from generation to generation.  While the ideas may be packaged in sweeter, more acceptable terminology, the basic message is the same. 

 

Ted Tripp’s book is a perfect example of this phenomenon.  Let’s look at the “how” of Tripp’s discipline method for babies.  Please remember that this advice applies to infants and toddlers. 

 

Once a parent has established a rebellious motivation for an infant’s actions, Tripp emphasizes that it is now the parent’s duty to “save” the child from the evil of his own heart.  The child must be restored to the proper relationship with her parents, one of submission.

 

Babies, emphasizes Tripp, must be trained to be submissive literally from birth.

 

He says:

p.134 “Acquaint your children with authority and submission when they are infants. This training starts the day you bring them home from the hospital.” 

 

We will not discuss the frightening implications of this statement, namely that parents must somehow act on newborn babies to make them submissive to the parental will.

 

Tripp believes that the primary (perhaps only) tool to rescue children from rebellion is spanking.  This applies to all children, regardless of age, but he particularly recommends it for small children, because it’s “tactile”.  Yes, you heard that right. “Tactile”.

 

Let’s look at the “rod” process for babies and children as described in Tripp’s book:

 

1. The child or baby is taken to a private place.  (We will discuss the key reason for this in a later post.)
2. The child or baby is stripped of clothing such as pants, underpants or diapers so that naked flesh is exposed..
3. The child or baby is slapped on the buttocks hard enough and long enough to cause pain and crying.

 

Tripp makes it clear that it is to inflict pain.  He speaks disparagingly of parents who do not remove the baby’s diaper beforehand.

 

He says:

p.114 “I have witnessed spankings administered through a double layer of diapers to a child who never stopped moving long enough to know he had been spanked. The spanking was ineffective because the parents never made the rod felt.” 

 

In Tripp’s parenting model, the parent who does not inflict sufficient pain is viewed as a weakling too unloving to properly drive wickedness from the heart of the baby or child.

The most righteous parent is the one most determined to inflict proper pain.

 

(Quotes are taken from Ted Tripp’s book, Shepherding a Child’s Heart.)

 

A google group has been set up called "Stopthehitting", with the purpose of organizing efforts to minimize the influence of Ted Tripp on the city of Seattle.  Join and get connected:

http://groups.google.com/group/stopthehitting

An interesting source of information about Tripp's book, "Shepherding a Child's Heart" is on Amazon.  Read the many concerned and outraged reviews:

http://www.amazon.com/review/product/0966378601/ref=cm_cr_dp_hist_1?_encoding=UTF8&filterBy=addOneStar

Christian homeschooling mom, Susan Lawrence, found a child whipping device being sold in a magazine, and she hasn't stopped fighting since.  Her site covers punitive parenting authors who are obscure outside certain Christian communities.  An essential site for information:

http://stoptherod.net/

Need advice on gentle, attached parenting?  The Gentle Christian Mothers have forums, articles and more. Some of these mothers are very knowledgeable about the tactics of punitive parenting teachers in the Christian community and the pressures that gentle Chrisitan parents face on a daily basis:

http://www.gentlechristianmothers.com/

 

Now that the 8-month old baby can crawl, babble a few syllables and is beginning to grasp object permanence, it is time for him to be held accountable for the evil rebellion that lurks in his heart.

Of course, the ideas of “evil” or “rebellion” could not be explained to such a small baby, nor is there any indication that an infant can understand the idea of accountability or consequences. If a baby that small is “punished”, there is no way of knowing what she thinks is going on, other than that pain has been inflicted. From sheer shock or fear, a baby might stop doing an action and appear to be “obeying”. The baby might continue what it was doing and appear to be “rebelling”. So the results of “punishing” a baby are strictly based on the incidental response of a baby to pain. It may, in fact, look like it’s working.

Shocked or scared into stopping an action, the baby will appear to have "submitted" to its parent. If the baby continues the action, not understanding why it has been "corrected", then the baby will warrant more punishment, inflicted on bare flesh. It all seems so arbitrary, doesn't it?

None of this matters in TedTrippLand. Tripp is convinced that parents can understand the motivations of even pre-verbal infants. It’s not that hard, because most children have mostly bad motivations for most things they do.

From Shepherding a Child’s Heart:
p.24 “Since it is the Godward orientation of your child’s heart that determines his response to life, you may never conclude that his problems are simply a lack of maturity. Selfishness is not outgrown. Rebellion against authority is not outgrown. These things are not outgrown because they are not reflective of immaturity but of the idolatry of your child’s heart.”

Having established the evil tendencies of the baby, it is now a matter of “disciplining” the baby. The child’s wicked motivation and/or action must be corrected and the baby must be made submissive to the parents. Ted Tripp normally recommends the “rod” and “reproof” for this, but since babies don’t talk, it’s all “rod” for them.

From Shepherding a Child’s Heart:
p.105 “The child is a sinner. There are things within the heart of the sweetest little baby that, allowed to blossom and grow to fruition, will bring about eventual destruction. The rod functions in this context. It is addressed to needs within the child. These needs cannot be met by mere talk. Proverbs 22:15 says, ‘Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline will drive it far from him.’ God says there is something wrong in the child’s heart. Folly or foolishness is bound up in his heart. This folly must be removed, for it places the child at risk.”

What might trigger a session with the “rod” for an 8-month old baby. Let’s see what Tripp says:

From Shepherding a Child’s Heart:
The Hat Offense:
p. 106 “Watch a baby struggle against wearing a hat in the winter. Even this baby who cannot articulate or even conceptualize what he is doing shows a determination not to be ruled from without. This foolishness is bound up within his heart. Allowed to take root and grow for 14 or 15 years, it will produce a rebellious teenager who will not allow anyone to rule him. The spanking process drives foolishness from the heart of a child. Confrontation with the immediate and undeniably tactile sensation of a spanking renders an implacable child sweet.”

The Wiggle Offense:
p.154 “When your child is old enough to resist your directives, he is old enough to be disciplined. Rebellion can be something as simple as an infant struggling against a diaper change or stiffening out his body when you want him to sit on your lap.

The Exploring a Bookcase Offense:
p. 154 “When our oldest child was approximately 8 months old, we were confronted with parenting our first mobile child. We had a bookshelf constructed of boards and bricks. Fearing the shelf would fall on him, Margy told him not to pull himself up by the shelf. After moving him away from the shelf, she left the room. As she peeked in on him, she observed him surveying the room. Not seeing her, he headed back toward the forbidden bookshelf. Here was a young child, not yet able to walk or to talk, looking to see if the coast was clear so he could disobey. Obviously, he was old enough to be disciplined.”

My next post will describe the process of inclicting physical pain that Ted Tripp recommends for babies to correct their rebellion.

Ted Tripp will be teaching these principles in our city to a church full of young parents within two weeks time.

At least, that's what Ted Tripp says.

If there’s anything that should warn you off of a child-rearing book, it is that the author admits that your fear of being arrested for using his methods is entirely valid!

Another thing that should warn you off of a child-rearing book is the fact that it has garnered so much concern, by both Christian and non-Christian people, that there is a campaign to get Amazon to stop selling it.

One Amazon customer writes of Shepherding a Child's Heart [emphasis mine]:
"Lest someone accuse me of being a rapid anti-spanker, I'm not. I recognize and accept that there is Biblical support for spanking your children. My problem is with the concept that you MUST spank to be a Biblical parent. What utter nonsense to think that there is only one method in which we can raise Godly children. And, Tripp makes no bones about his beliefs that there is only ONE way to parent your children Biblically, and that is with heavy-handed
spanking. "

"Essentially, this book is a spanking manual. And, when Tripp is not describing the precise method and action for spanking, it is his other message that is so much deeply disturbing than the insistance that you MUST spank. Tripp believes that as Biblical parents, what we must truly control is not the actions but the heart of our children. And to this end, he advocates spanking children not for their actions, but for what we interpret their heart to be. He espouses that if we tie those heart-strings, then we will *know* the heart of our children. And thus, we MUST discipline for what we know of their heart, and discipline until we turn their heart. "

Did you hear that everyone? This book advocates more than physically punishing children for their actions. It advocates corporal punishment for what parents assume to be their motivations and attitudes.

This explains his advice regarding physically punishing babies under the age of two, who are incapable of expressing themselves. The parents simply "know" that the child is acting out of evil motivation.

More on Tripp's teaching about infant spanking comes next.

Ted Tripp will visit Mars Hill Church in Seattle on September 19-20.  He will give a two day seminar on child-rearing.  The Mars Hill website and church bulletin have been advertising this event, which will be provided at the Ballard, Lake City, West Seattle, Shoreline and Bellevue campuses. 

Tripp will undoubtedly be selling his book, Shepherding a Child's Heart at these events.

Ted Tripp and his book express disturbing and harmful ideas about disciplining small children, and even babies.  He will teach these ideas to parents in Seattle, a city where harsh, religious, rod-based punishment techniques are not the norm, to an audience of young parents. These parents are eager to receive advice and aspire to be the best parents possible.

This blog will focus on what advice Ted Tripp will be giving them, and how this could impact many vulnerable babies, toddlers and small children.

I hope that my blog will do two things:

1.  Encourage public response to the decision of Mars Hill to bring Ted Tripp to Seattle.

2.  Educate the public in general, and parents in particular, regarding the harm Ted Tripp's teaching will inflict on children, families and our larger community.