Spare The Kids - trade paperback

Spare The Kids - Why Whupping Children Won't Save Black America

A challenge to the cultural tradition of corporal punishment in Black homes and its connections to racial violence in America

Why do so many African Americans have such a special attachment to whupping children? Studies show that nearly 80 percent of black parents see spanking, popping, pinching, and beating as reasonable, effective ways to teach respect and to protect black children from the streets, incarceration, encounters with racism, or worse. However, the consequences of this widely accepted approach to child-rearing are far-reaching and seldom discussed. Dr. Stacey Patton’s extensive research suggests that corporal punishment is a crucial factor in explaining why black folks are subject to disproportionately higher rates of school suspensions and expulsions, criminal prosecutions, improper mental health diagnoses, child abuse cases, and foster care placements, which too often funnel abused and traumatized children into the prison system.

Weaving together race, religion, history, popular culture, science, policing, psychology, and personal testimonies, Dr. Patton connects what happens at home to what happens in the streets in a way that is thought-provoking, unforgettable, and deeply sobering. Spare the Kids is not just a book. It is part of a growing national movement to provide positive, nonviolent discipline practices to those rearing, teaching, and caring for children of color.

Reviews:

“The personal and generational damage Patton lays bare indicts a fearful culture of violence and implicates not only conceptions of good parenting among African Americans, but among Americans at large. This is a must-read for all concerned about the welfare of children, about America’s future, and about the U.S. Constitution’s pledge of ‘We the People’ to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
—Library Journal

“Spare the Kids is a necessary book. Drawing from history, popular culture, and cutting edge research, Stacey Patton makes a careful and persuasive argument against the practice of hitting children. Without condescension or unnecessary moralizing, this book will challenge your most deeply held assumptions and refute your strongest arguments. More importantly, it challenges us to develop a healthier and more humane approach to raising and loving our children.”
—Marc Lamont Hill, author of Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

“Patton brilliantly demonstrates the ways that corporal punishment is indelibly linked to white supremacy, and a continuation of the systemic logic that undergirds it. In that sense, her work is less moralizing—something we already have more than enough of—than a structural analysis of systemic injustice and how that injustice has been transmitted directly, and often brutally, onto the bodies of children.”
—Tim Wise, author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son

About the author: Dr. Stacey Patton is an adoptee, child abuse survivor, and former foster youth turned award-winning journalist, child advocate, and assistant professor of multimedia journalism at Morgan State University. Dr. Patton was formerly a senior enterprise reporter with the Chronicle of Higher Education, where she covered graduate education, faculty life and research, and race and diversity issues. She writes frequently about race and child welfare issues for the Washington Post, Al Jazeera, BBC News, and The Root.com, and she is a weekly columnist for DAME Magazine

• Author: Stacey Patton
• Published: Mar 2017
• trade paperback
• size: 6 x 9
• pages: 256