Is it ever OK to smack your child? Politicians clash on parental discipline as exasperated Sky News presenter SLAPS anti-smacking student on live TV
A political row erupted today over whether parents should be able to smack their children.
Tory Education Secretary Nicky Morgan insisted people should be free to choose how they discipline their sons and daughters.
But Labour’s Ed Balls argued ‘it is wrong to smack children’ while Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg insisted every parent loses their temper sometimes.
And Sky News presenter Colin Brazier grew so exasperated at student Tim Doble saying parents should never touch their child in anger that he slapped him on the hand and told him he was ‘talking out of your backside’.
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Under the law, there is no ban on smacking and parents are allowed to use ‘reasonable chastisement’.
However, they are not allowed to hit a child with an implement or so hard that it leaves a mark, or causes bruising, swelling, cuts, grazes or scratches.
It can be the source of fierce debate in Westminster and in households across the country about whether smacking is ever acceptable, and whether it should be banned in law.
I don't want to criminalise parents if that's the decision that they take to discipline their child
Education Secretary Nicky Morgan
Mrs Morgan, who was being grilled by schoolchildren on TV, insisted that there was a difference between a ‘light tap’ and inflicting serious pain.
She said: ‘I don't want to criminalise parents if that's the decision that they take to discipline their child.
‘There's what we have called reasonable chastisement. I don't know whether it is just a tap on the hand or a mild smack on the bottom but, I think, as politicians, we struggle with this all the time - when does government make a decision or when do we allow parents or carers to make that decision?’
She was taking questions from readers of childrens’ newspaper First News for the Hotseat show on Sky News.
The mother-of-one said the government should not be in the business of telling people how to bring up their children.
But she added: ‘There has to be a line, when we say, no, that is a line that you have crossed and that is a child that now needs support from other people... there have been some terrible cases where children have been abused and some, sadly, killed even by their own parents.’
SKY PRESENTER SLAPS GUEST ON AIRDURING DEBATE ON SMACKING
A senior Sky News host today slapped a guest on the hand during a heated debate on whether parents should smack their children.
Colin Brazier appeared to grow increasingly exasperate with guest Tim Doble, a student who was arguing parents should not have physical contact with their child in anger.
Mr Doble said: 'In the heat of the moment... you cannot justify a really terrible action just because you are stressed with some sort of difficulty with your child.
'If you are a parent, your responsibility is not to lose your cool with your child.'
Mr Brazier repeatedly argued that parents often find themselves in an impossible situation and a small tap could help to bring children in line, before reaching out at taking Mr Doble by the hand.
The presenter, who has six children under the age of 14 with his wife Jo, told him that many parents would think: 'Until you have been there, you are talking out of your backside.'
Later in the debate he reassured Mr Doble that it was a one-off, joking: 'I'm not going to do it again Tim, don't run away.'
Mr Doble later took to Twitter to hit back at his critics, claiming he was being 'trolled' by viewers who disagreed with him.
He later took to Twitter to hit back at critics to targeted him with criticism after his TV appearance
Mrs Morgan was backed by her coalition colleague, Mr Clegg, who said he had not smacked his three boys but would not judge parents struggling with a disobedient child.
The Lib Dem Deputy Prime Minister said there ‘isn’t a simple legalistic answer on what the state tells parents to do’.
Speaking on his weekly LBC radio phone-in, he stressed that violence against children is ‘abhorrent’ and against the law, but disciplining children is ‘a slightly different thing’.
He revealed his own parenting woes: ‘I’ve had this, you have got one of your kids playing up badly in a supermarket, you pull them by the arm so they don’t pull all the baked bean tins down off the shelf. Is that reasonable chastisement?
I think we should say it is wrong to smack children, because if you start to say its ok then it starts to encourage in which the question is: "how hard?"
Labour's Ed Balls
‘We shouldn’t pretend it is easy that you can set down in a law… the point at which physical between a parent and a child which can sometimes be, well hang on a minute you have got to get in the car, or pick them up or whatever.
‘When does that become unreasonable chastisement?’
He insisted that he has never smacked his sons, Miguel, Antonio and Alberto. ‘It’s not something I do. I have certainly not smacked my boys across the back of the legs, no I haven’t.
‘I’m incredibly adamant that no parent should ever make themselves a paragon of virtue.
‘Have I ever lost my patience with my kids? Of course I have. Which parent has not? Any parent who claims they have been angelically patient… yeah right.
‘There isn’t a simple legalistic answer on what the state tells parents to do.
‘But I think we should all as parents and as a society always in the way we treat our own children and other children, treat them with passion and dignity and kindness, love, gentleness.’
However Mr Balls, Labour’s shadow chancellor, insisted parents should never smack their children.
‘I think parents shouldn’t smack children. I think schools shouldn’t smack children. I think we should say it is wrong to smack children, because if you start to say its ok then it starts to encourage in which the question is: ‘how hard?’’
Mr Balls has one son and two daughters with fellow Labour frontbencher Yvette Cooper.
Have I ever lost my patience with my kids? Of course I have. Which parent has not?
Deputy PM Nick Clegg
He stressed that smacking is ‘a bad way to bring up children’ but he did not think the law needed to be changed.
‘I think the law is already pretty tough, and somebody who smacks and marks and hurts a child, of course they should be punished,’ he told Sky News.
While he has not smacked his own children, he had regretted grabbing them.
‘There have been times where if you are standing on the edge of trying to cross a road and your child suddenly leaps out and you pull them back, and you say on the hand ‘don’t do that again,’ and afterwards I will probably think to myself that wasn’t the right thing to do.
‘But in those tense situations sometimes parents do, and I don’t like to do it. I have done it myself; I don’t think it’s the right thing to do and I don’t think you should make that illegal, I think that would be wrong. I think the law is good at the moment.’
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