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The Kitchen Round Table

a thought piece from Parent.org

To smack or not to smack - that isn't the question?

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Help!!! the Repeal of Section 59 debate is being held hostage by small mindedness

This bill has become a public battle between parent's rights lobbyists and child's rights lobbyists, which is a shame because more fundamental issues are being overlooked.    What is apparent from both these rights based arguments is that reality has left the room.

Imagine if, when drafting the Crimes Act, they had forgotten to include section 59!

Would New Zealand be any different?  After all, they forgot to put an exclusion in for rugby and we don't see lines of police vans outside stadiums every Saturday ready to arrest 30 miscreants for conducting an 80 minute rolling assault.  If they had forgotten to put section 59 in the Crimes Act police would now be ignoring the inconsequential light smack and investigating the real issues of child mistreatment as they currently do.  Why should we expect removing the section 59 will result in anything different? 
Should the repeal of section 59 pass or fail nothing much will change.  Repealing section 59 will not save a single child from mistreatment, and, with a clear mandate to Police and CYFS, should not result in the predicted jails filled with well intentioned parents 

So what is the real issue here, and if nothing is going to change anything - why bother repealling the law?

The most significant thing about section 59 is not how it affects parents choice of discipline but the statement it makes about how parents are valued.   After all, it is just about the only piece of legislation that directly impacts on the role of parenting. 

What Section 59 says to parents, and the world, is that we care so little about the skills, knowledge and quality of our parents that we are prepared to allow them to treat their children in a way in which, if they treated anyone else, they could be imprisoned!  It says that we have set the bar so low for our nation's parents that they need a spade to find it.  As the use of "reasonable force" is the only child rearing method specifically included in legislation it is the only government endorsed method of parenting, and far from being best practice, it is pretty much universally accepted as a last resort in parenting. 
 Perhaps this is why the media never shows parenting leaders or heroes, but only parenting villains - because we have set the criteria of measuring parenting around failure rather than success.

New Zealand has appalling child safety statistics but they are not the result of legislation and they cannot be turned around by simplistic legislative changes.  They are the direct result of 40 years spent deliberately and accidentally eroding and devaluing  the parenting environment  to the point now where parenting is a "no value" vocation.   Section 59 is the banner ad for that environment.  We cannot begin to build a better environment for parents while this embarrassing legislation exists.  It is as if we had a piece in the road code saying "non professional drivers are allowed to run red lights and exceed the speed limit without fear of prosecution" and expect them to drive safely.  Mixed messages don't work - support, education and skills do.

Repealing section 59 is that vital first step to creating an environment for parents that acknowledges the importance of their role and the need for the skills, knowledge and encouragement to do it well.  That's all it is.  It is neither the saviour of children nor the end of parenting as we know it.

So what's the answer?

We need our politicians to take a realistic view of this debate.  If they endorse section 59, or try to modify it to define "reasonable force" they will be endorsing the value that Section 59 places on parenting.  Parents might as well quit while they are ahead and hand their children over to the Minister of Parenting to raise (since we haven't got one - take your pick as to who will do the best job) and bow to government pressure to become tax paying workers.  If they repeal section 59 and think that is the end of it, they should lose their seat for such gross neglect. 

If they can take themselves out of the current political thinking of parents as a "cost" to society, and begin to think what sort of society we could create if parents were viewed as the key to the future and treated as an investment, they would quickly realise that the only significance of section 59 is that it is a barrier to building a world's best parenting environment, and dispense with it post haste.  They can then put their considerable energies into creating an environment for parents that is the envy of the world and the rock on which our future economic prosperity and social harmony will be built.

The Kitchen Round Table will come to you every few weeks, building on this idea of creating a better environment for our parents to operate in, so if you want some brief fresh thinking about social and economic issues look out for your next KRT.  We welcome opportunities to take this discussion further and to do this you can contact Steve Gore on 04 970 4947

Parent.org is a national lobby group promoting this common sense approach to building a better society.  We are a-political, non religious, non-prescriptive.  We simply believe that by creating an environment that encourages successful parenting New Zealand will become a better place for everyone.

Next edition – "We don't need another hero?"

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