Pearl Debates Heimlich in The Christian Post

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1. Debate with Pearl in The Christian Post | Why Not Train A Child? on September 16, 2013 at 3:41 pm

   […] debated Michael Pearl in a video which was featured in The Christian Post.  Although, I did mention the debate at the time as well as Samuel Martin’s Rebuttal to one of his statements, I never gave my own […]

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2. Teri on March 16, 2012 at 8:12 am

   He says that the book is hardly about spanking, only about 1% of it. If you go through the book, it instructs you to spank in almost every paragraph. He is, once again, trying to play with words. He says that it’s not “spanking”, it’s “training” — which involves using a switch to smack the bare skin of an infant, of course. This is not spanking, he says, it’s training. THIS is how he justifies saying that only 1% of his book is about spanking…. because the rest is training, which is actually spanking, but whatever. He also throws out statistics that he just pulls out of the air, apparently.

   I’m going to quote this one:

   He also denied that he recommends spanking “because the Bible says so,” as some journalists suggested before, and said he would not “hide behind the Bible” to excuse violent methods of child-rearing. In fact, he said, religion should not be used as an excuse for practicing certain child raising methods.

   “When you start using God against your children and use religion, then you start driving them away from God,” he said. “And the parent begins to think that they have an authority that goes beyond that which is rational and sane.”

   “I think that all about parenting methods ought to be open to the ring of public debate,” Pearl added. “I would never hide behind the Bible, behind a divine document, and say that we do these things because God told us to do them. If they’re not sound, if they’re not sound psychologically, they’re not sound emotionally, if the fruit of them does not prove to be positive then we should not do it. That’s why I have done extensive study and discovered dozens of studies that confirm that spanking has positive results when it’s done by loving parents. And on the other hand, when parents don’t spank their children, but use (alternative) methods, they get less effective results.”

   But, his book is all about how God commands parents to use the rod, and how they are representing God when the discipline. His books are all about how this is what God wants, and to do any less is to go against him, and to raise children who may not enter heaven, but are sure to enter prison.

   This is how he and his supporters constantly try to defend this way of discipline. Then, he throws the word “happy” in as much as possible. I can assure you, I may have smiled a lot, and if you asked if I was happy, I may have said I was, but I was NOT a happy child. I played the game because I had to in order to keep from being “disciplined”.

   I hope people can open their eyes and see this for what it is: manipulation and distortion of truth.

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