Essay, Research Paper: Child Abuse

Smacking and the Damage Done
There has always been a fine line between discipline and child abuse. What a parent thinks is right may not always be what is healthy for a child. “The Broken Chain,” by M.F.K. fisher is an essay about a young girls history of child abuse. Though many people feel that disciplining a child physically is acceptable, abuse is abuse!
In “The Broken Chain,” M.F.K. Fisher feels she wasn’t abused as a child. She saw being smacked was a good punishment for mistakes she would make. Is that always a good reason to smack your child? M.F.K. Fisher wasn’t being punished when she was young, she was being abused. She writes in her essay, “I would be smacked five or eight or ten sharp taps from a wooden brush hairbrush.” Being hit eight to ten times with a wooden brush would be traumatizing for a nine-year-old girl. Hitting your child is not the only answer to punishing your kids, and some parents find that hard to believe. Though on the parents defense, it is most likely the most effective. M.F.K. Fisher goes on to say in her essay, “Rex gave me a slap across the side of my head that sent me halfway across the room against the old sideboard.” Even though M.F.K. Fisher did do something wrong, no one that can’t defend themselves properly deserves to get hit in the face so hard, they fly halfway across the room.
Every parent wants to teach their children to be good kids and one day, be responsible, successful adults. All parents teach their children the way they think they should be taught, and some parents think abuse is the answer. A lot of kids who are abused now, come from families with abuse in the past, much like in M.F.K. Fishers essay. Parents need to know how traumatizing being hit as a child can be and also realizing that abusing your child at a young age can cause more serious problems down the road. Many kids who are abused as children have critical emotional-problems, or are abusing their children when they have them. With these facts, we now know that physical abuse is a mental, hereditary drug,
that can easily corrupt good parents without them realizing what they are doing.
The never-ending war of child abuse is as alive today as it was when it first got started. Until the day when every parent wakes up and realizes how they are harming their children in more ways than one, abuse will never end. Parents as well as children don’t realize they are abusing or being abused until the damage is done. Once the damage is done, parents realize the alternatives in punishing their children. If we all open up our eyes, and begin to see the negativity “punishing your children” does, than we can all start learning from our mistakes and beat child abuse out of our conscience forever.


Word Count: 492