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not normalize hitting their kids, and still don’t. Landing on the shores of the “New World,” the European Christians steeped, or so they believed, in the gentle spirit of Jesus, found it appalling to witness that the “savages” of North America avoided the corporal punishment of children.[12] By contrast, the Puritan ethic was to “engage rod and reproof,” in the words of one seventeenth-century Massachusetts minister.[13] This ethos may have fallen from favor since then, but not entirely. “To hold the no excuse for physical punishment theory,” writes Jordan Peterson (italics his), assumes “that the word no can be effectively uttered to another person in the absence of the threat of punishment.”[14] The good professor’s “another person” is, in this case, a two-year-old, whom elsewhere he charmingly calls “the determined varmint.” For Peterson, steeped in behaviorist ideology, discipline is often a matter of intimidating children, something we can accomplish, he writes, because we are “larger, stronger and more capable than the child” and can, therefore, back up our threats. He proudly boasts, “[When] my daughter was little, I could paralyze her into immobility with an evil glance.” In Britain, two headlines in the Telegraph from 2011 and 2012, respectively, signaled that such attitudes are far from isolated: “The Rod Has Been Spared for Far Too Long: Allowing Teachers Even the Lightest Touch of Physical Force Will Improve Discipline” and “School Discipline: Sparing the Rod Has Spoiled the Children—What Can Be Done to Reverse the Collapse of Discipline Since the Banning of the Cane?” Back in the world of science, the American Academy of Pediatrics, having reviewed nearly one hundred studies, issued a statement in 2018 that aligns with ancestral wisdom. It called for the end of spanking and of harsh verbal punishment of children and adolescents. Such treatment, the organization of sixty-seven thousand pediatric specialists pointed out, only increases aggression in the long term and undermines the development of self-control and responsibility. By elevating stress hormone levels, it may cause harm to healthy brain development and lead to mental health problems.[15] More recently, a Harvard study showed that the damage wrought by spanking to the child’s nervous system and psyche may be as severe as that caused by more