Does sparing the rod spoil the child?

Parenting is a tough turf. It’s also a free-for-all terrain where everyone claims expertness. When in a free fall, parenting is like the blabber around the round leather game, with noisy fans professing possession of better tactics than the god of Tiki-Taka, Pep Guardiola, though they cannot tap the ball into a yawning net from the goal line.

Globally, fans are part of the ‘enu dùn ròfó’ mammoth whose mouths are their only credentials to football expertise, blaming megabucks-earning coaches, game after game, oblivious of strategic soccer details, forgetting that football is what it is; a game, after all. The phoenix must burn to emerge.

I was born at the Lagos Island Maternity Hospital but raised in Mushin. The first sod of the hospital was turned by the Duchess of Gloucester, Princess Alice, on May 13, 1959, while Lady Robertson, the wife of then-Governor General of Nigeria, Sir James Robertson, declared it open on July 20, 1960. This was when imperialist Britain lorded colonialism over Nigeria, years after trampling on Nigeria’s neck with slavery boots.

In barely one year, the sprawling Lagos Island Maternity Hospital, which has midwifed millions of Nigerians, was built with no National Assembly squabbling for kickbacks in the name of oversight functions or appropriation. No ethnic swords were drawn over the location of the hospital, no knives sliced throats over the religion of the hospital’s Chief Medical Director.

Nigeria of the ‘60s and ‘70s was a country, unlike today’s COWntry. Our slavish past is more glorious than our independent present. Why? Because our corruption grows yearly in sophistication while the wheel of our humanity is clogged by greed and wickedness.

About two weeks ago, I travelled online to my Mushin roots, specifically to my family church, the Araromi Baptist Church, on 42, Shokunbi Street. It was the 60th anniversary of my boyhood association in the church, the Royal Ambassadors, whose motto is parked in 2 Corinthians 5:20, “We are Ambassadors for Christ…”

At 60 years of existence, the church’s Royal Ambassadors set out to write a book, “Raising Royal Priesthood in a Delinquent Society: History of The Layode Chapter, Royal Ambassadors, Araromi Baptist Church, Mushin,” after getting approval from the church leadership. I had the honour of editing and reviewing the informative book.

One of the highlights of the week-long programme was the awards presented to past teachers of Royal Ambassadors, in recognition of their roles in moulding the lives of yesteryear boys, some of whom have grown into fathers and grandfathers.

As one of the past teachers stepped out for his award and gifts, there were cheers from Royal Ambassadors. The name of the teacher is Mr John A. Ayanlola aka Boda Ayan. In the Araromi of the 1970s, to bump into Boda Ayan with your guards down was to embrace calamity in its splendour. In the words of Jose Mourhino, “You’re dead,” or as Oba Solomon Agbaye would say, “Iku pa e!”

Boda Ayan! His shadow alone was enough to cure your sickness, let alone his voice from a 100-metre distance. Before the Judgment Throne of Boda Ayan, many of us died many times before our deaths.

Boda Ayan would ask you, “What was the topic of the sermon preached last Sunday?” Before you begin to wonder, “Last Sunday ke, when I don’t even remember today’s sermon,” a cane would creep out from under Boda Ayan’s agbada, ‘chara! chara! chara’, on your head and body, exorcising the demons of forgetfulness in you. So, before you step into church, you must do some mental recollection of the teachings of the past week.

If he doesn’t see you in church, he will contact your parents or visit your home. Only boys who made top-three positions in their schools were spared when he asked for our report cards.

One day, he invited some Royal Ambassadors to his house and made them eba. While eating, one of the boys (name withheld) took another person’s meat, and there was a murmur. He asked what was amiss, nobody was ready to divulge the misdemeanour. They all left his house crying after eating eba.

Despite his sternness, however, Boda Ayan was loved by parents and guardians, who reported their children and wards to him for discipline. No Royal Ambassador escaped the cane of Boda Ayan.

Watching the emotional speech of the now-aged Boda Ayan online, accompanied by his wife, I began to wonder if today’s guardians and parents would leave their children and wards to Boda Ayan’s care or cane.

In his introductory sermon in the book, Araromi’s Shepherd, Reverend Ade Subuloye (Ph.D), advocates proper discipline as a means of instilling godliness in children. Subuloye advises parents not to speak to their children harshly, not to be inconsistent while disciplining them and not to over-discipline them. He declares, “When you rarely reprove your children verbally, restrict them from rebellion, or spank them when necessary, they will wonder if you even care about what they do. (Prov. 13:24; Prov. 22:15; Prov. 29: 15)”

Two world-renowned scholars, Prof Wole Soyinka and Prof Wande Abimbola, however, do not believe that sparing the rod would spoil the child.

In an interview with me, Abimbola said flogging a child as a means of correction was capable of making the child lack confidence. When his mother became pregnant with him, a babalawo had told Abimbola’s parents that no one should beat him when he was growing up.

The former Vice Chancellor of Obafemi Awolowo University says beating children doesn’t make them better, stressing that it ‘kills their sense of initiative, makes them fearful and unsure in making decisions, always seeking validation from a higher authority’.

The daughter of Africa’s first Nobel laureate, Moremi Soyinka-Onijala, gives a glimpse into how the literary giant raised his children, “My dad was a gentle disciplinarian. He didn’t believe in using the stick but a look from his eyes is enough to tell you that you were doing something wrong. He preferred to talk to us rather than use physical punishment.” She, however, said the only time Soyinka beat her was when she followed her friends home in primary school, leaving her younger sibling behind. “He gave me three lashes of the belt,” she recalled.

Buttressing the communal nature of child-rearing among Africans, a Yoruba proverb says four eyes give birth to a child while 200 eyes train him. Throwing in a word of caution against the excessive beating of children, another Yoruba proverb, however, says, ‘the parent who says, beat my child when he’s wrong, is not truly sincere;’ ‘bami na omo mi, ko de’nu olomo’.

From a religious perspective, the Book of Proverbs 23:13-14 recommends the cane as a tool for disciplining the child, saying: “Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you strike him with a rod, he will not die. If you strike him with the rod you will save his soul from Sheol.” Proverbs 13:24 says, “Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him,” while Proverbs 22:15 says, “Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child; the rod of correction will drive it far from him.”

Many African parents who relocated to the West with their children have had run-ins with the law on account of how they punished their children’s wrongdoings.

Though various US state laws permit the use of spanking aka planking to correct children’s wrongdoing, there are limitations to the severity and intent of the beating. No federal law addresses the issue. When it’s proven parents hit their kids not out of discipline, but out of malice, cruelty, or anger, it becomes child abuse, a punishable crime.

The U.S. Department of Education defines corporal punishment as the spanking of a student’s buttocks with a wooden paddle. However, this is not legal in most public schools. Only four states in the US outlaw the use of corporal punishment in private schools.

Corporal punishment in schools has been outlawed in all of Europe, most of South America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, and Israel, which makes the United States one of only two developed countries where corporal punishment in school is still allowed, the other being Singapore.

A consultant psychiatrist, cleric and columnist, Dr Adeoye Oyewole, says it’s wrong to beat children and expect them to change for the better. His words, “Three of my children are in medical school and I never beat them. African parents can’t stand deductive reasoning; that’s why we use the cane to crush the children. Many children who have suffered beatings in Africa turned out good abroad.”

Oyewole, who said it wasn’t the physical rod that was referred to in the Book of Proverbs, maintained that the Word of God was the rod referred to.

But does sparing the rod truly spoil the child?