Christina L. Erickson's "Spanked: How Hitting Our Children is Harming Ourselves"

Christina L. Erickson, PhD, is a social worker and professor who has worked in community social work, health care, and academic settings for over 30 years. She is a Professor of Social Work and Environmental Studies at Augsburg University.

Erickson applied the Page 99 Test to her new book, Spanked: How Hitting Our Children is Harming Ourselves, and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test lands the reader in a chapter called, Spanking Around the World. It’s a quick introduction to what we know about spanking worldwide, and it touches on women’s issues too. Women are the main caregivers to children everywhere, and strangely enough, adult women have been spanked for being naughty too, and not consensually. The end of this chapter summarizes the worldwide conversation among child advocates to end the hitting of children. They’ve got good reasons, consider this quote from page 99.

If we understand spanking as a show of force at the familial level, we can see that show of force represented in our community and at an international level. The nested circles. Violence prevention experts want to reduce violence in all spheres, including the ones in the family, which is the first place in which we experience any form of violence.

This non-fiction book takes spanking across thresholds most people never think about. School paddling, legal reasoning, family privacy, historical methods of child punishment, monkeys hitting offspring, parent-child synchrony, trauma, religion, and a whole lot of scientific data that shows that spanking is bad for kids. Truth is, it’s bad for parents and society too. Spanking’s been handed down across generations like an old family recipe. I know because I was spanked and turned out fine. Spanked takes that long-held notion and reveals what’s behind the real meaning of hitting our children.

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--Marshal Zeringue