Michael Pearl Gets More Attention

The death of Hanna Williams has brought an ever increasing amount of attention to Michael Pearl and his child training methods. Yesterday, the New York Times ran an article on Michael Pearl called “Preaching Virtue of Spanking Even as Deaths Fuel Debate.” It was on the front page, so I just thought I’d draw everyone’s [...]

A Self-Created Problem

For a long time, I couldn’t understand how anyone would turn down God’s gift of salvation. Who wouldn’t want to be saved? But really, the answer to that question was right in front of me, and I should have seen it. I was taught that the first step of evangelism involves convincing a person that [...]

How Many More Must Die?

And so it continues. Another child has died as a direct result of Michael Pearl’s teachings. How many more must die? MOUNT VERNON, Wash. – The parents of an adopted girl who died of exposure in her own backyard after she had been starved and abused for months pleaded not guilty to the charges Thursday. [...]

Michael Pearl in 1831

Michael and Debi Pearl’s child rearing methods are not new, but are rather a return to ideas about children common in the earlier part of our nation’s history, as this story from the American Baptist Magazine illustrates.  In it, Francis Wayland has the same goals and uses the same reasoning, arguments, and methods as those [...]

Genesis, the Fall, and a Patriarchal God

Have you ever really stopped to ponder “the fall” as narrated in Genesis? I have. And it seems to me that the story is highly problematic, and actually shares a good bit in common with the beliefs and practices of Christian Patriarchy. Let me explain.  It goes like this: Genesis 2:8-9 – The LORD God [...]

Parenting, Belief, and Expectations

Today I watched this video. It is a talk at a Secular Student Alliance conference by high school student Jessica Ahlquist. It’s weird, if I had watched this video even five or ten years ago, I would have looked at her and seen myself; I would have seen Jessica on the level of a peer. Today, [...]

Michael Pearl on CNN

CNN has investigated the case of Lydia Schatz, spanked to death by her parents following the Pearls’ methods. The Pearls defense is as follows (for full text see here): It has come to may attention that a vocal few are decrying our sensible application of the Biblical rod in training up our children. I laugh [...]

A Transition in Motherhood

I’m thinking about starting a new series here on my blog consisting simply of snippits from my research and studies that I think my readers might find interesting. So today you get a section from Julia Grant’s Raising Baby by the Book (page 15) on the transition from extensive to intensive mothering: For seventeenth- and [...]

Parenting Is Not A Contest

Last week my husband and I saw a movie on campus. As usual, we brought our little daughter Sally with us. She behaved very well, sometimes sitting beside me, sometimes nursing, sometimes walking up and down the stairs (we sat by the aisle). When the movie finished we got up and prepared to go. Sally, [...]

The Fruit of Spanking: Rage and Shame

As I remember it, my parents didn’t spank me all that often. When I was spanked it was usually just three wallops with a wooden paddle. My mom only rarely bruised us, and my dad actually went easier on us than she did. Sometimes mom would save us for dad to spank, and he would [...]

Giving the Child the Rod

I don’t know exactly when it happened, but at some point early on my mom handed me the rod. She told me I was to spank my younger siblings if they misbehaved or broke any rules and she was not in the room. The rule was that I could spank any sibling at least five [...]

Casting the Pearls back to the Swine

It is a strange reality that Michael and Debi Pearls’ child training methods were driven into me so firmly as a child that I didn’t even think to question them when I left Christian Patriarchy behind. I still believed that children must be trained to obey their parents unquestioningly, that children should be spanked starting [...]