Ira Glass Endorses Enhanced (Parental) Interrogration Techniques

Do you think you can tell the difference between good parenting and child abuse? It shouldn’t be that hard, right? Well, it was an impossible task for Ira Glass this week, the National Public Radio star of the award winning and extremely popular program, This American Life. Each week, Ira treats his listeners to his wry and ironic take on the stories his guests tell him about their life’s ups and down. He can be inspiring and creative, almost always funny, so when I tuned in this week I was shocked to hear mock torture and punitive justice celebrated as good parenting.

The story was about the childhood memories of Elna Baker, someone who works with Ira on the program. He called the segment, “Regrets, I’ve Had a Few” and introduced it by saying that whenever Elna talks about her parents he is impressed by the “happy originality of some of their parenting moves, the ingenuity that her dad brought to tasks that no parent enjoys”. But then Elna went on to recount what can only be described as the emotional abuse of children. The podcast is 13 minutes long, but if you don’t have time to listen to it yourself, here are the highlights – or should I say low-lights:

If Elna’s dad thought one of his kids was lying to him, here’s how he’d coerce a confession: he’d take a butter knife and hold it over a match or a lighter and threaten to touch it to their tongue. If they were lying, he’d explain, the knife would burn their tongue. If they were telling the truth no harm would come to them. He’d get his confession, all right, but also five crying, fearful children. Ira’s comment? “Elna’s dad tried to do the right thing as a parent, but he didn’t mind entertaining himself in the process.” I’m fairly certain that Ira wouldn’t find spanking or other types of corporal punishment “entertaining”. Why was mock torture something to laugh about?

One day Elna deliberately hit her younger sister with a broom, drawing blood. When she said it was an accident, her father staged a mock trial hoping she’d confess. When she didn’t, her dad decided to let her go scot free. He decided that forcing Elna to live “for the rest of her life” knowing that she’d hit her sister and lied about it would be the best punishment. Here’s how Elna described the impact that had on her: “I carried the guilt of this for most of my childhood. Like in church, when they would talk about lying or sin, this is the thing I would hold onto and relive because it was the worst thing I’d ever done. And then also feeling so much worse because I then lied about it and gotten away with it. I thought a part of me was evil because I was capable of doing it and I was afraid of that part of me because I got away with it.”

After the trial, Elna never hit Julia again but she continued to be mean and cruel to her. Julia filled in the blanks on some wondering questions in a Girl Scout notebook this way: “I wonder why… Elna is so mean to me. I wonder if…anyone likes me. I wonder whether… my sister loves me. I wonder how come… Elna doesn’t like me. I wonder where… I could be happy.” Ira’s comment to Elna after hearing this is to accuse her by saying, “You were awful!” and Elna agrees with him and says “I still feel really bad about it.”

Here are some wondering questions of my own:

I wonder why Ira failed to see that the damage done to Elna and Julia was not Elna’s fault.

I wonder why Ira didn’t tell Elna that she wasn’t awful, her parents were.

I wonder why Elna’s father was so focused on finding culprits and meeting out punishments instead of healing the broken sibling relationship between these two vulnerable sisters.

I wonder how the parenting practices that caused so much emotional pain and suffering could be offered up as funny and praised as creative.

In this season in which we focus so much on bringing joy to our children, let’s examine the ways in which we may be modelling the worst kinds of behavior. Remember that we are responsible for creating environments of love or abuse, environments that will shape our children’s behavior and sense of themselves as good or wicked people. So let’s resolve not punish, threaten, or play cruel mind games with our children – behaviors which we certainly don’t want them to imitate and adopt as their own. One simple thing we can all do this Christmas is to not use the threat of Santa’s naughty and nice list to coerce good behavior out of our children. It’s no different than a hot knife to the tongue. And if your children fight or are mean to one another, please remember that punishment or manipulative parenting techniques cannot cure sibling rivalry; only love can do that.