Do you believe that sparing the rod spoils the child?
The tragic case of Mohamad Thaqif Amin Mohd Gaddafi rightly caught the attention of the nation. His death resulting from alleged beating by an assistant warden at a religious school has shone the spotlight on the dangers of child abuse – not that we need a newspaper report to understand that hitting an 11-year-old with a rubber hose is a horrible thing to do.
By coincidence, other allegations of child abuse recently came to my notice, this time against a family in the United States. Mike Martin runs a YouTube channel called DaddyOFive showing videos in which he and his wife “prank” their children. I put the word in apostrophes because the videos (now removed) showed the parents shouting the F word at their children, encouraging their children to slap each other as hard as they can, and then shouting at their crying 10-year-old son to learn how to “take a joke”.
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