© AP Photo/Don Brinn
In recent years, several children have died after enduring extreme forms of corporal punishment from parents who had absorbed the controversial child-rearing advice of Tennessee pastor Michael Pearl. Now, the
New York Times reports, Pearl himself is under fire.
In their self-published book,
To Train Up a Child, Pearl, 66, and his wife Debi, 60, recommend the systematic use of "the rod" to
teach young children to submit to authority. They offer instructions on how to use a switch for
hitting children as young as six months, and describe how to use other implements, including a quarter-inch flexible plumbing line. Older children, the Pearls say, should be hit with a belt, wooden spoon or willow switch, hard enough to sting. Michael Pearl has said the methods are based on "the same principles the Amish use to train their stubborn mules."
There are 670,000 copies of the book in circulation, and it's especially popular among Christian home-schoolers such as Larry and Carri Williams of Sedro-Woolley, Wash. In September, local prosecutors charged them with homicide by abuse after their adopted daughter Hana, 11, was found naked and emaciated in the backyard, having died of hypothermia and malnutrition.
She had been deprived of food for days at a time, and made to sleep in an unheated barn.
Comment: