Seeing little kids and even babies spanked, slapped around, screamed at, threatened and even beaten in KH restrooms, back rooms or mother's rooms when I didn't do that to my own kids (and was criticized for it) was one of the things that was always really disturbing to me.
Being a buttinsky and old enough to get away with it, I actually took a few screaming kids away from their totally overwhelmed moms in the ladies room and got them calmed down, but I did it by offering relief, not being critical. I could almost always get them to quiet down...I've worked in day care for years, and even as a nanny where you cannot lay hands on a child at all and never had any real problems getting kids to behave.
Discovering that there are so many more ways to get a child's cooperation and to calm down without corporal punishment while working in Day Care (And I worked with welfare kids, who were often rather hard nuts to crack) told me that advising corporal punishment as the WTS does was not only stupid and wrong, it was ineffective.
But, the comments above are so true. The competition and pressure to conform is so intense among Witnesses that they will often do literally anything to a child, who doesn't know enough to feel that or be complicit with it, that they literally end up abusing their children out of sheer embarrassment or desperation.
They're so afraid that another Witness will think poorly of them, that they're not "Christian" parents who are doing everything perfectly.
It's so sad...being a Witness kid is horrible. No wonder they have the poorest rate retention for children in their faith. 3/4 of children raised as Witnesses leave it. That's the statistic. Thank God for that, is all I can say.
