The following is a transcript of our conversation with Tori Williams Douglass. It has been lightly edited for clarity. You can listen to the STRONGWILLED podcast wherever you normally get your podcast content, or listen here on the Substack app.
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“The fact is that you can take this ritualized parental violence against children and get the same mental health outcomes as kids who were raised in a war zone. It tells me a lot about how little they [religious parenting experts and adherents] actually cared about the outcomes of the kids that they were hitting.”
—Tori Williams Douglass
Tori is an anti-racist educator who also loves to nerd out about neuroscience. Be sure to check out their website, podcasts, patreon, and follow them on social media.
Corporal Punishment and Brain Development: An Interview with Tori Williams Douglass.
D.L.: Welcome to the STRONGWILLED Podcast. We're so excited to be here . . . and to be talking about corporal punishment? Not really, but we're very excited about our guest and getting to nerd out about a topic that honestly, if you bring it up at parties, you know, it just doesn't go well. So maybe that's why I'm excited today, Krispin, is because I get to talk about a topic that I've been studying a lot that nobody wants to talk about.
Krispin: Right, how often do you get to talk about corporal punishment with a friend?
D.L.: I mean maybe Tori does this often. That's something we will have to ask them. But we're so excited. This is the third time we've interviewed you for our podcast that has changed names throughout the seven years, right?
Tori: Yeah.
D.L.: Yes, Tori, this is me just always having an excuse to talk to you and to see what your brain thinks about certain things. So today we're talking to Tori Williams Douglas, who happens to know an awful lot about the topic of what corporal punishment does to the brain. Tori, anything else you want to tell people, about yourself and your expertise on this?
Tori: I mean, I don't think I'm an expert. I'm more of just like a data nerd, you know? And because it impacts me personally. So I'm always kind of curious about, about this. And I'm the oldest of five kids and I have a lot of friends who were raised with religious authoritarian parents and who are now out of that. I feel like I kind of won the getting out of church deconstruction lottery because almost all of my siblings are out, all of my best friends are out and people understand where I'm coming from. But yeah, this is not a subject you can just like bring up with somebody at a party. At least that's what my therapist tells me.
Krispin: *giggles*
D.L.: Wow. Well, we're so excited to have you here now, and just to catch people up —because some people listen to the podcast and don't read our Substack —we did publish a piece on corporal punishment. And Krispin, do you want to just quickly talk about the meta-analysis of the research?
Krispin: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one of the biggest things is that for religious authoritarian parenting people like James Dobson, they're like, there's no research out there that says spanking is harmful. And that is just completely untrue.
D.L.: They say like the way we prescribe spanking, nobody has done research on that. So, I mean, Tori, can we just talk about this for a second? I think in the cultural zeitgeist, right, there's this idea that spanking has just always happened and corporal punishment against kids has always happened specifically in European contexts and the Protestant context, and I'm really deep into that research, but what's interesting is us focusing on like James Dobson and the resurgence of religious authoritarian parenting in the 70s — Dobson, Bill Gothard, Ted Tripp, Tim and Beverly Lahaye, they all had this method for how they taught parents to spank their kids. Which is you do it in a supposedly calm and logical manner. You tell the kid that you're going to do it. You tell them you're doing it to obey God. Then you spank the child, and then you connect with the child. So you have the child hug you, and you make it all about the parent's feelings by saying, “This hurts me more than it hurts you, but I'm obeying God”. You know, all this kind of stuff. And they're like, this is the best, it doesn't impact kids negatively at all, and no research has been done on it. So I just want to hear your thoughts real quick on all that I just threw at you.
Tori: Yeah, I mean I suppose they're right in the sense that like the ritual part of it, like there wasn't a lot of research that was being done on that. But like, yes, people were doing research on hitting kids in the sixties and seventies. This is not like a brand new, like, oh my God, we didn't know. Right. Um, and I think that this is really an interesting thing that I see a lot of the time in evangelicalism is like trying to kind of get around the it by saying “Well, the way we do it doesn't cause harm” And so you just get to like unilaterally make that statement, which is, um, you know, I don't even want to call it gaslighting really. Because they just make these like really definitive statement. I said you weren't harmed, you weren't harmed, period. And like, the pastor gets to say that to you, like, your parents get to say that to you. So yeah, I mean, I guess in the sense that they're like, Oh, well, if you hit your child out of love and not out of anger, then it's different.
And like, the thing that I've been saying for years is: your kid's nervous system can't tell the difference between being hit in love and being hit in anger. It registers the same way, right? And I think anybody who's acting in good faith would question that assumption of like, Oh, it's different, right? As long as you're like calm and kind and loving and explaining it to them, it'll be different. But that's not how nervous systems work. Right?
Krispin: The research was really interesting to me because I love attachment science and there are studies that find like even in parent child dynamics where there's secure attachment or there's like high measures of parental warmth that it did not undo the negative impacts of spanking. like the spanking still had the same impact that it did on other kids.
Tori: Yeah, absolutely. I try to make it more personal by trying to take things that come out of religious authoritarian parenting or just like authoritarian spaces in general, and try to take another example so that I can be a little bit more detached. And to me, it's like, is there a difference between lovingly placing your kid's hand on a hot stove versus angrily placing your kid's hand on the hot stove? Like, yeah. What's the difference in the burn?
Krispin: That is such a good way of putting it.
Tori: Right? And the way that my sister Alice—who is an amazing comedian—the way that she puts it always is like if you run over my foot with your car on purpose or an accident like the injury is the same, right?
Like there's not like more injury if you're mad about it, you know, as opposed to it being premeditated. Which—like since when did like premeditated violence, make it better or less harmful, right?
D.L.: Well, I think that's what our project is all about, is the premeditated approach that Christian publishing, I won't even go into just, it's only white evangelicals, I'm going to say Christian publishing in general, promoted. They promoted these patriarchal, authoritarian methods of controlling children and making them compliant and they sold this idea of premeditation as the way to not hurt kids.
And I'm just so upset at that. But before Krispin and I started doing this project, I had never heard anyone talk about the way of doing it as Dobson and Gothard and other people described as ritualized, but it totally is. I'm just wondering your thoughts on that element, if that could even add extra stress to a kid once you know the drill. Because from what I've looked at in the research is that the anticipation [of violence] can lead to some really long-term impacts.
Tori: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that the cognitive dissonance is really brutal, right, on your nervous system. Like, your parent gets mad and they smack you, whatever. In a way that makes logical sense, right? But the kind of calm, collected, part of it is really, really incongruent, and so it's really hard to process. You can explain , my parent was angry and they hit me, right?
You can't explain: I'm covered in bruises and I'm crying and my mom is laughing and saying, This is cause of the Lord. Okay, wait, what? You know, it’s that piece of it, to me . . . . Obviously, like, some of this is projection, I don't have a ton of data on it. But, like, it's so much harder to make sense of. It’s very easy to make sense of: I did something wrong, my parent is mad, they hit me.
Krispin: Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking about this element of what we're thinking about is the unpredictability piece, right? And some of the research even talks about like, Kids that are spanked are much more attuned to facial expressions, even neutral ones, right? Like, they have that danger response. And so, thinking about that, if you know, my dad's in a bad mood and I need to avoid him that is different than, like, I don't know if this is going to get me hurt. And the thing is that as adults, I think they think this is logical and this makes sense. But to the kids, they don't because there are all these rules. And who knows when you cross the line and when you don't, I think that's sort of the narrative.
We even just did a podcast episode about Adventures in Odyssey where Mr. Whittaker spanks his grandson and his grandson later does something wrong. And he was like, you can spank me. I know that you will spank me. And Whit’s like, no, I'm not going to spank you. Why would you think that? And that's the whole point because you've said that if you disobey, you get spanked, but not every parent spanks their kid every time they disobey. Like, how are they supposed to tell when it’s going to happen?
Tori: Yeah. Yeah. And so there's no way to, at least for me, right? Like, just speaking from my own experience, there was no way to keep yourself safe. Right? Because, I tried to negotiate this with my parents very explicitly. I was like, can we at least make a rule that if we don't know the rule, you can't hit us for it? Like, you can't make it up on the spot and then hit us. And I got a concession on that finally. I don't think it always stuck, but it was better than the surprise of oh, you broke a rule that you didn't know existed, right? Because, yeah when there's no way to anticipate it, there's no way to keep yourself safe.
And so you're just always in this hyper vigilance, which DL, as you pointed out the other day, leads to paranoia. So your baseline is you can't ever be calm because your parents could be in a bad mood.
D.L.: Okay, I think all of this is so true and then the mindfuck of being raised in an evangelical or religious authoritarian home, right, is that the kid becomes hyper vigilant whereas the parents are like, everything's going great! And my kid, you know, like I just have to spank them every once in a while. Of course, some people spanked their kids all the time. Like there's such a continuum of how people actually practice corporal punishment. This is kind of hard to even talk about just because there is such a variance. But I think what all three of us are trying to say is well, it doesn't matter how often you did it. If you were angry or not, even the severity of the physical abuse, I mean, of course, that does play into it.
But if you're causing your child pain of any kind, right? It's like, wow, the impacts are sort of the same. But the parents in these scenarios are like, no, our kid's fine. Like the kid just goes on their merry way and we hugged. We had a prayer session. The kid cried. The kid now feels great. Relationship restored. We're well on our way to our family legacy. You know, that is like how my parents thought of it. They had no clue that I was developing hypervigilance, right? Which I totally was, because who wouldn't in this scenario, right?
Tori: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think that there's a piece of . . . I don't think our parents really understood fight or flight, right? People didn't really understand PTSD when we were kids. That was still kind of a newfangled idea when we were growing up and it applied to people who like came back from wars, right?
It didn't apply to people who were being very calmly hit by their parents. So that makes perfect sense to me and the thing that stuck out to me about the episode you did about Adventures in Odyssey that was so interesting is because there's already a fracture in Whit's relationship his daughter already. Like, very clearly.
And so it's interesting to me that they knew. Like, they knew this shit was not gonna work. Like, I'm sorry. They understood that this is a really serious line to cross, right? I knew by the time I was, like, I don't know, six, seven, eight? It was like, if my parents ever put a finger on my child, they will never see that person again. I knew that when I was little, like, elementary school age. Because I was like, nope, this isn't right, you know? So I'm not entirely sure that, or rather, it's again, the cognitive dissonance for me of The parents are just like, Oh yeah, everything's fine, everything's great. And then it's like, Oh, my kid won't talk to me.
Well, I tried to talk to you probably thousands of times considering the fact you were the only person I could speak to because I wasn't allowed to go to school because there were demons there. Right. So I did try to communicate with you about what my values were around this and you chose not to listen and just decided unilaterally that everything was fine.
And I think that there's something really interesting that needs to be explored about the idea of causing harm, right? And you don’t get to decide I didn't cause harm. You were not harmed by this, right?
D.L.: hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.
Tori: That is worse than just being like, oh yes, I fucked up, I'm sorry. Like, that's so much worse.
Krispin: Yeah, and one of things that I've been thinking about with this is how a lot of people our age, but also younger folks are going low contact or no contact with their parents. And I don't think people talk about spanking very much, but I think that what you just talked about is a really good point. If the framework is like, if I bring my hurt to you, you just say it didn't hurt you or it was God's will. Like, this is how God wants it or whatever. So I don't have a lot of options to bring my hurt to you. I'm just going to expect to be dismissed and therefore I'm just going to pull away. Because my two options are: continue the dysfunction in this painful relationship or pull away. But the idea of expressing what's wrong and being heard doesn't feel like it's going to happen, because it hasn't happened from a very young age.
Tori: Mhm.
D.L.: I, feel like Tori, what you are talking about is really sort of blowing my mind because for people who grew up with parents like this . . . I mean I never once expected they would apologize for spanking me. And that's just so sad because I have been talking about this on social media a lot. And I obviously shared my personal story on here. And, As well, my parents do have conspiracy theory, um, issues. I don't know the way to say it — conspiratorial thinking issues? And a part of that is not trusting science and not trusting what the research says about spanking. And you're absolutely correct that there was already tons of discussion about this happening in the 60s, 70s, especially the 80s, the 90s, by the time I was six. Yes. Like the general consensus was: that's not a great way to get your kids to behave, even. Plus it's not great for the kid.
But my parents had been so trained by evangelical Christianity to automatically ignore, you know, science. I mean, my parents were young earth creationists. My grandpa worked for NASA. And my dad became a young earth creationist. Like, isn't that amazing? So something is happening there.
Krispin: Because your grandpa did, even though he was like a conservative Christian in a lot of ways, did believe in evolution.
D.L.: I remember when he told me that he believed in evolution I was like, 11. I was like, oh my god, grandpa, are you going to go to hell.
But I feel like there's this element [of conspiratorial, anti-science thinking] to all these discussions, right? For so many of us, if our parents were all in on these methods, there's no way to talk about the harm from a scientific standpoint and also from a personal standpoint.
Tori: Right.
D.L.: And maybe I’m focusing on the scientific because it hurts less because the personal hurts real bad and I don't really like to think about it, you know
Tori: Yeah, absolutely I think that you really kind of nailed it in that our parents were just taught not to trust anyone except like their leaders. So whether or not it was, it was Dobson or I don't know, like a Pat Robertson or some TV preacher or whoever, it was: everybody in the outside world is lying to you. You can deny what you're seeing with your eyes, and just trust the Bible, because the Bible has been the same for however many thousands of years, and it doesn't change. Everything else around you is changing, and the scientists are always changing their minds about what the best thing to do is.
So you can't trust that. But also the dehumanization of children was also in there. So when the science starts saying children are full people and you're not birthing a blank slate. Again, it was like the scientists are like changing their minds again, they're trying to tell us that kids are people and that it actually is going to matter and it’s harmful for us to use scripture to discipline our children.
It's interesting because the people that gravitated towards evangelicalism, at least, you know, talking to like my friends about their parents, it's like, they all experienced trauma too. It wasn't the same kinds of trauma, but like, they were all pretty traumatized. People in different ways wanted the cut and dry: here's the answer. You don't have to go searching anymore. Like, yeah, you're broken. But that's okay. You don't have to do anything about it because Jesus already handled that for you, right? And so now it's we just get to give you these instructions and you follow them and you get this output.
I'm not convinced that they actually believed that this would have no consequences for their relationships with their children when their children were grown. I remember you posted something about focus on the family putting up something where all these parents are reaching out to them being like, I did everything you said and my kids won't talk to me!
D.L.: Yeah, I mean, Focus on the Family is now cashing in on all the estrangement happening. But, I mean, this is not just in like Evangelical world, boomer parents are freaking out and I guess there's a psychologist guy who's wrote a book on like the epidemic of adult children going no contact and you know all this stuff and so I think there's just this panic out there and people really don't want to . . . well I'm going to say all of us, none of us, want to face how impactful these experiences are in early childhood.
I wish it wasn't, you know, if I could be perfectly honest. Doing the research is so triggering partly because you're like, Oh shit. It does impact us. What’s been an “Oh shit” moment for you in the research, Tori? I'm going to ask you that too, Krispin.
Tori: I think that for me it was like the idea that you can, Air quotes, “discipline away” learning differences or disabilities, right? That you can discipline your child into learning normally, right. Which then means you're dealing with the punishment of kids for having ADHD or autism and that is really activating for me personally. And I've really been able to like explore because I'm just like, ugh, yuck. That's a thing that they did, for sure, because ADHD wasn't a real thing. It was just like, oh your kid's not focusing. You just need to discipline them and train them to be focused on their schoolwork or whatever the thing was, right? And the idea of harming kids for their disabilities is like, blech. That's a big yuck for me.
D.L.: And you're saying that it “works” some of the time. It obviously doesn't work all the time, but I just think about how many of us who were not diagnosed neurodivergent in any way, and how this discipline worked to get us to conform, to get us to fit. For me, it was to fit into my assigned gender role, right, to live the life of a straight white female — get married, have kids, and all that stuff. And I'm just like, oh, it's so sad
Tori: Mm hmm.
D.L.: What I hear people all the time bemoaning is the state of the youth now, right? Oh, they all have a mental illness. Oh, they're all gay. Oh, they're all autistic. And what's fascinating is like well, a lot of us older people were that too, we just got it disciplined out of us.
Krispin: Yeah, we just weren't talking about it. I mean, I think you're an example of really disconnecting from that. But I think about myself. Like, I knew on some level that I had a lot of mental health issues as a teenager. But I just didn't talk to anyone about it because I had no concept for talking about it.
Tori: it wasn't safe.
Krispin: Mm hmm.
Tori: Like, your parents are not safe people to talk to. So, I don't know why they're so surprised. It's like, what kind of relationship can you really have with someone who's not safe to communicate with?
D.L.: And that, again, there's so many layers to talking about corporal punishment and discipline of children because what you're saying is one of the hallmarks of what makes it so problematic in the long term. For instance, my parents did not want us crying about getting disciplined, right? My parents did not want us angry about it. My parents did not want, big emotions, right? It's like, so not only are you getting disciplined, but you can't have the appropriate physical reaction that your body probably wants to have to being hurt.
Tori: Yeah.
D.L.: And so you learn to repress those feelings and you learn to dissociate from your body and your emotions.
Now, if you learn that in childhood — and again, a lot of this is happening when kids are like two and three. Right, I think two and a half is like the age where it kind of crescendos, I think, to the highest amount of spankings, based off of people who, who willingly report that they spank their kids. And that kind of shit has impacted me for so long and it also impacts my relationship with my parents, right, if I had to suppress my actual feelings. So, yeah, that's what I do now, too, guys. Sorry. What goes around comes around, you know what I'm saying.
Krispin: I want to hear your oh shit moment D.L.
D.L.: Oh, well it changes every week, um, but one of the ones I'm really interested in right now is, I'm reading a lot of Alice Miller, and she's looking at all the German parenting experts in the 1700s, 1800s, and they are just like Dobson. They're like, listen, if you do this [corporal punishment] a bunch with your kids when they're two, they won't ever remember and all they'll know is that they want to follow the rules and they'll do it willingly and they'll go to school and they'll mind their teachers and then they'll mind the government and it's all going to be great. But you have to eradicate the will of your child when they are two and every single time they show their will you must show them yours is stronger.
And I mean I know that was happening in a lot of our families honestly because Dobson and all these people they were obsessed with the toddler years and I'm like German philosophers and teachers they were obsessed with that in the 1700s and that's also true of the Protestants in America in the 1600s, 1700s. So it kind of goes back to your point of people knew what they were doing, and this has been widely talked about among Protestants in particular, because Protestants have this funny little belief, right, in the inherent sinfulness of the self.
And if you believe that about yourself as an adult, it makes sense why you want to eradicate that in your children. And they're like, it just makes it so much easier if you crush that in a child when they're young. You don't have to do all that work when they're older. And to me, I'm just like, wow, this, they've been saying this out loud this whole time, you know.
Tori: I mean, I think the will crushing piece is interesting because I think that that ties pretty directly into the like mental illness output that there,
D.L.: the pipeline, the pipeline!
Tori: Uh huh. Yeah. So that, that makes a lot of sense to me.
D.L.: Yeah. What about you, Krispin?
Krispin: Yeah, I think for me, I was reading this Time magazine article and, they're interviewing a researcher and they were talking about how wild it is that in the US, whether to spank your kids or not is considered a controversial issue. And I think that just really like hit me around like, Oh yeah, this feeling of like, yeah, there are different perspectives on this or different ways to see it.
But then you actually look at the research and you're like, actually, it's not controversial when it comes to like the scientific data. So that, I don't know, it just really struck me like, because I think I would even sort of describe myself that way, even like through this project, I've learned so much, but I just, I think earlier in our lives, with our kids, we were like, yeah, we're going to choose to not spank our kids, but we didn't really think too much about like, why not? It just felt like the best way forward. But I wouldn't have thought about how harmful my experience was until digging into all of this.
Which actually leads to how I was going to ask you about your process of bringing your attention to corporal punishment. So you work at a neuroscience lab?
Tori: I was working in a neuroscience lab for a couple of years at OHSU that was focused on ADHD and autism in the developing brain. And there that was definitely a place where it was like, Oh, yeah, this isn't even a question. Like, nobody's asking, like, Oh, should we be hitting kids? Or like, it was like a non issue. It's like, no, that's not, we're not even having conversations about that anymore. Like, we've moved beyond that.
D.L.: Yeah. And I'm curious, what did you learn about what the impacts are when it comes to the brain and development and corporal punishment?
Tori: I mean like you, I'm sure that you already know this because you've been doing a lot of research on this, but there's a ton of data on the brain impacts. I think that maybe setting aside the mental health aspects, I think that the thing that really stuck out to me the most was decreased gray matter in the brain of people who are hit as children.
And you know, something else that I kind of put together as I was doing some of the math on this is . . . and going back to Dr. Dobson's absurd assertion that nobody studied it the way that we're doing it, so it's fine. When actually like, the fact is that you can take this ritualized parental violence against children and get the same mental health outcomes as kids who were raised in a war zone. It tells me a lot about how little they actually cared about the outcomes of the kids that they were hitting, you know.
Like, that's a lot of violence, right? If you know, a kid who has, all of their, like, basic needs met, I guess, in terms of shelter and food, and clothing, and medicine. But you're still getting outcomes that are the same as being raised in, like, a refugee camp? Like that's pretty fucking serious, guys.
D.L.: That's a really intense way of putting it. And I know you're right, but my first thought was. But nobody believes we grew up in a war zone. Right?
Tori: Yeah, we're still trying to convince them that any of this is happening. Meanwhile, Trump is running for a third term. Like, what the fuck? *LAUGHS*
D.L.: I'm sorry, I gotta yell. I have to yell. I'm sorry. I just
Tori: We don't get breaks from him and it's just like, yeah, okay, okay, whatever. Anyway. But yeah, nobody believes us when we say that's what it was like, but you know, the brain scans aren't lying to you. Like there's something going on here, clearly.
D.L.: Is it okay if I just ask you a couple of questions that have been burning in, in my soul? And it's okay if you don't know the answers because you don't need to know the answers. Maybe we can all just jabber about it, right? One of the first things I started researching, like, almost two years ago was that there's not a ton of studies done on the ritualized form of spanking and in general the impacts of being raised in evangelicalism
Like, there's just hardly any being done, honestly. But some of the studies showed that people who are drawn to religious fundamentalism, if you do a scan of their brain, they have a smaller prefrontal cortex, right? And some, it could be from traumatic brain injury. It could be from all these things.
And so my question is, are people drawn to religious fundamentalism and replicating these patterns with their kids and using corporal punishment with their kids, if they experienced some kind of corporal punishment themselves, right, which caused their brain to not develop as much and makes them drawn to rigid worldviews, totalitarian worldviews, right? So you can have a political totalitarian worldview. You can have a religious one. And sometimes they coalesce into a religious fascist movement. You know what I mean? Like that's so fun to be born into. So I guess that's my question is like, is this just a cycle?
I mean, you can look at any famous Christian man who's made your life miserable with their personal beliefs, and they almost always got the shit beat out of them by their parents. Like, that's just a reality that we aren't able to talk about very much. And so, I'm wondering if it's not just about people replicating patterns, which I think is happening, but if it is also actually related to brain development.
Tori: So, that's really interesting because we don't have the technology yet, or the data. We have a lot of data, but like, in fairness, everything we've learned about the brain we've learned in like the past 30 years. And so we don't really have the technology yet to parse out specific kinds of trauma in terms of like, oh, if there was like corporal punishment, but, but what we do know is there is like a trauma sort of foundation, right? that leads to these brain outcomes, like you said, like the reduced prefrontal cortex.
The thing that I don't really get, or I guess, I guess the piece of it that like you said, is tracking back to these people who have like, made your life miserable and the fact that they were all brutalized as children also, they also grew up in really, in really violent situations, like regimes. It's like they grew up in violent parenting regimes. And in an effort to make themselves okay, they decided to preach that what happened to them was good, actually.
D.L.: Totally. Totally. It's sort of painful how apparent it is.
Krispin: Right, how he's just like, yeah, like, I know that it was love because my mom loved me and what you're hearing, what I hear in that is like, you needed to know that your mom loved you, therefore you had to put everything through that filter.
D.L.: She probably also said it was loving.
Tori: Yeah, yeah, probably. I mean, I've not been officially diagnosed, but I have two kids who are autistic and it's, you know, mostly genetic, so I'm like, it came from somewhere, right? But at least for me and my childhood growing up, I was like: this shit is not loving and you are wrong. And I got into so much trouble because I very regularly was like, this is bullshit and you're actually making your life harder because it's harder for us to do what you say when you hit us.
I had no basis for this, I had no data at the time. I just intuited this thing of like, this is wrong. This is harmful. You suck a little bit for doing it. And like, I wasn't really able to reason with my parents because again, they had this thing about how you can't learn anything from children, right?
Children aren't real people. They don't deserve respect. And so there was that piece of it, but for me, I was just like, yeah, no, this is some bullshit. I'm not buying into any of this, which I'm sure my parents loved about me.
D.L.: So were you identified as the strong-willed child in your family?
Tori: I don't know if I was just because I was socialized female but I don't know that my mom necessarily saw that in me. Maybe she did, but I never got that label from her, you know For some reason the fourth child in my family, she was the one that got labeled as bad, like from the womb, interestingly enough. But yeah, so, I find that really weird, the idea of adults getting into fights with very small children and losing, and then being like, well now I have to be violent towards you.
D.L.: And that's what's wild is in Dobson — he's the one that really popularized for many families this idea that like if one of your kids has the balls to say this is wrong and this is abuse and you guys are not loving and this doesn't feel good and I'm not grateful and I don't forgive you like if you have a kid who says that Dobson's like, oh, guess what?
They're strong-willed. They have extra amounts of sin, basically, right? The sin nature that you must, like, double your efforts to eradicate that. And that's what's so tragic to me! And this is just how, again, authoritarian regimes act. If there's anybody who protests, what do they do?
Tori: Make an example of them.
D.L.: You punish them in front of everyone else. And that's what we see happening to protesters in the United States. Like, it's just, it's so interesting to see who is scapegoated.
Krispin: Right. And I mean, to your point about being autistic, maybe not an official diagnosis, but having those traits because for autistic folks hierarchy does not make sense to them. Right. They're just like, this is some bullshit. Right. And what's so interesting is if you read The Strong-willed Child, Dobson talks about these kids that he's worked with, like a kid that who only wants to eat really mushy foods and only wants to play one game. And you're like, alright, we know what we're talking about here.
D.L.: Dobson's like, give them an hour with me, and they'll be obedient, and you're just like, oh my gosh. I just think it's so astonishing to look back at these patterns that were replicated in so many families. And the ones, the kids who were being so honest, were the ones who were punished. And, the kids like me, where, you know, I'm autistic, I have a really strong sense of justice, and so when I think about my childhood, And how much I fawned, and how dissociated I was, and how shut down I was.
I could not access my sense of justice until I left the home when I was 17. And that's because it had to be suppressed, right, in my home. And I just think, wow, again, what does that do to a kid long term? If your sense of like, hey, this doesn't seem loving, this doesn't feel like good news because for me, this all goes back a little bit to the problem of Evangelical Christianity that is predicated on patriarchal white supremacy, right?
And just telling women telling people of color, telling children, this is good, this is loving, you actually love this. And it works on some people, which is why they do it, you know?
Krispin: And I think that goes to something that you were talking about on Instagram at some point, Tori, about Christianity and skills and how Christianity, at least like I will speak to my experience of evangelical Christianity doesn't give you life skills, right? Like it doesn't give you the skills to like talk through conflict, right?
And that’s what we're talking about here. You just follow the rules. You just go along
Tori: Mm hmm.
Krispin: And then thinking about how when our brains form with prefrontal cortex, and it just really makes me think about how limiting that experience is when it comes to later in life.
Tori: Yeah. Oh my gosh. Right? Yeah. Evangelical Christianity seems to give a lot of advice and, like, no skills, right? For conflict resolution or repair in a relationship, which is fucking essential. And they like, Nope! Don't teach that! Or what about consent? Consent being the only difference between a healthy relationship and like assault. And they're like, no, we're not teaching that. Right. And so it's just like giving these little pieces of advice of like, Oh, if this happens, do this, right. If that happens, do that. And it's all like, at the end of the day, it's pray and read your Bible and talk to your pastor and defer to whatever your pastor says. Defer to authority, because we're not going to give you tools to work through the problems as they come up.
We're just going to give you like these little anecdotes of like, hey, this is what happens if you can't decide where to go for dinner. And like, it's the man's decision at the end of the day.
Krispin: Right. I mean, who needs that gray matter? Cause you're not going to need to use it in a high control religion.
D.L.: They don't want people to have it, and Tori, I really quickly wanted to talk about the topic of consent and how it actually is directly related to the use of corporal punishment on children. Now, I never put this together, but I read R.L. Stoller's book, The Kingdom of Children, which is kind of about child liberation. And he makes this amazing point about how you can't teach kids about consent [in these contexts where spanking happens]. You can't teach them that they can say no to unsafe touches on their body, and they have a right to say no. You can't teach that to a child that you are spanking.
Tori: Yeah.
D.L.: And it just devastated me, Tori.
Krispin: That was your oh shit moment last week.
D.L.: No, that was like last year. But whatever. I mean, you can't teach kids about consent and then use physical violence against them. And so it's not taught. And there's many other reasons why, honestly. And because of not teaching kids consent, because instead you teach them it's okay for godly people to hurt those that they love and are trying to correct . . . I mean, it's so hard for me not to look at all of these books that evangelicals put out, these parenting books, and see a good percentage of people of children who experience this are just ripe for abuse.
And to be in abusive relationships the rest of their life.
Tori: Yeah, being able to manipulate people is kind of integral to White evangelicalism, you know, because you need to get people who will deny what they're seeing in front of their faces in favor of what you're saying. Right. So setting people up to be easily manipulated is really part of, of the grift, honestly.
I don't think any of it is sincere. I'm sure there's sincere evangelicals of course, but the structure is not sincere. There's nothing about the structure that is sincere. It's all rooted in in colonization.
It’s like missional Christianity and it's just doing it to your kids. That’s where using physical violence to force people to conform also comes directly from slavery, right. And that there was that exact same hierarchy of: you have a patriarch, and he calls the shots, and everybody else is beneath that they don't get a say, because that's how God ordered the family.
So much of evangelical theology is justification for enslavement. And they've prettied it up and spruced it up to make it politically acceptable.
Krispin: Right. I mean, as you're talking, I'm just thinking about the passages where Dobson talks to parents and says, what is most important is that you are a strong leader because whoever is the strongest and can take on any challenge, any threat can defeat and can vanquish or like colonize, right? Like anyone else, right? And that God has designed humans to be drawn to the strongest leader. And so you need to be a strong leader.
Tori: Wait, wait, where does Jesus fit in this hierarchy of strong leaders? I don't know, like, I don't feel like getting crucified is very strong of you. Like, what? Okay, okay, sure. But no, I think that you're absolutely right, that they need to be able to justify their own behavior and their own feelings, and so they just package it up really nicely and turn it into something that they can sell.
D.L.: Wow. Okay.
Krispin: Well, they first they make sense of their traumatic childhoods in this really toxic way, and then they sell it.
D.L.: Okay, so Tori, I've been posting on social media what the research says about corporal punishment. And oh my god, I got on the wrong side of TikTok, okay? Not everybody's responding in a bad faith way, but I'll just tell you some of the things people say and you can respond.
Like, their knee jerk reactions when they hear that actually, even if you spank in a ritualized manner, it is abusive. First of all, they say, Spanking is different from corporal punishment.
Tori: No, your brain nervous system can't tell the difference, so it's not. Sorry. Next.
D.L.: Great. Thank you for that. Second, they say, Oh, if spanking doesn't work, then how come we stopped spanking kids over the past 30 to 40 years? And that's why we've seen this increase in violence in America?
Tori: Violence is down. Next. Violent crime is fucking down. Fight me, bitch. Like, I'm sorry.
D.L.: Also, I would say that the United States still spanks a lot of children. You know what I mean? It's, it's not like, we stopped.
Tori: We have a very low crime rate, considering how many children we hit.
D.L.: Yes. Okay. So there's that. Okay. Another thing people say is, hasn't everyone throughout history always done this with their children? Why are we just now hearing that it’s bad?
Tori: Absolutely not. There is zero evidence that in the Americas or West Africa, that anyone was hitting children. There was a much more respectful reciprocal relationship between parents and children, and a lot of that was because the parenting wasn't done by like the birth parent a lot of the time, right?
It was more of a communal effort. I think that maybe there was some disjointedness perhaps. Like, oh, some random adult is coming and assaulting a child they're not related to. Maybe it didn't feel as good. I don't know. But yeah, if you look at indigenous parenting methods in, in the Americas and in West Africa, like, yeah, no, people were not hitting their children.
That's absurd. Like, it's, it's historical revisionism and racism to say that.
D.L.: Yeah, totally. I mean, that's how I feel too. Okay, the last one people say is as they're angrily typing out responses to my TikTok, they say, I was spanked and I turned out great.
Tori: Yeah, but . . .
D.L.: So the research is WRONG.
Tori: But you're on the internet advocating for hitting someone a third your size, so you didn't turn out great. Sorry, I'm so sorry. I wouldn't word it like that. I would like, if I was talking to that person specifically, I'd be like, that's good, but just because something didn't harm you doesn't mean it's not harmful, right?
I think that we can affirm people's experiences if they sincerely feel that they turned out great. Like, that's fine. I felt that way for a long time until I read the data and got away from churchy stuff. Um, there's a reason there's a “post” in the PTSD. It's cause like, it's after the stress, and getting away from it . . . it takes getting away from it to realize that there was a fucking problem a lot of the time because your nervous system didn't evolve to let you process all of that in real time.
Krispin: Right. And when you're trying to maintain that relationship [with your parents], your brain doesn't want to look at that end.
Tori: Yep. Yeah, absolutely. But I mean, I think that it's like, sure, that's fine. That's great. I love that for you. I'm so glad you weren't harmed. That doesn't mean it's not a harmful practice.
D.L.: Right. And that's the thing. The thing that people commented over and over and they said this science is incorrect. Because I turned out fine and that's where I'm like, oh, oh, baby. I don't think you did. You just said all the research is bullshit because your parents said this won't hurt you. You know, this hurts me more than it hurts you.
Tori: Right. Yeah. But I mean, again, you can't look at your own gray matter in your brain. And honestly, even if you could, even if you are someone who has access to an MRI machine, like, congratulations, but also like, You can't do research on yourself because that's not how research works. Brains did not evolve again that way.
So you can't be like doing your own research on your damn self. They will not accept that as data. You literally can't do that because it's not, it doesn't qualify because you're—
Krispin: I mean, I know we keep on going. I could talk about Dobson all day. And that's what he says. He's like, I know what the research says, but for me, it was not harmful. And he actually says I'm the only one that can decide whether this was harmful or not, which we have taken and run with. And we're like, great. If that's the bar, then we all get to decide if this was harmful or not. And a lot of us are saying it was really harmful.
Tori: Yeah, absolutely. And like, I mean, okay, obviously, Dobson was very harmed again, but some people have experiences that are objectively harmful, and they think they're fun, or whatever, right? And it's a consensual thing. And Hey, that's great. Again, consent keeps coming up here. How interesting.
But that doesn't mean it's not a harmful experience for everyone. Like, just because you enjoy peanut butter and jelly doesn't mean a kid who has a peanut allergy isn't going to be harmed by your fucking sandwich, right? And so, yeah, I don't know. Yeah.
D.L.: Okay. Well you responded just how I would have wished you would. Now I'm sure me and a lot of other people listening when they hear you talk about working at a neuroscience lab, looking at brain scans, have this feeling like wish I could look at a scan of my brain. And that would tell me, right, there's a reason why I experienced anxiety and depression and hypervigilance and all these things.
And I think what we're all trying to do here, though, is just say, we're validating the lived experience of being a child and your caregiver telling you that by hurting you, they are following God. They are loving you and the long-term impacts of that. So the vast majority of us are never going to get a brain scan, right?
The vast majority of us are not going to get a PTSD or CPTSD diagnosis or any of these things. But I hope this podcast today we can let you know that the science says that there's these certain outcomes to corporal punishment. And Krispin put together some slides on what the meta analysis says, which is that you are likely to develop anxiety, depression, have lower interpersonal skills, um, experience, experience suicidality, have low self esteem, uh, be at increased risk of substance abuse problems. And an increased risk of experiencing physical abuse later in your life in other relationships.
So, I just want to put that out there to folks. I check a lot of those boxes myself. And growing up evangelical, I learned to just believe it was because there was something wrong with me, that I was anxious, that I was depressed, that I woke up sometimes not wanting to be alive.
You know what I'm saying? But really, it's an impact of growing up in a pretty stressful home environment.
Krispin: And I think what's so significant is like that research that DL just read is based on like dozens of studies, 75 studies, 160,000 kids, and is looking at a lot of impacts on a lot of kids. Which I think to me just says yeah, this is so common. It's actually, unfortunately, so common in society.
Um, and yet it's hard for so many of us to make that link because of the societal stories about it.
Tori: Yeah, yeah, I think that's true and I think it's good to talk about what the actual impacts are. Yeah, most of us are not going to get a diagnosis or a brain scan and there's like those things aren't, at the end of the day, they're not going to necessarily explain why it happened to you, which is hard, right?
Cause it's like you were a kid, and you didn't deserve that. There isn't an explanation for why it was okay that it happened to you. Hopefully people can take that information and use it to make better decisions with their own kids or with kids in their lives and, you know, advocate if you're not someone who doesn't have children, like, that's great.
Like, you can still advocate for kids and keeping kids safe from violent parenting regimes. I strongly recommend that. And also, finding ways to care for your nervous system, right? And finding community where you are affirmed and valued for being fully yourself instead of having to cut these parts of you off to stay safe.
You know, I totally resonate with wanting answers and about why did this happen? And like, I think that there's a point at which why did this happen? Isn't a super helpful question, right? As badly as I personally want an answer of who does this to children, where I can actually make a difference is in how I interact with my own kids, how I interact with my friends’ kids, and, and understanding my own limits based on like the experiences that I went through and survived.
Um, and yeah, again like Krispin and D.L., you're both advocating for keeping children safe. And It's fucking huge.
D.L.: And just from what I've seen, again, big picture, the political ramifications of corporal punishment on kids are: it creates kids who are more likely to grow up and not only vote for authoritarianism, but like be extremely excited about it. And, you know, we're seeing that happen in the United States with this really triggering election cycle. You know, if I'm being honest,
But the, the researchers have shown, and mostly they were looking at Germany, that it didn't matter your intellect or not, if you were into Hitler in Germany. [This is not actually related to research but to Alice Miller’s own theory.] You know what did matter? How connected you were to your authentic self. The more divorced you are from your authentic the more likely you are to be taken in by authoritarian leaders especially if you've been raised in an authoritarian environment. And so I just think, even what you were saying, that's the path to healing. That's the path to healing your nervous system. It's also the path to resisting oppression, you know, oppression against children and oppression in our society.
So go out and do something today that helps you connect to your true self. That can be really hard if you were raised like me. But luckily it can be pretty fun to do this work. You know what I mean? I'm sure Tori you have like a wide array of things you do. You strike me as someone who has quite a practice of like little things here and there, you know, connecting to your nervous system.
I wondered if you wanted to just share like one or two with us as we close out here.
Tori: Um, well I am like you in the amount of glitter that I own. It’s very healing.
D.L.: Why is glitter so great?
Tori: For me, I mean, I think especially like, like living in Portland, having greenery around is very helpful, and like, I mean, doctors in the UK are literally prescribing gardening to people, you guys.
So yeah. If that's something that people are into, plants are great. I mean for me obviously hiking is kind of my sort of default kind of going out trying to like regulate. I try to do a lot of breath work as well, but just like arts and crafts and fun things that I like wanted to do as a kid and wasn't really allowed to because they were too messy. I love that for me.
D.L.: Being messy.
Tori: Uh huh. Yeah.
D.L.: I love that so much. Tori, you are just such a delight. Thank you for coming and being willing to talk about a pretty like triggering topic that literally no one wants to think about too hard. Thanks for being willing to do that. I hope you have something really lovely planned for yourself after this.
Where can people find you if they want to keep connecting with your work? Let us know what you're up to and, and how to find
Tori: Yeah, absolutely. Um, I don't, social media is like so weird now because it's like half of it is owned by like aspiring fascists and so I don't really know like what to do with myself in terms of where people, but I'm like, I'm on, I'm on,
D.L.: I fucking hate it, man. I do. I do.
Tori: It's brutal. Um, yeah. Anyway, I'm on Instagram mostly these days, I guess, uh, my main account is at Tori Glass. Um, I started posting some little exvangelical deconstruction videos, which is just at xv underscore tori, T O R I, um, yeah, you can, I have a sub stack that's also Tori Glass. If you, if you, like, just type in Tori Glass, you'll find all of my stuff.
So, I'll just say that.
D.L.: Oh, great. Okay.
Krispin: and we'll definitely link to some of those things in the show notes for listeners as well Yeah
D.L.: Yeah, well, thanks for being on the mean streets of social media. I'm like, oh, if Tori shows up in my comments, I'm like, oh, the cavalry has arrived. You know, like,
Tori: Like, take the day off.
D.L.: My gosh, yeah. Well, we love it, Tori. We love your work.
Krispin: Thank you so much for this conversation.
Tori: Yeah, love talking to you, for sure. Anytime.
Krispin: Thank you.
Corporal Punishment and Brain Development