The Holocaust Lessons on Compassionate Parenting and Child Corporal Punishment

History, science, public policy, and personal experience all come together to form a compelling argument against physical punishment of children from a former child protection social worker who has made this advocacy his life’s work.

David A. Cooperson, MSW, MA, LCSW, has long witnessed the consequences of corporal punishment on children through his social work and in his personal life, but it was the findings of a Holocaust survivor and scholar, Samuel P. Olinor, that brought his mission for compassionate parenting into focus. In Olinor’s study of non-Jews who harbored Jews from Nazi persecution, he found that the group’s common denominator was a childhood free from corporal punishment.

Scientific study has since backed the claims of negative consequences from the use of corporal punishment on children, yet social policy lags woefully behind: all fifty states have anti-bullying laws, but many remain in the past when it comes to corporal punishment in our schools and in the home.

Cooperson asks us to once and for all take a stand for children’s rights, and to ensure that the “never again” lesson we learned from the Holocaust truly means “never again.”