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SCHENECTADY
Dad charged for ‘whupping’ his son
Father says he gave up on ‘Dr. Phil’ approach
BY KATHLEEN MOORE Gazette Reporter

    Lloyd Ray Fisher is either a child abuser or an exemplary parent.
    Police say Fisher committed felony assault on March 13. He whipped his son with a belt after the 13-year-old was kicked out of school for stealing from teachers, hitting other children and cutting a girl’s hair.
    But supporters of corporal punishment say that the few short-lived welts on the boy’s butt might be just what he needed.
    His father, however, now faces jail time if found guilty. He plans to take the case to trial to argue that a one-time belt-spanking for inexcusable behavior is well within a parent’s authority.
    “I was just trying to be a parent,” Fisher said. “He’s 13 now. I’m trying to raise him to be a man. I couldn’t just sit back and watch him going down the wrong road.”
    Both sides agree on the basic facts: The boy, whose name is being withheld by The Daily Gazette, had been in trouble for months. He is big for his age, and has bullied girls, hit boys and repeatedly taken cash and cellphones from teachers’ purses, acts which landed him in Family Court for theft. He stole from other children at his after-school day care so often that he was expelled last month.
    Then, on March 13, he attacked a boy with a ruler.
    The school suspended him at once. They called his mother, who has custody. She called his father. Fisher picked up the boy at school, took him home, and in his words, “whupped his butt.”
    “I’d tried the Dr. Phil method. You sit him down, you talk, you go out for ice cream, you go on long walks,” Fisher said. “But he was in continuous trouble. It’s like an everyday, regular thing: The judge said stay out of trouble for a month, and six hours later he stole again. He was hitting girls — I sat him down and said, ‘Dude, that’s the most disrespectful thing you can do.’ The last thing you want is your kid beating up girls. I have little girls and I can imagine — that’s as low as you can go. And he kept doing it.”
    So when the boy was kicked out of school, Fisher decided to get physical.
    “I just flashed back to old school — you need some heat under your butt,” Fisher said. “I gave him a couple of whacks. It lasted less than a minute.”
    But the boy later described the beating as involving up to 18 strikes. He was left with “a couple welts,” according to District Attorney Robert Carney.
    A welt is a lump or ridge that rises on the skin after a blow. The injury is similar to a bruise, but not caused by bleeding under the skin, and disappears relatively quickly.
    By all accounts, the boy was able to sit comfortably, walk and play after the incident. But four hours later, after the boy went home and told his mother, Fisher was arrested. He turned himself in and spent fi ve days in jail before making bail.
WAS IT A CRIME?
    There’s no question that Fisher hit the boy with a belt. But was it a crime?
    “That was standard operating procedure for most parents when I grew up,” said City Councilman Joseph Allen, who has never met Fisher but is vehemently opposed to the idea of criminalizing physical discipline. Allen thinks more children need a good spanking.
    “If you got discipline once, sometimes that was a lifelong lesson,” Allen said. “All children are different. Some of them need the rod. How are parents going to discipline? Are you going to talk ’em to death?”
    The state Office of Children and Family Services says anything beyond talking is not just useless, but counter-productive.
    “The child learns to hit other people,” said spokesman Ed Borges. “In the workplace, when someone misperforms, are you going to slap ’em around? No, you’ve learned to de-escalate the situation.”
    Spokeswoman Sue Steele added, “Violence breeds violence.”
    Carney said parents can legally still spank children with their open hand — just not a belt.
    “It’s sometimes a fine line between corporal punishment and a crime. This is a case that goes beyond a parent disciplining a child,” he said. “Some distinguishing features were he was whipping him with his belt as many as 18 times, and there were some welts.”
    He said the pain inflicted by the belt was beyond reason. By law, prosecution must prove that the boy was in substantial pain to get a conviction for misdemeanor assault.
    For felony assault, Fisher must have either seriously injured the boy — which Carney agrees did not happen — or used the belt like a deadly weapon. Carney said whipping the boy did not rise to that level, so he plans to push for a misdemeanor rather than the felony in the initial charge. But he wants a sentence of eight months in jail in exchange for reducing the charge. For now, Fisher is still charged with a felony.
    “This rose to the level of particularly sadistic pain and injury,” Carney said, adding that he wouldn’t take parents to court for a normal spanking.
    Many parents still do just that. Sociologists have been tracking the evolution of public opinion on corporal punishment in the country for the past 20 years, and so far only a handful of parents strongly oppose spanking.
    In 2006, 46 percent of respondents supported spanking. Only 8 percent strongly opposed it.
    But the sea change has begun. In 1986, the first year that the National Opinion Research Center began tracking the issue, only 3 percent of respondents strongly opposed spankings. At that time, 56 percent supported corporal punishment. Now that same number of parents are on the fence, neither strongly opposed nor strongly in favor.
    “Americans are a bit conflicted about it. ‘Spare the rod, spoil the child’ has had a long history,” said Skidmore College sociology professor Catherine White Berheide. “But a hundred years ago, the progressive era began to protect children with child labor laws and all sort of laws that codified that children are precious to us.”
    Most of those laws protect young children, under the age of 12. Public opinion is more likely to support Fisher because he was hitting a teenager, she said.
    “This concern we have with precious children goes to younger children. We tend not to have these issues with older kids because they can hit back,” Berheide said. “There is a group of teenagers that parents and schools have trouble controlling. So I can imagine this parent feeling, if other avenues have been tried, what else can he do?”
    She added that culturally, poorer parents and non-white parents tend to support corporal punishment much more than white, middle-class parents. In some cultures, “whupping a child is OK,” she said. “There are cultural differences.”
    But in the white middle class, she said, experts argue that corporal punishment can ruin a child.
    “The idea is that there should be no spankings, that we should have other forms of discipline,” Berheide said. “When you tell a child, ‘Don’t hit your brother,’ and then you hit them, they learn violence is the way to express your point of view. Even if it’s a controlled spanking, it sends the wrong message.”
    But Allen said it can send the precisely correct message.
    “Usually, if you got hit with a belt, it’s because you did something extremely wrong,” Allen said. “Spanking your child with a belt isn’t a felony. I mean, hitting them with a brick, or a 2-by-4 — that’s a felony, in my opinion.”
    He said Fisher’s arrest may also encourage children to defy their parents.
    “These kids know, ‘Hey, you hit me, I’m gonna take you to court, I’m gonna charge you with assault,’ ” Allen said. “I’m really concerned about this. This should be overturned. We need more discipline, not less.”
    Berheide also said Fisher’s reason....................http://www.dailygazette.net/De.....amp;EntityId=Ar00101

A good whoppin never hurt me when I was a kid.  I think I grew up better because of it sometimes.

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Father who ‘whupped’ son merits a medal

    Re March 26 article, “Dad charged for ‘whupping’ his son”: You have got to be kidding me! Lloyd Ray Fisher should be given a medal for the “whupping” he gave his son! However, I believe that the mother of his son should be sitting in jail for not standing by the father and teaching right from wrong.
    This is an example of what is wrong with society today. Too many children are taught by DARE that if their parents touch you, it is abuse, and they have every right to report it. Lloyd’s son is a troublemaker, and what his father did is commendable. How dare he be put in jail! The mother should have stood by the father, as they should show a united front to their son. What has the mother taught her son? Nothing!
    When I was young, my father hit me with a belt. I am 52 years old, and I still remember why he did it and when it happened. He hurt only my pride, but the lesson he taught me remains. He was not a child abuser — he was frustrated by my stupid actions. I learned a valuable lesson that day. We need more Lloyd Ray Fisher’s in this world, and less state Office of Children and Family Services employees who say it is counterproductive. Has all of their “de-escalating” the situation solved the crime and graffi ti in Schenectady? I think not.
    Maybe Gov. Paterson should do away with this department. Better yet, appoint Lloyd Fisher to head it.

    SUSAN TUCCI
    Glenville     

http://www.dailygazette.net/De.....amp;EntityId=Ar00705

My loving father used the belt, and my mother used the wooden "sauce spoon" and even a yardstick once the sauce spoon snapped over my forearm and she had nothing else to chase me with. After getting the belt ONCE, my father had then to take it off and "snap" it by doubling it and making that sound you do when you push the two ends together and pull them apart fast. "SNAP!" That was all I ever needed after the one belting.

This happened about 3 times total in my life as a child, and I never became a predator, bully, wife-beater, molester, rapist, murderer, thief, miscreant, punk or criminal. Of course the liberal state-ists would have imprisoned my wonderful parents and "liberated" me to a state run group home if it occurred in 2009.

I love my parents all the more for doing what they HAD to do at the time when I was being entirely unmanageable. I knew then they meant business and I BETTER NOT act bad to that level again. And I didn't. Being the bad guy is not easy for parents today, and I know it never was then either. Of course I am sure there are a few mean and sadistic parents, but overall the corporal punishment methods that are long out the window simply did not correspond with the rash of sociopath activity we see in youths today.


One of favorite expressions is "It is a good thing they did away with prayer in school and corporal punishment or we might have all kinds of teen crime, pregnancy, drug use and rampant disrespect today." Of course the egg in that statement lands on the face of the new age liberal state-ists.

I too was on the receiving end of my Mom's wrath when I was out of line. Her preferred method of punishment was an old paddle that the rubber band and ball had been lost from and it always straightened me right out. Kids need discipline and due to the liberal views on punishment[or lack there of] we now have a nation of kids who think they can do whatever they want to whomever they want with no consequences. Our parents weren't abusers just parents who were trying to teach us to grow up and have respect for others, their property, and the laws of the land.  

So the marks from the belt or whatever should be gone inlike  how many days ?

Any marks left after a week would be child abuse ?

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So the marks from the belt or whatever should be gone inlike  how many days ?

Any marks left after a week would be child abuse ?

If hitting this child with a belt was scientifically proven to somehow add to the greater good of humanity, I'm sure you would be an advocate.  

What if he was whipping an embryo with a belt??

Funding the right scientist, will get the desired results.  

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So the marks from the belt or whatever should be gone inlike  how many days ?

Any marks left after a week would be child abuse ?

We can't actually define something obscene but we all know it when we see it. Same thing here. AGAIN, I REPEAT (or paraphrase) FOR THOSE TOO WRAPPED UP IN THEIR LIBERALISM TO ADMIT TO COMMON SENSE:

"It is a good thing they banned prayer in schools and corporal punishment or we might have an explosion of child crime, drug use, disrespect, teen pregnancy and societal disorder. Thank Gaia the Earth Mother for the sixties."

My father never hit me. And he never had to. Not because I was a good kid, it was because all he had to do was look at me with "that look" and I knew he was serious. My mother was a different story. She would use her hands, wooden spoon, fly swatter or whatever she could get her hands on. But it took a lot to set her off. I wasn't a bad kid. But I always had to get the last word in. I always answered back. But not with my father, only my mom. So when my mom was flailing about after me, I really knew I had it coming.

There is a difference between discipline and child abuse. They are not one in the same.

The last time my mother employed the "sauce spoon" I was 17 years old and a senior in high school. I was 185 lbs and 5'10" while my Mom was 5' and 95 lbs. You do the math and tell me if it was "abuse." She broke every wooden spoon in the kitchen and a few yardsticks chasing me down after I pulled a prank and terrified my 4 year old nephew (her grandson.) She even called me a few choice words as she chased me. Those oak spoons shattering on my forearms stung a little. I deserved it and love her for it. I had it coming, and she showed me she was boss, in a way that "time out" may not have. Sometimes it is never too late to learn from an a**-kicking.

I can recall it like yesterday, 1000%

Today we breed little panty waists who think they were treated "unfairly" and need the Finklestein Partners to help them get even. Nobody knows how to take their lumps anymore. It is "abuse" or it is considered unjust, or it "harm the child's self esteem..." puke...

All the kids have been trained well by the liberal establishment to depend on someone else to help them, lawyers, government, DSS, and you are absolutely right GB.

Thanks to all  of you that have shared their AUTOBIOGRAPHY  - which includes getting hit with different types of utensils and belts and such- great for you-

Maybe those beatings made up grow up tough and surly-

Maybe back in " your day " it was OK for your dad to smack your mom around a little bit too- ?

I thought that we were discussing "child discipline" not domestic violence.

As a parent of two adult children, I spanked only one of them (my son) once when he was about 3 or 4 years of age.  I took him over my knee and gave him two spanks with my open hand.  He cried for a few minutes, more I suspect from a sense that he disappointed me than from any inflicted pain.  I, however, hurt for several days for having to do it.  

Because of or, perhaps, in spite of my parenting techniques, I have two fine children who are respectful, polite, law-abiding and productive citizens of our community.  I am very proud of the people that they have become.  I attribute my good fortune to the Lord's blessings.  

It would appear that the liberal way to raise the children hasn't done real well based on the problems we're experiencing today.