By Woodrow J. Hinton

Several Greater Cincinnati programs can come to the aid of parents who lose sight of the line between physical discipline of their children and abuse.

Cincinnati City Councilman Sam Malone contends that when he took a belt to his 14-year-old son May 13, he was exercising his right and duty as a parent to discipline his child. Law enforcement authorities disagreed, arrested Malone and charged him with domestic violence; a temporary restraining order now prevents him from seeing his son until a hearing Tuesday in Hamilton County Municipal Court.

In the meantime, local airwaves have exploded with talking heads chattering about the line between proper physical discipline and child abuse.

But those who accuse the government of overstepping its bounds can relax. Not all calls that come to the children's protective services hotline 241-KIDS warrant action or even investigation, according to Laurie Petrie, spokeswoman for the Hamilton County Job & Family Services.

She describes an exchange: "A kid calls and says, 'My mom spanked me.' 'Well, were you injured?' 'No, she was mean to me.'

"Well that's not an allegation of abuse or neglect. I think that people need to understand that a red mark on a child's bottom that goes away in a few minutes is not an injury."

But bruising, welts, broken skin, broken bones, burns, beating a child around the head or boxing her ears until blood comes out do constitute injury, Petrie says.

And though Ohio laws make allowances for corporal punishment, an incident becomes child endangerment when that punishment is "excessive under the circumstances and creates substantial risk of serious harm."

Even excessive cases sometimes involve "a good and nurturing parent who lost it," Petrie says.

It's when kids are at ongoing risk of abuse or neglect that Children's Services steps in with heavy feet. That's the case for 7,000 to 8,000 Hamilton County kids who are at any given time moving through Children's Services. About 1,500 of those have been removed from their homes to stay with relatives or foster parents. The rest can be protected in their home settings, Petrie says.

But she believes that most abusers don't consciously set out to seriously hurt their children. Drug abuse and untreated mental illness top the list of problems plaguing abusive parents. Others lack skills and support.

"I think there are relatively few truly, pathologically sadistic child abusers," Petrie says.

But for the grace of God
The first problem with physical discipline is that it's difficult to draw the line between it and abuse. The second problem is that in the heat of the moment it can be hard to keep that line in sight.

"Once any of us starts to hit, it's very easy to lose control, especially if we're already irritated and angry with a child," says child psychologist Jim Brush. "We can all potentially lose control. I think we should all be humble enough to know that there but for the grace of God go we."

Brush advises parents to use corporal punishment as a last resort and then to keep it to just one swift crack on the rear end.

Though spanking can be an effective way to set limits for toddlers or preschoolers, Brush believes that corporal punishment loses effectiveness past the age of 8 because parents' relationships with older children become complicated and fraught with subtleties and innuendoes.

"Hitting a child above the age of 8 is like assaulting your spouse," he says.

In fact, the only thing hitting a teenager is effective at doing is alienating them from the parent at the very age when a parent should be filling the role of consultant.

"It makes the parent unavailable as a parent, because now the parent has become an abuser and a potential enemy," Brush says. "So the child out of fear and out of a sense of having the parent as his or her enemy is going to conceal."

Obviously, abused children also end up traumatized. They have trouble concentrating in school. They often abuse drugs and alcohol and hang with similarly dysfunctional kids. They don't respect authority figures because their primary authority figure hurts them. And they become aggressive, because kids who swallow violence often spit it back out.

That's why the parents of adolescents moving through the YWCA of Greater Cincinnati's Amend Program for adolescent anger management are also expected to attend, says program director Jim Beiting.

"These kids come in angry and, well, guess what -- they got angry parents," Beiting says. "We're only working with half the problem if we're working with just one or the other."

He says parents who base discipline solely on the threat of physical punishment are out of luck once kids grow big.

"We get a lot of parents who come in and say, 'Can you believe he fought back, can you believe he doesn't respect me anymore?' " Beiting says. "If all you're relying on is the physical threat piece, it stops working because literally the size difference doesn't exist anymore. It's hard to be a bully if you're not bigger and stronger than someone."

Put a bug in your ear
The YWCA's Battered Women's Shelter doesn't allow its residents to spank children at all, says director Theresa Singleton.

"At the YWCA we practice nonviolent intervention with kids," she says. "We encourage women to use 'time out,' to use positive reinforcement."

Positive reinforcement of both parent and the child is at the center of an effective new therapy for teaching parents how to deal with unruly kids, "Parent-Child Interaction Therapy."

In the first phase of the therapy, parents learn positive parenting skills -- not by watching a therapist interact with their child but by being coached while interacting with the child themselves. Ideally, the therapist stands behind a one-way mirror and offers suggestions through a bug worn in the parent's ear.

The second phase teaches parents better discipline skills. Just giving clear, positive commands increases compliance 60 percent, according to Erica Smith, a postdoctoral fellow at the Mayerson Center for Safe and Healthy Children.

But Smith says the first phase is often so successful in building relationships that kids naturally want to please their parents and no longer need much discipline.

In the past three years, a team that includes Smith and Erna Olafson, an associate professor of clinical psychiatry and pediatrics at Children's Hospital and the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, has trained 95 therapists in 17 agencies, including Beech Acres, Family Service and The Children's Home of Cincinnati.

Parents often need -- and lack -- just as much reinforcement as their children, according to Olafson.

"(Parents) come in with a lot of guilt," Smith says. "We're not there to judge parents or point out what they're doing wrong."

The therapy has proven most effective with children ages 2-12, but Olafson believes that with minor edits it should work well with adolescents too.

In fact, the benefits of healthy interaction know no age limit.

"People who are trainees tell us it works with husbands and wives," Olafson says.