The Rake’s parenting editor Renata Frears recently had an opportunity to speak with Roy “Buck” Prescott, controversial author of Breaking the Spirit of Your Unborn Child and Breaking the Spirit of Your Newborn Child (Regnery Publishing). Prescott was in town for the first annual “It’s a Man’s World” symposium at the Best Steak House in Richfield, where he was honored for his pioneering work on the benefits of fetal deprivation.
You argue that not a single drop of breast milk should ever touch a baby’s lips. What’s wrong with breast-feeding?
The breast is the incubator of all manner of harmful pathologies. Every time a mother takes an infant to her breast she’s teaching that child to say, “Give! Give! Give!” while at the same time ensuring that for the rest of her life she’s going to be viewed as a sort of unhappy and unfulfilled ATM machine molded out of flesh. Breast-feeding is the infant’s introduction to America’s pernicious culture of permissiveness; if a child can have easy access to its mother’s breast, what can’t it have? Where do you draw the line?
But many so-called experts claim that breast-feeding helps the mother and baby to bond, and increases the baby’s immunity to many common and potentially devastating diseases.
I have another word for what you refer to as ‘so-called experts’: parrots. Teach any addled child of the ’60s to utter a handful of useless phrases—“nurture,” “self-esteem,” etc…—and you have a so-called parenting expert on your hands. These characters have sown the seeds for an epidemic of social erosion.
You’re a proponent of infrequent physical contact between parents and their newborn. How is a child harmed when it cuddles with its mother or father?
I despise all those feel-good words with doubled consonants—cuddle, snuggle, coddle, etc. Look up ‘affection’ in the Oxford Unabridged Dictionary; it originally meant a sort of passion or lust that was in direct opposition to reason. The primary job of the parent is to communicate rigorous expectations and strict personal boundaries that convey the severity of the life experience and the sort of discipline necessary to survive in a world that is generally indifferent if not outright hostile to any individual’s feelings of self importance or ‘self-esteem.’ I would hope that you have some way to indicate the horror with which I speak that phrase.
In your book you say that corporal punishment is the only way to discipline a child. This goes against the wisdom of many other writers on this subject. Why do you advocate spanking?
Quite simply, because hundreds of years of historical evidence indicates that it’s the single most effective means of communicating parental displeasure and the consequences of misbehavior. This notion that you can bargain with a child without relinquishing the necessary upper hand in a parent/child relationship is utter hogwash. Children are brutal, unscrupulous, and relentless negotiators, and recognizing the distinction between behavior and misbehavior is critical from the moment an infant is born.
What do you say to those who call spanking abusive?
I’d say they’re dangerously naive. These are the people who have turned America’s children into a zombie army of overweight therapy drones. They’ve produced what I call “the unaccountable generation.” When it comes to the nature vs. nurture debate, believe me, nature wins every time. The nurtured child is the child that gets eaten alive when it is eventually thrown to the wolves.
Several other experts, including Dr. Phil, have called your methods “the ranting of an unqualified lunatic.” How do you respond?
I’d say that’s a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Dr. Phil is a charlatan of the sort this country has been producing—and rewarding with obscene wealth—with alarming frequency for far too long. One of his own children is married to a former Playboy bunny, and anyone who would take parenting advice from such an odious fraud is guilty in my mind of criminal child neglect. I’ve repeatedly offered to arm-wrestle Phil McGraw on the Oprah show, but thus far he has ignored my challenges and spared himself further humiliation.
You’re unmarried and don’t have any children of your own. How have you developed your approach?
You don’t have to build a banana to know how to peel and eat one. I was a staff sergeant in the United States Army for a decade. I bred and trained bloodhounds for almost twenty years. I’ve had more dinners, dates, holidays, and public outings ruined by the misbehavior of other people’s infants and children than I could even begin to count.
You write that every child is born with “serious inherent defects,” yet others have argued that every child is born perfect. How are babies
defective?
Every baby is a constellation of defects, some of them unique to the individual child, others endemic to all infants—some might call this constellation of defects ‘human nature.’ Parenting is precisely the process by which these defects are eradicated and the child is trained to be a competent, responsible, and functioning adult. Show me a child who doesn’t learn conformity and strict obedience to authority in the home and I’ll show you a monster that hasn’t yet burst from the laboratory.
How do you explain sex to a young child?
You don’t.
What would be the effect on society if all children’s spirits remained intact?
A nation of ‘enlightened’ depressives who buy their potatoes at co-ops and are prisoners to their increasingly disenchanted and depressed children. ‘Spirit’ is one of the most abused words in the English language, and what this world does not need at this moment in time are any more spirited—and spoiled—children. Deprivation and disappointment breed initiative, and what we desperately need are responsible, realistic kids who are fully prepared to take their licks and who recognize their place in a functional, moral, and civilized society. Dog eat dog, of course, implies that some dogs are going to be eaten. That, in a nutshell, is life, and it’s the essential message of both my books.