Childcare Expert Bill Maher Defends Corporal Punishment For Kids

For someone who seems to actively dislike children, Bill Maher sure has a lot of opinions on how to raise them.

To be fair, Maher does have some experience with looking after kids, namely the Club Random episode in which he lectured a handful of youngsters about topics ranging from Game of Thrones, to Elvis Presley, to how Googling climate change will inevitably lead to porn sites.

Despite repeatedly claiming that he doesn’t want to ever have kids, whom he considers “feral” animals, Maher regularly doles out a ton of parenting advice on his various platforms. Like last year, when he went on a Father’s Day rant during Real Time’s “New Rules” segment, all about how America should “bring back trad dads.” Why? Because apparently rising anxiety rates amongst America’s youth aren’t being caused by social media, climate change or economic uncertainty. Nope, it’s purely because dads aren’t as dickish as they used to be. 

Well, Bill just weighed in on the state of modern parenting yet again, and this time, he extolled the virtues of corporal punishment. 

While chatting with Academy Award nominee John Malkovich (or whomever it was that happened to be puppeteering his brain that day) Maher responded to his guest’s story about childhood beatings by stating, “I am someone who believes in spanking as a sort of nuclear option.”

Maher went on to explain that he was only spanked “a few times” as a child. “When you really commit that foul, that (parents) have to let you know – not a beating, a spanking,” Maher stressed. “But the fact that we got to this place where that was just completely verboten, that was unthinkable. And it should not be unthinkable.”

“The few times my father spanked me, I definitely hated him,” he added. “Who’s not going to hate somebody who’s hitting you?”

The conversation stopped when Malkovich awkwardly backed out of the room to “run and pee” (in retrospect, it’s shocking that more Club Random episodes don’t end this way), but this isn’t the first time that Maher has gone to bat for hitting kids. He previously brought it up during an interview with skateboarder Tony Hawk, arguing that spanking shouldn’t count as abuse. 

“Kids need boundaries, they need discipline,” Maher said. “They’re not getting it, that’s why they’ve gone insane.” If they hadn’t been in a basement, it’s entirely possible that Bill would have then begun yelling at an actual cloud.

And Maher has made this same argument on Real Time before, suggesting that “spanking your kids a little bit when they’re young, before they’re old enough to fight back” isn’t so bad. “I got spanked, didn’t kill me,” he reasoned. “I probably should have been spanked a little more.”

Of course, studies conducted by actual pediatric experts, not cable TV comedians, have found that spanking is “harmful to children’s development and well-being.” And contrary to Maher’s off-the-cuff theories, there is “clear and compelling evidence that physical punishment does not improve children’s behavior and instead makes it worse.”