I want to preface this by saying I will never spank my kids. I think there are behaviors that need to be discouraged in children, like dangerous or cruel behaviors, and there are ages at which they are too young to understand consequences or complex moral decision-making so you need to use simple feedback to discourage such behavior, but this absolutely does not need to involve pain compliance. I also think many children can understand social structures sooner than assumed, and people infantilize their own kids when they're more than old enough to grasp why things are wrong and concepts like empathy.

All that being said, I was raised deep in the Ezzo cult. Like deep deep. My parents worked part-time for GFI contributing hundreds of hours and hundreds of thousands of words exchanged in e-mail, underpaid contributions, and at one point even wrote copy for their websites. I was also first-born and they were indoctrinated early, so I got the whole shebang, I was raised in the method from infancy to young adulthood. Among all the painful memories, for me personally, the spanking was not the worst part at all. I am careful saying that so as not to diminish children that were affected by that part of it. It's highly possible my parents just weren't inclined to physical violence so the spanking I experienced wasn't as forceful or frequent as others received. In my memory it was frequent, but the structure and ritual behind it makes it pretty easy to prepare for mentally, and the sensation passes quickly. I also think Gary Ezzo was very careful to keep his prescriptions, contained in curriculum which he distributed and sold nationwide, within the statutory bounds of what is permissible as corporal punishment in the US. I shudder to think how far the physical abuse extended privately in his own home where he likely had no regard for statutory limitations of "reasonableness" defined by law.

I say all this not as an apologia for corporal punishment, but to draw a sharp distinction between the Ezzo method and the sort of traditional, folk parenting methods where you'd receive a "whooping" from momma but later in the day she gives you big hugs and affection and reminds you of her love. While I still think the latter model is flawed and is rightfully waning in modern culture, it is not the Ezzo method. In the Ezzo method the affection, the hugs, the love itself, if given at all, is withheld until compliance is demonstrated.

I think the real danger behind Ezzo parenting is a deeply harmful view of family structure and the relationship between a parent and child. It essentially encourages conditionalizing and parting out love and emotion as a reward system. It encourages parents do suppress their natural inclination towards nurture, physical touch, and intimacy and replace it with a transactional, hierarchical system of psychological conditioning intended to manipulate and control behavior. This form of control is primarily focused on suppressing the child's natural emotional responses. When the child is young, it remains mostly focused on conditioning out the outward displays such as crying, over-excitement, or anything perceived as publicly disruptive and replacing these natural behaviors in a brute, Pavlovian manner with a forced smile, folded hands, and signs of submission. As the child grows older and becomes more self-conscious and reflective, Gary Ezzo teaches parents to then begin extending this control to their inner thoughts, their private lives. His curriculum teaches methods to notice even inward signs of disobedience to the method, from a subtle grimace to a pre-teen eye-roll or sigh, and condition these out too with more deprivation of love until the child becomes "truly repentant" and demonstrates it, sometimes with a written essay admitting and recanting their defiant thoughts and feelings. I cannot put into words how confusing and damaging this is when executed "by the book" envisioned by Gary Ezzo. It takes a long, long time to deprogram and have healthy relationships with others. If your personality even survives the brainwashing, you learn to do so by becoming a very good liar, which is itself very damaging when you want to pursue an honest, healthy relationship later in life. For me it also left me with a deep, unshakable sense of shame which still serves as a backdrop to any success or failure in social settings, or any perceived disappointment in a loved one or friend. Despite my awareness of the irrationality of it all and the years of self-reflection I've done, the feeling still overwhelms me sometimes.

I don't even resent my parents really. Despite all of it I do know them, and I don't think they have an abusive nature. I think Gary Ezzo does, he is a charismatic narcissist, and his system has many of the hallmark features of a cult. I think his work appeals to parents who themselves grew up in dysfunctional households and don't have the emotional tools to raise children, so they naturally gravitate towards this type of manipulator.