CORPORAL PUNISHMENT
Among the corrective measures used in child-training since time
immemorial, corporal punishment occupies a large and conspicuous place.
While such punishment is, at present, on the decline, still it is
sufficiently widespread and frequent in its application to warrant a
discussion of its effectiveness in accomplishng the ends desired, as
well as a word concerning its moral effect on the child.
The infliction of corporal punishment implies the inability of the
parent to govern the child without it. It must be predicated on the
belief of the parent in its superior merits, which causes him to
submerge its humanitarian aspects beneath its supposedly utilitarian
effectiveness, or because he is unacquainted with other methods. It
would be difficult to conceive a parent who would beat a child from
personal choice when there were other corrective methods at hand which
he believed to be of equal efficiency.
The author recalls a man of high standing in the financial
world--successful in business, but cold, stern, austere and puritanical
in his personal code, who thrashed his son, from his tenth to his
fifteenth year, frequently as often as once a week. Then the boy ran
away from home to escape the tyranny and is now a wanderer over the
earth, his heart filled with bitter hatred toward his father, while the
latter deems himself a much abused parent and his son an ungrateful
and wayward boy. At no time during the many hundred beatings which
he administered did it occur to him that bodily punishment was not
a salutary corrective; he failed to realize the futility of a means
which did not accomplish the desired results. Had an analogous problem
arisen in his business, he would quickly have discarded any plan which
so thoroughly demonstrated its uselessness. This man had a profound
and earnest desire to rear his son to perfect manhood. He adopted the
method which seemed to him best designed to accomplish that result.
Today he is a broken-hearted man grieving over his lost son. Again we
hark back to the wayward parent. “Fathers, provoke not your children to
anger lest they be discouraged.” Col. 3:21.
The average child does not rebel against authority but only against
authority which he thinks is unjustly or harshly exercised. He
invariably revolts against corporal punishment because he believes any
degree of it to be excessive. From the boy’s point of view he is a
Lilliputian whom the Gargantuan parent abuses because of greater brute
strength. A fourteen-year-old boy who was being beaten by his father
for failure to perform some chore shouted in his face, “You wouldn’t
dare do that if I was as big as you.” And the boy spoke the truth. The
father who is addicted to the corporal form of punishment is deterred,
when his son approaches maturity, as much by fear of being vanquished
in the contest as by a realization of its futility as a corrective of
the later adolescent.
This form of punishment is commonly adopted to “break the will” of
the disobedient and rebellious boy. If breaking the will of the boy
means making it conform to that of the physically stronger father, the
attempt is as ineffective as it is brutal, for acquiescence under such
circumstances never is evidence of mental consent. Servile subjection
of will is out of harmony with that growth of will-power which is
necessary to the ideal development of the adolescent.
Persistent, unjust, or excessive punishments, either of body or mind,
furnish a powerful incentive for the boy to invoke his chief means of
defense against superior force--evasion and prevarication. Such conduct
is guaranteed to produce a youthful Munchausen.
What are a boy’s means of defense against a beating which he regards,
either rightly or wrongly, as excessive or brutal? He has only
two--flight and falsehood. He knows that he is incapable of matching
physical strength with his parent. This knowledge, combined with
whatever love for the parent has not been extinguished, prevents a
contest of strength which the child realizes would be futile. Flight
is frequently out of the question because of the boy’s dependency and
his inability to earn his own living. His last means of defense is
falsehood, the use of which he justifies as his only method of escape
from unwarranted or excessive punishment. Fully conscious of the wrong
of lying he considers it the lesser of the two evils.
Similar in its effect is the nagging of children, in which mothers are
more prone to indulge than fathers. Exhibitions of constant scolding,
faultfinding, and querulous temper, interspersed with boxing of
ears, smacking of cheeks, and slapping of hands, all tend to thwart
the child’s mental and moral growth and contribute to the making of
a wayward son. Such punishment is largely mental but none the less
reprehensible because it lacks the element of physical pain. To slap
a child’s hand as a correctional measure, with the sharp word of
reproof which accompanies it, gives the child a mental instead of a
physical shock; a slap of the same degree given in a playful mood will
cause him to laugh. When a boy, especially in the adolescent period,
begins to complain of the injustice of constant nagging, scolding,
and corporal punishment, it is a danger signal which should cause
the parent to stop, look, and listen. Such conduct on the part of
the parent alienates the love and sympathy of the child, conduces to
lying, secretiveness and evasion, and is productive of truancy and the
development of the wanderlust. Its psychological effect on the parent
is the loss of self-respect which is the inevitable accompaniment of
punitive injustice.
The punitive theory of the correction of youthful offenses is archaic
and should be relegated to the Paleolithic era from whence it sprang.
To mete out punishment as such is vengeance pure and simple; an
eye-for-an-eye-and-a-tooth-for-a-tooth policy which has no place in
modern child-culture.
With our present-day scientific knowledge of the boy, as distinguished
from our personal knowledge of him in the past, we recognize the
trend of tendencies and understand the portent of symptoms which
formerly were either unnoticed or disregarded. We have brought minute
investigation, analysis, and cold logic into the solution of his
problems over which we were wont to blunder. We have made no greater
blunders in the past than those we have committed in connection with
the corrective measures which it has been the custom of certain parents
to employ. The necessity for physical punishment has been superseded by
persuasive methods based on a more accurate understanding of the boy’s
mental and moral processes and his impulses for good and bad.
Love, sympathy, and justice beget loyalty where fear fails. Moral
suasion, mental development, the cultivation of will-power, the appeal
to reason, the deprivation of liberties and privileges, rewards for
merit, the exhibition of love, insight and sympathy, the use of tact
and the honor system, all are effective substitutes for physical
chastisement.
The preponderating weight of authority among sociologists and
penologists supports the view that the attitude of the parent toward
his filial offender and of the state toward the adult misdemeanant
should be on the one hand formatory and on the other reformatory--but
never punitory.
The desire to avoid punishment which the prospective recipient regards
as unjust, whether rightly or wrongly does not matter, results in the
concoction of many ingenious stories and schemes. Again the author
draws on his own boyhood experience for an illustration. At the age
of nine I was threatened by my mother with a severe switching for an
offense the nature of which has long since been forgotten. The timely
arrival of callers postponed the dreaded event and afforded me ample
time for reflection. The anticipatory torture which I suffered during
the hour preceding their departure was greater punishment than the
actuality.
My mental processes during that hour were these: “I didn’t do anything
very bad. I don’t deserve a whipping for it. I am sorry for what I have
done and won’t do it again. It’s unfair to whip me for such a little
thing. How can I escape this unjust licking?” At last, after long and
labored mental effort, I evolved a scheme which to my youthful mind
seemed the last word in ingenuity and effectiveness; it would appeal
to her pity and give her an object lesson she would never forget. My
plan was to obtain some oatmeal from the pantry, chew it until my mouth
was filled with froth and saliva and at the first blow of punishment I
would fall to the floor in simulation of unconsciousness, frothing at
the mouth.
These alarming physical symptoms were designed to touch the wellsprings
of pity in my mother’s heart and I would thus escape this threatened
chastisement, as well as future ones. At last the callers departed and
the hour of my doom arrived. She cut two switches from a peach tree
and entered the spareroom--that chamber of horrors--and I followed
reluctantly with halting steps.
When the first blow fell, my instinctive and unconscious activity in
endeavoring to avoid it caused it to strike my ear instead of my back
at which it was aimed. “The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft
agley.” The lusty yell of pain which followed the contact of the
switch with my ear caused me to eject the oatmeal; and with succeeding
yells vanished all recollection of my carefully laid plans for
pseudo-fainting.
Boys frequently show great power of invention in minimizing or evading
punishment about to be inflicted. One boy pads the seat of his trousers
to mitigate the ordeal, where the anticipated weapon is the slipper;
another puts on three undershirts where the customary instrument of
torture is the switch or rod. Still another, suffering the indignity of
being compelled to cut his own switches, has been known to exceed his
instructions and cut the castigatory branch half way through in many
places.
The spare-the-rod-and-spoil-the-child policy has lost its significance
in these latter days. The rod is the emblem of parental ignorance and
incapacity. To beat a defenseless child is proof of lack of ability
to govern it through moral forces. It is a humiliating admission that
one is not qualified for his job as parent. The confirmed user of the
rod is either the parent whose neglect of training or wrong methods of
training have already produced delinquency in his offspring, or the
parent who believes that a liberal application of the birch will atone
for his ignorance on the subject of boy-training. To all other parents
the resort to the rod is as unnecessary as it is abhorrent.
The final question remains: Should the rod ever be used, and, if so,
under what circumstances? When lack of training or poor training has
produced delinquency in the boy and all other corrective measures have
failed--as they usually will fail when applied too late--then corporal
punishment, if not carried to the degree of brutality, may be attempted
as a last resort before confinement in the reform school or house of
detention.
I have profound pity for the fathers who expend less gray matter in the
training of their sons than they do in the training of their hunting
dogs. Give each the same thoughtful, intelligent, patient training and
the boy will surpass the dog in docility, obedience, and understanding.
With better knowledge of the boy and his psychology, and with better
trained parents, the necessity for the use of the rod has disappeared.
“Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will
not depart from it.” Prov. 22:6.