CHAPTER XCORPORAL 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 itshumanitarian 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 wasnot 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 ofview 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 subjectionof 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 dependencyand 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 insteadof 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 policywhich 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 loyaltywhere 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 experiencefor 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 objectlesson 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 followedthe 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 abilityto 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 confinementin 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.