July1939 in Home and
School "Readers’ Questions"
Smacking
“L.E.M.” writes: I have been arguing with some of my friends about
physical punishment, and I should like to know what you think about it. My own
view is that the average child from about one year to three or four understands
nothing else so well - they cannot be argued with, and some punishment is
necessary if a proper discipline is to be maintained. A small smack is not
really inflicting much pain, is soon over, and I find a small child bears no
more malice than a puppy. Children of that age are not sentimental - they don’t
feel humiliated - and even of they did, a certain amount of humility is a
virtue none too common these days. I am afraid the result of no smacking would
be a man or woman with no sense of discipline or obedience - a trouble which is
filling the children’s police courts with boys and girls whose parents admit,
“they can do nothing with them” a most lamentable result of giving in to them
too much when young. My father is a doctor, and over and over again he is
called in to sick children who have been given unsuitable food or who are
allowed to get up when ill because “Well, you see, he wanted to!” Heaven help
the country in the next generation starts life with the idea that they can do
everything they want to. My friend’s boy of sixteen months who is allowed to
decide whether he wants to rest or not will find that other people are not so
accommodating as his mother - As Kipling says, “Angels may come to you, Willie
my son, but you’ll never be wanted on earth, dear.”
I wonder why you think that not
smacking a young child is exactly the same as letting him do just as he wants? Why do you assume that there is no other form of
training a child, and that the only
alternative to smacking is simply indulgence? This is very far from true.
The child has many other motives which can be used in is training besides that
of fear of physical pain. In children who have not been spoilt by early
subjection to physical chastisement, so that this has become the key to their
relation with grown-ups, the child’s own wish to develop skills and abilities,
and his pleasure in co-operating with grown-ups, are real and genuine motives.
But to give the child the opportunity for developing these skills and
independence needs more patience, more time, more understanding on the part of the
grown up than to administer a sharp smack and say, “Do this” or “Don’t do
that”. It always interests me when people say that without smacking the child
will never learn to adapt himself to the ordinary social world of grown-ups. Such
a view assumes that decent behaviour among grown-ups is entirely the result of
fear of imprisonment and punishment. It needs but little reflection to show how
very far from true this is. Imprisonment and punishment are limiting factors
which are necessary for exceptional cases but do not represent by any means the
actual motives which lead ordinary grown-ups to be well-behaved and considerate
and responsible people. Law-abiding citizens and people who are successful in
social relations are such because of their positive
loyalties and interests and sympathies, not because they are frightened by
dread of punishment. It is just because physical chastisement is such an
inadequate means of education for real social life that one turns away from it.
It is wrong to imagine that the
boys and girls who fill the children’s Police Courts and whose parents admit
that they can do nothing with them are what they are because of indulgence and
not having been smacked. In the
great majority of cases the very reverse is true. Only too often, the children
who come before the magistrate have been quite severely treated in the home.
There was a case recently when the magistrate ordered the father to whip the
boy, and the father then confesses that he had whipped and whipped him until
his own arm ached and he was weary of it, and had come to the Court because he
did not know what else to do! This is a common, although somewhat
extreme case. Practical workers with delinquents and those who have made a
historical study of the effect of penal laws are all agreed that severity of
punishment invariably increases the seriousness of crime and the frequency of
delinquencies amongst the young. The problem of reforming the young adolescent
who has taken to crime, or of re-training the difficult and defiant child in
the home, is always a problem of wining the child’s co-operation and trust by
meeting his real positive interests and giving him opportunities for
constructive activities.
I do not need to say that I quite
agree with your criticism of the parents who allow a child to get up when he
should be in bed for sickness, or who give him food which is unsuitable for
children just ‘because he wants it”. But that is a totally different matter.
There is unfortunately so much confusion in people’s minds about the different
issues involved in this problem. The question of trying to force a boy of
sixteen months to rest when he has shown he does not need to rest, either on
physical or psychological grounds, is quite another thing from allowing him to
eat rich cakes which disagree with his digestion! If the mother needs to be
free of the child because she needs to rest herself, there are other ways of
making sure that the child is quietly occupied than trying to compel him sleep when he does not need it, and regarding him as
disobedient because he cannot sleep.
It is sometimes said that little
children are like animals and should be treated as such. Your own remark that
the child understands nothing, but smacks
is in the same lines. But it is wrong! Even the child of a year or a year and a
half is very different in many important respects, from even the most
intelligent of animals. It would, of course, be an easier problem for us as
responsible educators if the situation were as simple as that. But one is
always dealing with a developing and growing human being, and the human feeling
of self-respect is always there either openly or implicitly at any age after
the first year.
I quite agree that children are
not sentimental and that they very often bear no malice for a small smack, but
that only holds good of the occasional smack given by an exasperated adult in a
momentary bad temper. Children do understand and readily forgive a flash of
impatience on the part of the grown-up, and it is even true that with some
children such an open outbreak of temper on the part of the grown-up, ending in
a smack, leaves the child more content since he feels the account is settled in
that way. If the idea that one should not smack a child simply leads to nagging
and pestering the child with reproaches, then, I agree, an occasional smack
would be much better! But that is quite different from setting up the principal
of corporal punishment as a real educational end or the sole educational guide
in the early years. None of us is perfect and children do not expect
perfection, in fact a little human frailty endears us to them because it shows
the child that we are not so very different from him after all. But the cold,
deliberate, systematic smacking of a child for any and everything he does which
does not please us is based on standards that are false to the child’s true
needs of growth in skill and independence. It is a method which makes no
provision for the positive development of his interests or of feelings of
co-operation with the grown-up, and is thus wholly to be condemned.
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