January 22, 1936 in Nursery World
I Smacked Her
A strong protest against the point of view that which sees smacking as the most satisfactory way of training a child
Nanny writes: “After reading two letters on the question of smacking children, I would like to tell you my experience. My charge was nearly a year old when I took her. She was eighteen months old before I had a good night’s rest. She would wake up every night and cry, sometimes for hours. As she was a healthy, normal child, I put it down at first to teething time, and tried to soothe to sleep again. But it was of no avail. Sometimes mummie would come in and take her into her room in order to give me a few hours’ rest. She would cry for an hour on end without a tear in her eye. Then one night, instead of petting her, I gave her a smacking instead. For the rest of the night it was effective. She was very quiet. So, every night after that, when she woke up and cried without reason, I smacked her. At the end of three weeks, I found I had nights of undisturbed rest. She is getting on for two and a-half years now, but I have had no more trouble. I found that when I took her on that she would not go to sleep without being rocked, even when she was put down after her bath at night: Why? Because until I came, mummie brought her up. It is my opinion that where the upbringing of children is concerned, the present-day mothers are hopeless. If my little one sits and dreams over her meals instead of eating her food up, I give her hand a sharp smack, but this is very rare. If I say to her, “Nannie wants you,’ she comes straight away. I never have to tell her twice to do anything. If ever she is really naughty, I put her to stand in the corner. ‘Alison’s Mother should try this. If she is going to feel ‘awful’ every time she punishes her child now, it is nothing to what she will feel when her child defies her and makes a scene in public. This is exactly what my charge does when mummie takes her out alone. But mothers think if they smack their children they will lose their love, little realising that the hand that loves them must sometimes hurt them for their good. In spite of the ‘brutality’ I have shown to my little one, she always says when she sees me going out without her, “Nannie no go away. Nannie stay.”
I am glad to have an opportunity to take this subject up further, and I am going to say quite frankly what I think about the methods described by the writer of this letter. I will begin by saying that I would allow no one with such a point of view and such a way of handling a tiny child to come anywhere near a child for whom I was responsible. The method works for the practical convenience of the nurse. It is convenient to have a child who will do everything one wants at a moment’s notice., and who will hide all troubles and difficulties instantly by going to sleep for fear of smacking.
But the duty of a nurse or the responsibility of a mother does not lie in finding the shortest way to her own practical convenience. It surely consists in finding the way that will not only help the health and happiness of the child at the present, but will ensure satisfactory development, health, happiness, independent social responsibility, and a full development of skills and interests in later childhood and in grown-up life. Now, the experience of all the Child Guidance Clinics and all of the people who have to do with difficult children in later years, say from four or five onwards, and above all, with delinquent children in the middle years of childhood and early adolescence would confirm me in saying that just this type of method with tiny children is responsibletimes out of number for these later difficulties. I do not say, and no one can say, that in every single case such stern and stupid methods will result in anti-social behaviour or severe neuroses. There are children who can come through the worst treatment successfully, just as there are children who become ill and difficult even with the most understanding of nurses and parents. Human development is so complex that one can never predict with absolute certainty, but all the experience, as I say, of the Child Guidance Clinics, and of those who have to advise and treat ill and difficult and unhappy children in the later years, would confirm the view that it is extremely probable that a little child treated as this one is treated would grow up with some serious neurosis or anti-social character. The risk is so great that, as I began by saying, I myself would not allow anyone with such methods to have anything to do with the child for whom I was responsible. Such complete inability to understand the child’s point of view, to have any glimmer of imagination with regard to the child’s problems, to see the child as a person or to think of the child’s future, as distinct from the nurse’s present convenience, would in my mind certainly disqualify a person for dealing with children of any age. I know that I am speaking very strongly, but I do so with a full sense of responsibility, and with the knowledge of all the experience of other people, as well as my own, behind these statements. Recently, a psychiatrist who is experienced in the remedial care of delinquent girls and adolescents, and who has a home where a certain number of such girls are kept, and treated with every helpful method known to psychological science and medicine, has told me that after six years’ experience she has gone over the results of her treatments and the histories of the girls concerned. She finds that she had fifty per cent successes, that is to say, half of the delinquent girls in her care have been returned to life responsible and sensible and happy people. The other half have to be counted failures, and she has found out that in every single case of these failures the outstanding fact in the girl’s history was lack of love in the first two years. This took various forms. Some of the children were illegitimate, some of them had really cruel parents, some of them had stern and un-understandingtreatment. But in every case the children failed to experience a really affectionate family with some human being during the first two years. Now I am not suggesting that the writer of this latter fails altogether to give affection to the little child in her charge. The child has had some affection from her mother, so that this case does not illustrate the situation of not having been loved at all during the first two years; but to have a nurse who treats one with such severity and such complete lack of understanding is getting very near the case of children who suffer from lack of love. And I would not venture to hope that a really happy and successful child in later life is the outcome of such treatment in the early years. 
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