I was heartened by a news item tonight that reported that a teenaged girl commuting on "Skytrain"---Greater Vancouver's monorail system---was "swarmed" by a gang of six teenaged girls, beaten and robbed. (May 5/08)
It is surely wonderful that females have finally shed that reserved, passive, effeminate posture that has kept them down for so many centuries and struck out and assumed this independent, assertive "male" approach to social interaction. No more shrinking violets. Now its "take no prisoners". It just goes to show that Dr. Spock's philosophy and modern child psychology theory is paying off.
In the 1960s I began to hear that corporal punishment of children was barbaric. That sentiment grew to become a chorus of conventional wisdom for today. A watershed New Zealand study found that 18% of children who were spanked manifested behavioural problems in adulthood. What those who quoted the study didn't say however was, that by implication, 82% of the children
who were spanked did
not exhibit behavioural problems.
Let me tell you about the behavioural problems I
didn't see in the 1950s or 60s in children---the children "victimized" and "abused" by spanking: Mouthing off at lifeguards, theatre ushers and teachers, refusing to give up your seat to women and the elderly on buses, disobeying curfew, going to school dressed like hookers and beating seniors to a pulp after tying them up and robbing their homes.
Why was that the case? Children then were subject to discipline. Ah yes, trendies say, but you can provide discipline without hitting poor, defenseless children. Yeah sure you can. The evidence is all around me. It's on the evening news, in theatres, on public transport, at swimming pools and school yards. Whatever the individual differences among children may be, statistically the results are in.
The violence in society committed by teenagers is inversely proportional to the violence meted out to them as children. A dose of prevention and a pound of cure.
Children must know that there is a bottom line. Behind all the endless verbal warnings there is a point when its "Kid, if you don't listen to what I'm saying, I am going to improve your hearing with the palm of my hand on your rear end." Unfortunately, unless eventually executed, that threat never seems to carry any credibility. Amazing how that works.
In my own particular case, as a boy, I apparently had a problem with ear-wax build-up. My father would tell me not to do something, but I didn't hear him because of the wax in my ears. Then time would pass and he would repeat his warning, and because I still couldn't hear him his voice would grow louder. Finally, the wax got so thick that I couldn't hear him shout the warning and he pulled out his belt and lashed my buttocks until I cried. Miraculously the wax then vanished and I never had any difficulty hearing anything my father said for the rest of the year.
Another funny thing too. I never felt abused, humiliated or resentful. I grew up without the slightest inclination to attack elderly people or deny my seat to them on public transport or harangue authority figures. And the boys of my generation were much the same, I reckon. We were, I suppose, "psychologically mutilated" by corporal punishment. And society was a helluva lot better for it.
I dedicate this to the man who loved me enough to discipline me the way I needed it. Proverbs 13:24
