Bringing up the Boy / A Message to Fathers and Mothers from a Boy of Yesterday Concerning the Men of To-morrow

by Carl Avery Werner

Nearly every parent possesses the faculty of governing to some extent—greater or less; and all children are capable of responding to it—but in varying degrees. There is, therefore, no hard and fast rule that can be laid down for the guidance of all parents, to be applied successfully to all children. However, by reducing the subject of this article first to boys, and second to the average boy, I think we can get the discussion down to a practicable basis. The little girl is here absolutely eliminated from consideration. I have studied her assiduously and at close range for a number of years and have succeeded in establishing this much only; first, that she is almost too sweetly complex for paternal comprehension, and second, that she is not amenable to the rules by which we discipline the boy.

My boy, then, is the average boy, old enough to walk and talk and understand what is said to him, moderately sensitive, moderately affectionate, moderately impulsive, moderately perverse, of ordinarily good health, and possessed of the usual amount of animal spirits.

Obedience is the foundation stone of the entire structure of discipline. There is a good deal in discipline besides obedience, but without obedience there is no discipline. It is not the alpha and omega, but is a good deal more than the alpha. Discipline is harmony. Harmony cannot be maintained without perfect obedience, because obedience is a joint affair, a partnership arrangement between you and the boy. All other essentials of discipline are ex parte. In all other essentials you are subjective and the boy is objective. You think and he acts, you direct and he executes, you furnish the plan of living and he lives it. But it is the partnership in obedience that makes this possible. Given perfect obedience, the rest is easy, because the boy’s daily routine is simply a vivification of the principles shaped by your own matured mind.

Let me repeat, then, that discipline is simply harmony and harmony cannot be attained without perfect obedience. Note the adjective, perfect, for this is the obstacle over which we are so prone to stumble. Obedience must be absolute, complete and infallible.

How can we attain it? How can we take the child-boy and so mould him that he will respond to a command instantly and unfailingly? Within him there is a natural, healthy instinct opposed to it. Within him is the natural human tendency to think and act independently, to learn by experiment, to venture unassisted and unrestrained into the unknown.

Punishment other than corporal will not always do it, because at the time when this condition must be established the boy’s baby mentality is not capable of compassing the long distances between cause and effect. At the early age at which it is necessary to establish perfect obedience, the moral penalties are too slow in action, too complex and too much dependent upon local condition to be effective. There are exceptions, of course. For example: You have a box of sweets and you tell the boy he may take one. He takes two. As a penalty for his disobedience you make him return both pieces to the box and you cast the package into the fire. There you have incorporal punishment that is instant, direct and effective; but this incident is made to order and of rare occurrence in fact. Suppose that the boy swallows the two pieces instantly, or suppose the more usual occurrence that you have forbidden him to partake of the sweets at all and he has surreptitiously eaten one. What then? Casting the remainder into the fire will not impress him at the time because his appetite has been satisfied, the desire is dulled. You may deprive him of his allowance on the day following, but the lapse of time dims the relation of the penalty to the offence. This kind of treatment works well with some of the minor errors but not with disobedience. The tendency to disobey is too constant, too persistent and too frequent, and too early in the boy’s process of development.

A mother said: “It is not necessary for me to strike my child. I compel him to sit in a chair for one hour without speaking. He fears that more than the rod.” Of course, he does, poor little chap! And that mother did not realise that she was substituting a barbaric torture for mild punishment. I reverse her reasoning: It is not necessary for me to so torture my boy. Nor shall I deprive him of his play, of the outside air, of his supper, of anything that makes for his health and happiness, nor of any good thing that it is in my power to give him.

Disobedience calls for a punishment that is short, direct and impressive. A sharp tap on the palm of a boy’s hand, or on the calf of his leg—or two or five or ten—is the only kind of penance I know of that fills the requirements. It is the one short and sure road to an immediate result. Naturalists tell us that the sense of touch is the first experienced by a newborn child. It is the first and quickest wire from the outer world to the brain. Then come hearing and smelling and seeing and long after these come the moral perceptions, the power of deduction and the distinction of right and wrong. My experience has been that this first sense continues to be the live wire until well on toward the maturity of the child—if the child is a boy. There are many men, who can undergo the severest mental torture with calm resolution and fortitude, but who tremble at the sight of a dental chair. Not long ago I was chatting with a friend, who is a dentist, when a burly policeman rushed in, plumped himself into the operating-chair and asked the dentist to ease his aching tooth. The dentist looked at the tooth and reached for his forceps. “The only way to fix that is to extract it,” he said. The officer of the law sprang from the chair like a jack-in-the-box and made for the door, remarking apologetically as he went out that he couldn’t spare the time. “That man,” said the dentist, when he had gone, “has a medal for bravery, and three times has been commended for saving lives at the risk of his own.”