Her solicitude for the child’s moral welfare is as commendable as it is necessary and her desire to prevent such incidents from becoming a habit is praiseworthy. Her methods, only, are wrong. Instead of punishment the child is entitled to instruction which will develop his mentality until he can distinguish between fact and fancy. With growth in mental stature comes coördination of ideas and a clearer discernment of the line of demarcation between the real and the unreal, and when the child becomes mentally able to distinguish between the two, such misstatements of fact will be at an end. Falsehood in young children has been characterized by Dr. Hall as “a new mental combination independent of experience.”
In rare cases this mental fog continues, with diminishing intensity, through maturity. Everyone knows of the man who told a story so often that he himself finally believed it. It chiefly manifests itself in adults in exaggeration of the qualities, abilities, or prowess of the teller. Witness the fisherman of your acquaintance whose account of the weight and size of his biggest fish grows with each succeeding recital. He does not mean to lie. He thinks he is telling the truth. In the beginning he justified his exaggeration of weight and size by doubting the accuracy of the scale and rule by which he weighed and measured the fish. The continued repetition of his yarn produced an impression on his brain closely resembling actuality. He deceived himself. Pride in his piscatorial prowess made deception easy. His error was partly mental, partly moral, the latter being in direct ratio to the clarity of his mental processes. It is a tremendous tribute to the mental stability and moral discernment of a fisherman to be able to refrain, in after years, from overstating the weight of his biggest fish.
We now consider another phase of misstatement of fact—the falsehood of the older boy. At the age of six or seven the mental fog begins to clear. He sees things in a truer, brighter light. The relationship of facts to each other becomes more and more cognizable. His moral faculties are emerging from a chaos of mental impressions. This age, approximately, marks the birth of moral consciousness. His conception of right and wrong takes form and begins its process of development. At this period he begins to distinguish between fact and fancy and as his mental processes become clarified by increasing maturity, so in a corresponding degree his confusion of the unreal with the real disappears. Mentality begins to dominate imagination.
What of the boy, under these conditions, who tells a lie? An inquiry into the motives which prompt his falsehoods may clarify the problem and afford a solution. The study of a large number of untruthful boys has developed the fact that their motives for mendacity are few and are usually comprehended under one class—the desire to escape punishment for an offense. Other and lesser incentives to lying are envy, boasting, revenge, jealousy, and imitation, but none of these is as potent as the fear of a reprimand, a scolding, or corporal punishment.
A scolding and a whipping are both painful—one in mind, the other in body. It is natural for one to seek to avoid pain and suffering. It is equally certain that punishment must inevitably follow the violation of law—whether parental law, physical law, or the law of the land. Loading the stomach with indigestible food brings its own punishment in the disturbance of the bodily functions. The commission of a felony necessitates a term of imprisonment after conviction; and with equal certainty punishment should follow the violation of parental law. But if that punishment is unnecessarily severe or if it violates the boy’s sense of fairness and justice, he will seek to avoid it by the most effective weapon of defense at hand—falsehood. Nothing is more conducive to deceit than frequent scoldings or floggings for trivial offenses, and the elimination of corporal and unduly severe mental punishments will remove the chief incentive to falsehood.
The remedy for the falsehoods which have their origin in the lesser provocatives referred to above is moral suasion, a hackneyed phrase often used and little understood. Literally it implies the persuasive influence of moral teaching. In its broader aspect and as a cure for lying, it comprehends the culture of moral consciousness; training of the will; fixation of the habit of obedience; teaching the evil results which always follow falsehood; the development of mentality (without which there can be no comprehension of moral concepts); and the influence of parental example in the exact and scrupulous adherence to truth. All these combined produce the composite result called moral suasion, which is generally effective.
CHAPTER X
CORPORAL 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 its humanitarian 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 was not 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.