Your boy and his training

by Edwin Seward Puller

The average child does not rebel against authority but only against authority which he thinks is unjustly or harshly exercised. He invariably revolts against corporal punishment because he believes any degree of it to be excessive. From the boy’s point of view he is a Lilliputian whom the Gargantuan parent abuses because of greater brute strength. A fourteen-year-old boy who was being beaten by his father for failure to perform some chore shouted in his face, “You wouldn’t dare do that if I was as big as you.” And the boy spoke the truth. The father who is addicted to the corporal form of punishment is deterred, when his son approaches maturity, as much by fear of being vanquished in the contest as by a realization of its futility as a corrective of the later adolescent.

This form of punishment is commonly adopted to “break the will” of the disobedient and rebellious boy. If breaking the will of the boy means making it conform to that of the physically stronger father, the attempt is as ineffective as it is brutal, for acquiescence under such circumstances never is evidence of mental consent. Servile subjection of will is out of harmony with that growth of will-power which is necessary to the ideal development of the adolescent.

Persistent, unjust, or excessive punishments, either of body or mind, furnish a powerful incentive for the boy to invoke his chief means of defense against superior force—evasion and prevarication. Such conduct is guaranteed to produce a youthful Munchausen.

What are a boy’s means of defense against a beating which he regards, either rightly or wrongly, as excessive or brutal? He has only two—flight and falsehood. He knows that he is incapable of matching physical strength with his parent. This knowledge, combined with whatever love for the parent has not been extinguished, prevents a contest of strength which the child realizes would be futile. Flight is frequently out of the question because of the boy’s dependency and his inability to earn his own living. His last means of defense is falsehood, the use of which he justifies as his only method of escape from unwarranted or excessive punishment. Fully conscious of the wrong of lying he considers it the lesser of the two evils.

Similar in its effect is the nagging of children, in which mothers are more prone to indulge than fathers. Exhibitions of constant scolding, faultfinding, and querulous temper, interspersed with boxing of ears, smacking of cheeks, and slapping of hands, all tend to thwart the child’s mental and moral growth and contribute to the making of a wayward son. Such punishment is largely mental but none the less reprehensible because it lacks the element of physical pain. To slap a child’s hand as a correctional measure, with the sharp word of reproof which accompanies it, gives the child a mental instead of a physical shock; a slap of the same degree given in a playful mood will cause him to laugh. When a boy, especially in the adolescent period, begins to complain of the injustice of constant nagging, scolding, and corporal punishment, it is a danger signal which should cause the parent to stop, look, and listen. Such conduct on the part of the parent alienates the love and sympathy of the child, conduces to lying, secretiveness and evasion, and is productive of truancy and the development of the wanderlust. Its psychological effect on the parent is the loss of self-respect which is the inevitable accompaniment of punitive injustice.

The punitive theory of the correction of youthful offenses is archaic and should be relegated to the Paleolithic era from whence it sprang. To mete out punishment as such is vengeance pure and simple; an eye-for-an-eye-and-a-tooth-for-a-tooth policy which has no place in modern child-culture.

With our present-day scientific knowledge of the boy, as distinguished from our personal knowledge of him in the past, we recognize the trend of tendencies and understand the portent of symptoms which formerly were either unnoticed or disregarded. We have brought minute investigation, analysis, and cold logic into the solution of his problems over which we were wont to blunder. We have made no greater blunders in the past than those we have committed in connection with the corrective measures which it has been the custom of certain parents to employ. The necessity for physical punishment has been superseded by persuasive methods based on a more accurate understanding of the boy’s mental and moral processes and his impulses for good and bad.

Love, sympathy, and justice beget loyalty where fear fails. Moral suasion, mental development, the cultivation of will-power, the appeal to reason, the deprivation of liberties and privileges, rewards for merit, the exhibition of love, insight and sympathy, the use of tact and the honor system, all are effective substitutes for physical chastisement.

The preponderating weight of authority among sociologists and penologists supports the view that the attitude of the parent toward his filial offender and of the state toward the adult misdemeanant should be on the one hand formatory and on the other reformatory—but never punitory.

The desire to avoid punishment which the prospective recipient regards as unjust, whether rightly or wrongly does not matter, results in the concoction of many ingenious stories and schemes. Again the author draws on his own boyhood experience for an illustration. At the age of nine I was threatened by my mother with a severe switching for an offense the nature of which has long since been forgotten. The timely arrival of callers postponed the dreaded event and afforded me ample time for reflection. The anticipatory torture which I suffered during the hour preceding their departure was greater punishment than the actuality.