Also, we are in entire disagreement with the author when he says that spankings should be administered in a cool and deliberate manner, that "punishment must partake of the nature of a ceremony." The only excuse for a parent who spanks his child is that he has lost his temper and his patience and his ability to think up any better remedy. If he is asked why he does it he would do well to explain all that very frankly to the child and to add that it is the rather harsh rule of the world that stronger people usually adopt force against weaker people to get what they want. The child may regard him as a bully, but he will not be in danger of being thought a hypocrite as well.
This system seems far preferable to the one suggested by the author in a quotation from Charles Werner: "My boy, listen: I love you and I do not like to hurt you. But every boy must be made to obey his father and mother, and this seems to be the only way to make you do it. So remember! Every time you disobey me you shall be punished. When I tell you to do a thing, you must do it instantly without a moment's delay. If you hesitate, if you wait to be told the second time, you will be punished. When I speak you must act. Just as sure as you are standing here before me this punishment will follow every time you do not do as you are told."
This would be, at least, a commendably frank statement of the tyranny under which most children are held if it were not for the unjustified intrusion of the love motive. This occurs, however, in a still more objectionable form in a reply to a mother, in which the author writes, "Should it ever be necessary to spank him I should not refuse to kiss him, even while you are doing so. He can learn that no punishment is inflicted in anger and that punishment does not turn aside your affection."
Such conduct is adding insult to indignity. It goes beyond the tyranny which few parents can resist in a state in which interests are necessarily so conflicting as one which is inhabited by growing persons and grown-ups. It is probably not to be expected, or even desirable, that parents should always allow the interests of the child to displace their own, but when they cannot resist the temptation to sweep over the borders of childhood with all their armed forces it is a little too much to ask that the conquered people should be not only docile but grateful. In other words, the father or mother who says as a prelude to punishment, "I am doing this for your own good," is a liar at least nine times out of ten. What he means is, "I am doing this for my own convenience," and he ought to be frank enough to say so.
The trouble is, as Mr. Floyd Dell has pointed out, that the parent wants complete submission and complete affection too. He can't have both without making a hypocrite of his child. It is perfectly healthy that the child should have fierce outbursts of resentment against his parents when they get in his way, and he should be allowed, and even encouraged, to express his protest. It is the most arrant nonsense to suppose that a relationship of continual love is a desirable thing to keep up. It is much too wearing.
The other day I tried to take a small fragment of newspaper out of H. 3rd's mouth, and he tried to swing his right to the jaw. I still have the reach, and I was able to protect myself by a frequent use of a lightning left jab. Finally I rescued the paper. It was only a small section of an editorial in an evening newspaper about the trial of the five Socialist Assemblymen. Probably I might just as well have permitted H. 3rd to swallow it. Without doubt, the paper would have taken it back the next day, anyway.
In speaking of his endeavor "to make the small duties of life pleasant to the child" one parent writes: "These items should never enter the arena of argument; they may, if taken up early, by a gentle, loving firmness, be treated always as though they were as certain as sunrise, for there is a curious conventionality, a liking for having things done in a dependable fashion, with little folks, and there is nothing to which human nature in young or old more cheerfully submits than the inevitable."
Yes, and there is a curious conventionality in the man who has been hopping about the office all day in obeying the orders of the junior partner or the city editor, which inspires him when he comes home to his children to pretend that he is Kaiser, Fate, or God Himself.
"No time of day is more heavenly in a home than the hour when little children, like white angels, go up the stairs to bed."
We wonder if our continued failure to get any such impression rests only on the fact that we have no stairs.