The New Dare to Discipline (2 page)

Perhaps that is why the pendulum has swung back and forth regularly between harsh, oppressive control and the unstructured permissiveness we saw in the mid–twentieth century. It is time we realized that
both
extremes leave their characteristic scars on the lives of young victims, and I would be hard pressed to say which is more damaging.

At the oppressive end of the continuum, a child suffers the humiliation of total domination. The atmosphere is icy and rigid, and he lives in constant fear. He is unable to make his own decisions, and his personality is squelched beneath the hobnailed boot of parental authority. Lasting characteristics of dependency; deep, abiding anger; and even psychosis can emerge from this persistent dominance.

Of greater concern are the boys and girls who are being subjected to physical and emotional abuse. There are millions of families out there in which these unthinkable crimes are being committed day after day. It is hard to believe just how cruel some mothers and fathers can be to a defenseless, wide-eyed child who doesn’t understand why he or she is hated. The cases I’ve dealt with over the years—of unloved and abused children—are impossible to forget. I remember the terrible father who regularly wrapped his small son’s head in the sheet that the boy had wet the night before. Then he crammed the tot upside down into the toilet bowl for punishment. I also think of the disturbed mother who cut out her child’s eyes with a razor blade. That poor little girl will go through life blind, knowing that her own mother deprived her of sight! Horrible acts like these are now occurring every day in cities and towns around us.

We should also recognize that there are many ways to abuse a child without breaking the law. It can be done subtly by ignoring a boy or girl’s desperate need for nurturance. It can be accomplished by unjust and unfair punishment, including parental acts that might pass for “corporal punishment”—such as routinely hitting, slapping, kicking, and throwing the child to the ground. Then there is the entire range of humiliating behavior by a mother or father, making a youngster feel stupid and weird and unloved. Within certain limits, these behaviors are not illegal. There is no one to rescue the pitiful child who is being twisted and warped by the big people around him. Let
nothing
in this book ever hint at my approval for such tyranny.

Let me say again with the strongest emphasis that aggressive, hard-nosed, “Mommie Dearest” kinds of discipline are destructive to kids and must not be tolerated. Parents who are cold and stern with their sons and daughters often leave them damaged for life. I could easily be misunderstood at this point, having authored this book in which I recommend (in chapter 4) the judicious use of corporal punishment under specific circumstances and limits. May all doubts be dispelled.
I don’t
believe in parental harshness.
Period! Children are incredibly vulnerable to rejection, ridicule, criticism, and anger at home, and they deserve to grow up in an environment of safety, acceptance, and warmth.

We must acknowledge, as indicated earlier, that the opposite extreme is also damaging to children. In the absence of adult leadership, the child is his own master from his earliest babyhood. He thinks the world revolves around his heady empire, and he often has utter contempt and disrespect for those closest to him. Anarchy and chaos reign in his home, and his mother is often the most nervous, frustrated woman on her block. When the child is young, the mother is stranded at home because she is too embarrassed to take her little spitfire anywhere. It would be worth the hardships she endures if this condition produced healthy, secure children. It clearly does not.

Many of the writers offering their opinions on the subject of discipline in recent years have confused parents, stripping them of the ability to lead in their own homes. They have failed to acknowledge the desire of most youngsters to rule their own lives and prevail in the contest of wills that typically occurs between generations.

In my book
The Strong-Willed Child
I quoted from a parenting text entitled,
Your Child from Two to Five,
published during the permissive 1950s. In it was a bit of advice paraphrased from the writings of a Dr. Luther Woodward, as follows:

What do you do when your preschooler calls you a “big stinker” or threatens to flush you down the toilet? Do you scold . . . punish . . . or sensibly take it in your stride? Dr. Woodward recommends a positive policy of understanding as the best and fastest way to help a child outgrow this verbal violence. When parents fully realize that all little tots feel angry and destructive at times, they are better able to minimize these outbursts. Once the preschooler gets rid of his hostility, the desire to destroy is gone and instinctive feelings of love and affection have a chance to sprout and grow. Once the child is six or seven, parents can rightly let the child know that he is expected to be outgrowing sassing his parents.
¹

Having offered that sage advice, with which I disagree strongly, Dr. Woodward then told parents to brace themselves for unjust criticism. He wrote, “But this policy [of letting children engage in defiance] takes a broad perspective and a lot of composure, especially when friends and relatives voice disapproval and warn that you are bringing up a brat.”

In this case, your friends and relatives will probably be right. Dr. Woodward’s recommendation is typical of the advice given to parents in the mid–twentieth century. It encourages them to stand passively through the formative years when respect for authority can so easily be taught. I responded to that counsel this way in
The Strong-Willed Child.

Dr. Woodward’s suggestion is based on the simplistic notion that children will develop sweet and loving attitudes if we adults will permit and encourage their temper tantrums during childhood. According to the optimistic Dr. Woodward, the tot who has been calling his mother a“big stinker” for six or seven years can be expected to embrace her suddenly in love and dignity. That outcome is most improbable. Dr. Woodward’s creative “policy of understanding” (which means stand and do nothing) offers a one-way ticket to adolescent rebellion in many cases.
²

I believe that if it is desirable for children to be kind, appreciative, and pleasant, those qualities should be taught— not hoped for. If we want to see honesty, truthfulness, and unselfishness in our offspring, then these characteristics should be the conscious objectives of our early instructional process. If it is important to produce respectful, responsible young citizens, then we should set out to mold them accordingly. The point is obvious:
heredity does not equip a child with
proper attitudes; children learn what they are taught.
We cannot expect the coveted behavior to appear magically if we have not done our early homework.

The kind of advice Dr. Woodward and others have offered to mothers and fathers through the years has led to a type of paralysis in dealing with their kids. In the absence of “permission” to step in and lead, parents were left with only their anger and frustration in response to defiant behavior.

That thought immediately brings to mind a family I knew with four of the most unruly children I had ever met. These youngsters were the terrors of their neighborhood. They were disrespectful, loud, and aggressive. They roamed in and out of other people’s garages, helping themselves to tools and equipment. It became necessary for neighbors to remove the handles from outside water faucets, because these children enjoyed leaving the water running when the families were gone.

It was interesting to observe the method of discipline used by their mother, if only because it provided a memorable example of what didn’t work. Her system of controlling her brood boiled down to a simple formula. When they became too noisy or cantankerous in the backyard, she would rush out the door about once every hour and scream, “I have had it with you kids! I have just
had
it with you!” Then she would turn and go back into the house. The children never even glanced up at her. If they knew she was there they gave no indication of it. But she apparently felt it was sufficient to burst out the door like a cuckoo clock every so often and remind them she was still on the job. There must be a better way to handle the awesome task of parenting that God has assigned to us.

If both extremes are harmful, how do we find the safety of the middle ground? Surely, there is a logical, reasonable philosophy of child rearing that will guide our day-by-day interactions at home. Can’t the social scientists come up with a workable game plan? Perhaps this will sound like heresy coming from a man who spent ten years of his life in behavioral and medical research, but I don’t believe the scientific community is the best source of information on proper parenting techniques. There have been some worthwhile studies, to be sure. But the subject of parent-child interactions is incredibly complex and subtle. The only way to investigate it scientifically is to reduce the relationship to its simplest common denominators, so it can be examined. But in so doing, the overall tone is missed. Some things in life are so complicated that they almost defy rigorous scrutiny, and parental discipline (in my view) appears to be one of them.

The best source of guidance for parents can be found in the wisdom of the Judeo-Christian ethic, which originated with the Creator and was then handed down generation by generation from the time of Christ. This is what my mother, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother understood almost intuitively. There was within Western culture a common knowledge about children and their needs. Not everyone applied it, but most people agreed with its tenets. When a new baby was born one hundred years ago, aunts and sisters and grandmothers came over to teach the new mother how to care for her infant. What they were doing was passing along the traditional wisdom . . . the heritage . . . to the next generation, which would later perform the same service for the newcomers on the block. That system worked pretty well until the 1920s and thereafter. Slowly, the culture began to lose confi- dence in that tradition and shifted its allegiance to the experts. Behaviorist J. B. Watson was one of the first and most influential gurus to come along. He offered what he called a “foolproof” method of child rearing, and mothers bought it hook, line, and sinker. If only they would follow his advice, he said, they could produce any kind of a child they wanted . . . “adoctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and—yes—even a beggarman and a thief.”

Watson advised parents, if they wanted the best results, to show no affection for their offspring. He wrote:

“Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning. . . .

“Remember when you are tempted to pet your child, that mother love is a dangerous instrument. An instrument which may inflict a never-healing wound, a wound which may make infancy unhappy, adolescence a nightmare, an instrument which may wreck your adult son or daughter’s vocational future and their chances for marital happiness.”
³

This advice from Dr. Watson comes across today like pure nonsense, and indeed, that’s just what it is. In fact, it’s difficult to believe anyone gave credibility to such advice even in 1928. Yet Watson was enormously popular in his day, and his books sold in the millions. Mothers and fathers worked diligently to “condition” their children in the way recommended by this half-baked hot dog.

Then came Dr. Sigmund Freud, and Dr. Benjamin Spock, and Dr. A. S. Neill (see chapter 7), and Dr. Tom Gordon, and Dr. Ruth Westheimer, and Phil Donahue, and Oprah Winfrey, and the
Ladies’ Home Journal
, and
Cosmopolitan,
and
Red book
, and finally, a newspaper for “enquiring minds who want to know.” With every new, off-the-wall suggestion that came along, I asked myself: If their new approach to child-rearing is so wonderful, why was it not observed until now? How come 20 billion parents across more than five thousand years failed to notice the concept? Certainly, the accumulated experience of all that mothering and fathering should count for
something
!

My primary purpose in writing this book, both the 1970 version and this recomposition, has been to record for posterity my understanding of the Judeo-Christian concept of parenting that has guided millions of mothers and fathers for centuries. I am convinced that it will prove successful in
your
home, too. Let’s move on, then, to examine five underpinnings to commonsense child rearing.

1.
Developing respect for parents is the critical factor in child
management.
It is imperative that a child learns to respect his parents—not to satisfy their egos, but because his relationship with them provides the basis for his later attitude toward all other people. His early view of parental authority becomes the cornerstone of his future outlook on school authority, law enforcement officers, employers, and others with whom he will eventually live and work. The parent-child relationship is the first and most important social interaction a youngster will have, and the flaws and knots experienced there can often be seen later in life.

Respect for parents must be maintained for another equally important reason. If you want your child to accept your values when he reaches his teen years, then you must be worthy of his respect during his younger days. When a child can successfully defy his parents during his first fifteen years, laughing in their faces and stubbornly flouting their authority, he develops a natural contempt for them.

“Stupid old Mom and Dad! I have them wound around my little finger. Sure they love me, but I really think they’re afraid of me.” A child may not utter these words, but he feels them each time he outsmarts his elders and wins the confrontations and battles. Later he is likely to demonstrate his disrespect in a more blatant manner. Viewing his parents as being unworthy of his respect, he may very well reject every vestige of their philosophy and faith.