“My wife and I
agree on most aspects of childcare with one exception. I feel that corporal
punishment has its place in instilling a sense of right and wrong although I do
not approve of it. I consider shouting or emotional abuse to be in many cases
much worse.”
Mr T.R.
Over 2000 years
ago Quintillian commented, “Though you may compel a child with blows, what are
you to do with him when he is a young man no longer amenable to such threats
and confronted with tasks of greater difficulty?” In similar vein, Plutarch
counselled “Children ought to be led to honourable practices by means of
encouragement and reasoning and most certainly not by blows … for so they grow
numb and shudder at their tasks, partly from the pain of blows, partly from
degradation”.
The emotional
recognition that hitting people (large children) is wrong has therefore been
present for thousands of years and yet it is clear that it has always had to
co-exist with the opposite view, the biblical rejoinder that “to spare the rod
is to spoil the child.” Those two
opposites not
only co-exist historically and geographically, they co-exist in the minds of
parents and children.
The parent who
shouts at or hits his child is not at that moment the same parent as the one
who later hugs his/her child or plays a game or has a conversation. Similarly,
the child who has a screaming fit of rage at not being bought an ice cream is
not the same child as the one who can say thank you for help with homework.
An emotional and
moral understanding of what is right and wrong can help in control of this
problem but is no guarantee of sane behaviour. When someone is overcome with a
powerful feeling their knowledge of right and wrong is wiped out.
“If looks could
kill”, said a young woman accurately, looking at her angry baby. Contrary to
popular wish, babies are not born into the world as gentle beings who possess
no darker feelings. Angry destructive feelings are there from the start. If all
goes well, according to Melanie Klein, love and hate come closer together and
there is a wish to repair damage. The more parents are able to bear the
powerful feelings that come their way, the sooner the child will learn about
his own destructiveness. Where parents are taken over by these feelings the
child can experience himself as the innocent victim with all hostile feelings
neatly placed in the parent, or vice versa, with serious consequences.
If I look back to
thirty years ago to primary school experience, many of those teachers could be
charged now for common assault for what was everyday practice then. In some
classrooms today the violence has passed from the teacher to the class. The
class now abuse the teacher and teachers and head-teachers are leaving in large
numbers complaining about the violence of today’s children. The violence,
however, is not today’s. It has existed ever since the human race began and
which co-exists with everything that is sane and true. Let us look at an
example of a common domestic occurrence.
Whilst mother
goes to make a phone call at the other of the room 3 year old Tom is standing
by his brother Luke’s cot. “Ah, baby” he whispers, trying to sound loving.
Suddenly, he snatches the rattle from Luke’s hand and throws it away. Luke
cries. Mother puts the phone down, rushes over and hits Tom’s hand. “I can’t
leave you for a moment” she shouts. Tom cries. She returns the rattle to Luke.
Once Luke is settled she asks Tom if he would like a story.
Displaced by the
birth of a sibling, Tom feels neglected by his parents, however much effort is
made to forestall this. He would like to throw the baby away and kill him but
at other moments he also loves the baby. Stirred by his mother’s temporary
absence of attention, which stands for the greater loss of attention that
occurred by her pregnancy and the new arrival, suddenly he is overwhelmed by
the violence of his feelings and throws the baby’s toy away. The baby
recognises the fury and cries and the cry stirs up a response in the mother.
She is taken over and hits him. His cry ends the particular storm they have all
passed through. In a different state she repairs the damage to her baby and
then the damage she has caused to Tom.
Mr T.R. may hope
that he has instilled a sense of right and wrong if he hits his child but
actually he does not know what he has instilled. For Tom’s mother there were
lots of powerful feelings about in her baby, in Tom and in her and she was
powerless to change what happened on that occasion. Whether the rest of her
peer group or husband agreed with her behaviour or didn’t or transformed it
into easier notions of “punishment” is irrelevant to the fact that it was
irrevocable at that moment. Her cry of “I can’t leave you for a moment” is also
her guilty understanding that Tom is raw because she left him for more than a
moment to conceive and then give birth to another child.
This mother
thinks about the meaning of what happened because she was not happy about being
taken over by such feelings. Next time, perhaps, she will try to settle Tom
with an activity before she makes a long phone call or she will take charge of
the baby while she does this, knowing that the provocation to Tom is too great
for him to manage at this stage. This mother’s momentary loss of equilibrium
may sound qualitatively a long way away from parents who beat, hit a child with
an implement, or hit a baby but in the actual moment it happens, the mother is
just as much at the mercy of destructive impulses as they are. However, the
fact that she is troubled by these actions and thinks about them later offers
hope of change for the future and it is the small changes in daily practice
that add to a psychogenic evolution of parenting in the whole culture.