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From: mom@sfmag.UUCP (M.Modig)
Newsgroups: net.kids
Subject: Re: corporal punishment
Message-ID: <686@sfmag.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 10-Sep-85 14:15:32 EDT
Article-I.D.: sfmag.686
Posted: Tue Sep 10 14:15:32 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 11-Sep-85 07:52:07 EDT
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> Spare the rod --> spoil the child" is
> completely wrong but many parents still accept it.  One of the
> problems with raising a child this way is that the child, when he or
> she grows up, tends to become an adult whose inability to empathize
> with feelings of weakness and helplessness is illustrated in the
> following exchange:
> 
> > > Funny, I got the paddle several times in jr. high school and I
> > > NEVER DESERVED IT. 
> >
> >Poor baby.   Everyone send sympathy cards.
> 
> I'll bet my next paycheck that Mr. Henning received corporal
> punishment fairly often as a child and that he experienced it at the
> time as undeserved and unfair.  Rather than blaming Mr. Henning for
> his lack of sympathy I would attribute it to his childhood
> experiences, since his attitude as expressed above is typical of
> those who received corporal punishment.  Such a child learns to
> repress (i.e. dismiss from conscious awareness) his feelings of
> helpless vulnerability, so that when he becomes an adult and someone
> (usually a child) experiences and expresses those feelings of
> weakness, the feelings threaten to return to conscious awareness and
> reactivate the pain on account of which they were repressed.  So
> the adult defends himself against reexperiencing these feelings,
> perhaps with a sarcastic dismissal of them:  "Poor baby.  Everyone
> send sympathy cards."
> 

This is a rather interesting theory, but I am not sure I buy it.  I
was spanked when I was younger, though I was never physically hurt,
like I might have been if I had been beaten or abused.  Also, my
parents spanked me less and less as I got older, since as a child
gets older, there are many other discipline options open to a parent
besides spanking.  But the most important points, I feel, are that
my parents taught me to take responsibility for my actions and face
the consequences of them.  They also took time to explain to me why
I was being punished, and they also taught me many other things,
such as respect and compassion for others.  I think that spanking
itself need not bring about the attitude you describe, though
parents who spank indiscriminately and uncaringly and who beat their
children might well rouse such feelings in them.  However, I think
you can be taught not to care about others by emulating parents who
don't care about others either, or by being raised by parents who
don't care too much about their children (no attention, etc.)

> Extreme examples of this kind of personality can be found in many of
> the Nazis, nearly all of whom received "strict" upbringings complete
> with corporal punishment.  Their childhood experiences, I believe, go
> a long way to explain their lack of sympathy with their weak and
> helpless victims on whom they imposed undeserved suffering.  Adolf
> Hitler, BTW, was beaten constantly and severely as a child.  This is
> not to say that the beatings were the *sole* cause of his later
> actions.  There some other factors in Hitler's case, including the
> fact that he had no children of his own, who otherwise might have
> served him as victims instead of the Jews.

I don't think that corporal punishment can be blamed for as the
whole, or even a major, cause of the problem here.  Children were
not only punished severely, but were taught not to sympathise with
the weak and helpless, and were taught loyalty (to Hitler rather
than, say to their family) and to worship strength and scorn
weakness.  Corporal punishment in the form of severe beatings is
just part of the overall attitude.

Mark Modig
ihnp4!sfmag!mom