Spare the rod, spoil the child

What do you do if your puppy makes a mess on your carpet? You would probably shove the puppy’s nose into the pile of doggy poop, and to reinforce the point smack the dog with a rolled up newspaper. That is a very normal, socially acceptable way of training your dog, and no one would accuse you of animal cruelty.

What do you do if your child misbehaves? Most parents would yell, threaten or, ground the child. Some would take away the child’s toys or limit the time the child is allowed to watch TV or play video games. Very few would actually resort to spanking or some other form of corporal punishment. And God forbid someone from outside of the family attempts to discipline a child – such actions could easily land the well-meaning disciplinarian in jail.

While I am against any form of physical and mental abuse, I am a firm believer that children should be punished accordingly for their misbehavior and that by not doing so we are destroying the younger generation.

In today’s American society we are conditioned to believe that everyone is special. Children grow up with a completely undeserved sense of entitlement and achievement – they get a pat on the back from their parents and teachers for the most minute and mundane things.

What is even worst is that we stopped teaching our children to respect other people. A good friend of mine is a teacher at a Pittsburgh public school, and the stories that she tells me are simply horrifying. If she fails a student, she receives threats of physical violence. On one occasion, after she sent a student to the principal’s office, he (the student) hit her in the face with a textbook. On another occasion, when she asked a student to stop talking on his cell phone in class, the student hurled his textbook at her from across the room. And she cannot do anything about it – if she were to physically discipline the kids, she’d probably end up in jail, or, even more likely, the kids would wait for her after school and beat the living hell out of her.

This past Sunday (January 6, 2008), my wife and I went to a local ice skating rink with a couple of our friends. At the rink, there was a group of 12- or 13-year-old kids who amused themselves by purposefully tripping beginner skaters, or by taking sharp turns in front of other people and throwing ice in their faces.

For the first 20 minutes of so, I tried to ignore the obnoxious kids. After a while, I got fed up and told the kids to stop. Of course, they simply ignored me. The next time one of the kids tried to trip my wife, I caught his arm and told him that if he does not stop, I’d “beat the crap out of him”. In hindsight, I probably should not have threatened him. However, no one in the rink was willing to discipline the kids – they just pretended like nothing was happening and continued to skate. The fact that our society condones such rude behavior from children, even if by simply ignoring it, absolutely positively pisses me off.

At the end of the skating session, as I was changing in the locking room, I was approached by a very large man who started screaming at me for grabbing his nephew. The man demanded that I apologize to the kid for grabbing his arm. I refused, saying that the kid should apologize to my wife first. The guy punched me in the face and when one of my friends tried to help me, the kid’s uncle threw him over a bench.

The whole altercation took maybe 5 minutes and no one tried to stop it. Everybody pretended like nothing out of the ordinary was happening. The security guards did not bother showing up until after the guy who punched me in the face ran off, and the rink’s manager refused to give me the name of the kid or his parents.

When the kid’s mother showed up to pick him up, instead of disciplining her child, she screamed at us a barrage of obscenities before leading her little delinquent away. I am more than sure that he is going to get a pat on the back for being a little jerk.

I guess the point of this whole rant is quite simple – we’d all like to think that our children are special and wonderful and best in the world. We often deliberately chose to overlook their bad behavior – after all, no one wants to believe that their child is a little monster. By ignoring our kid’s bad behavior we are encouraging them to misbehave even more.

As much as it hurts me to say this, there might be some truth to the old-time axiom – “Spare the rod, spoil the child.”