Psychology

The Punishment Trap #1 – Rules

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Many modern parents don’t want to hit their kids – to be really, really clear about it, I’m OK with that. I approve. Sadly, though, most will fail. There are just too many traps. In fact, just about everything is a trap, the whole world as we know it conspires to make us hit our kids.

The first trap is called total control, total domination. This is how it was for us, those of us from either the pre-Dr. Spock generations, or from families that the doctor and his intellectual progeny have not yet reached, families that were or are unabashed practitioners of corporal punishment. Parents from these families that want to be different, that don’t want to hit are subject to this trap. We think it’s a matter of method. Most of us never stop to wonder, a method for what? We think a change of method is all that is needed, but not a change in what either method, the old and the new, is designed to accomplish.

Which is, I’m sorry to say, total control. This is how the trap works. We want to change the method, but we don’t realize, our own childhoods, spent under total control have left us with the same expectations as our parents. Children must listen. Children must do what we say, at least when it’s about something important; we know what’s right, we know what must and mustn’t be, and so there are rules.

Rules, as they say, are meant to be broken, and when they are, the rulemaker must respond: “Hey. You broke the rules.” Many modern parents don’t want to hit, maybe they don’t even want to fight, so if the kid says “I’m sorry, Mom, I didn’t mean to, I forgot, I won’t do it again,” then maybe it’s over.

There are many ways in which it won’t be over though, and the parent may feel a loss of control, and a need to reinforce the rule, and then it’s punishment, something short of hitting. And now maybe it’s over. There are many ways in which it won’t be over though, and now the child may feel a loss of control, and a need to resist, and now, often enough to matter, we are moving towards a fight, and very often a physical one.

Punishments are imposed; they are something that by definition no-one wants; if you want it, if you volunteer for it, that’s not a punishment. They are forced, and force is physical.

This is getting long and . . . technical. Long and short?

If you don’t want to hit – don’t punish.

If you don’t want to punish – don’t make rules.

Rules are a trap; have a rule, and you may end up hitting your kids.

They don’t want it, I don’t want it, and you don’t want it either.

Remember?

 

Original Sin

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Mass-murderers like Charlie Manson and Andreas Brevik (spelling?) seem to think everyone is a psycho like them. They have it in common that all they thought they needed to do to start a race/faith war was to kill a few people, a few tens of people, and the war would be on, that all the average guy needs is for someone to start the killing and we’d all jump in and go on a mass mass-murder spree, a national, even global, bench-clearing brawl. They think everyone is like them, or at least that we all secretly want to be.
A core belief in people’s intrinsic violence, intrinsic evil, that’s what that is. Or to put it in other words, they hold with the doctrine of Original Sin.
Which is, of course, is a strong predictor for the nearly universal belief in the social tool known as punishment.
(This is what makes Charlie so captivating when he talks. He seems to know this, that he and we are not that far apart.)
It’s no secret that the religious, at least the Christian religious make no bones about this, that Original Sin is a tenet, they think it’s true, hence the need for God. And they mostly all follow the extrapolated idea from it, “spare the rod and spoil the child.” But what of the disavowed, the atheists, the lapsed? Also true, for the most part. We can deny the church, we can deny the bible, but it is foolish to deny that the bible is the basis of our entire culture here west of Afghanistan and east of Hawaii, (possibly excluding much of Africa) for the last 2,000 years. You atheists, you church-bashers, know this: use the rod, and you propagate the very thing you hope to extinguish!
This is a key part of the interaction between religion and our faith in punishment as a social tool. When everyone is punished, when we are all raised with punishments that begin long before we have any understanding of the world, then a vengeful god makes sense, the idea of a punishment awaiting us at the end of a mis-lived life seems, reasonable. It has precedent, at least in our minds. Of course, this idea is normally expressed the other way ’round, that God and his punishments are the model for our lives, as written into many faiths’ texts. I don’t hope to change any minds among the religious followers, but the atheist reader will have to admit that the actual function is arranged in the natural timeline of a human life: parents first, God second.
It seems that there is no getting around our cultural heritage, certainly not if we still cling to the most important and influential beliefs of that legacy while only disavowing ourselves of the less reality-based and purely theoretical ones.
Alice Miller:
“Wherever I look, I see signs of the commandment to honour one’s parents and nowhere of a commandment that calls for the respect of a child.”

Bullying as Punishment

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the world runs on authority, on force. The army, the police, schools, corporate hierarchies, parenting, parenting, parenting. Family structure. Punishment and discipline is a system by where we control unwanted behaviour by force, and punishment, which, punishment is defined as dishing out unpleasantness to the misbehavers in order to motivate them to change their ways.

This is pretty much a definition of bullying. The bully punishes the victim. The bully justifies this punishment by listing the victims’ misbehaviours, or the victims’ family’s, or race’s, or faith’s misbehaviours.

This is punishing behaviour, this is bullies doing what their parents did, doing what the police do, I mean the bully’s behavior is VERY CLOSE to that, closer than any of us would like to think. I’m saying the bully feels he is doing what he sees around him, that in the parlance of some schools of psychology, the bully is getting his power back, after some authority figure has taken his power from him.

So, parents, schools going to the bully kids and telling them to stop is a joke to these kids. They see it as just more ‘do as I say, not as I do.’ So do I, for that matter. I, for one, would love to see someone ask the kids if I’m right about that. Don’t take my word for it. Ask the kids.

Parents don’t think they are bullying. We have a consensus about what is acceptable punishing behavior, and we really cannot seem to draw parallels with our legitimate punishments and other similar behaviours. If we can’t, if we won’t see how bullying is an extension, an extrapolation of our punishing ways, then there is very little hope that any of our conversation about bullying, any of our attempts to combat it will get any traction, very little hope of our ever solving a problem if we refuse to understand it in the first place. Surely, someone has noticed that speeches that don’t acknowledge this difficult truth have not had any dramatic effect on the bullying phenomenon? I think any approach that doesn’t include this idea would be considered empty and hopeless, at least to any group that lives under threat or reality of punishment – like our kids.

Long and short, if we don’t stop ‘bullying’ our kids at home, we will never stop their bullying, that should be obvious. I don’t know why it isn’t.

Many nations have outlawed corporal punishment, in Canada, we are in the process of outlawing it, and I can see the next step, that we will someday realize that the damage caused by punishing behaviours generally outweigh any benefit, and when we all stop anything like bullying, so will our kids. Until then, we will fight this bullying thing in vain, fighting it in the schools, and causing it at home.

So now, there are programs, task forces, plans and research, all government money spent to figure out this embarrassing problem, and if we don’t try to stop people from the use of punishment – corporal and otherwise – on our kids at home, we are wasting all those resources. And that is a sad, cruel joke, one that the parents don’t understand, and only our kids are laughing about. Not in a good way.