|
May
Discipline and Punishment
Men can lead perfectly honorable lives based on
observing norms of behavior they have learned from
others and that are promoted by, others - by their
families or communities, or by their professions or
the religions or philosophies they adhere to. But
there is always a question of how men will behave
in a situation beyond the direct influence of those
institutions. Some individuals revert to behavior
that is unworthy of their usual standards when they
believe they can get away with it. Others, however,
have deeper resources that enable them to remain
consistent with their publicly scrutinized
behavior. They have internalized values; their
self-disciplined behavior doesn't depend on
anyone's reminding them what the rules are.
Perhaps there is no more confused subject in
childcare than the issues that swirl around
discipline and punishment. In relation to character
development, the word "discipline" has acquired
several different meanings. As used most broadly,
it connotes training, which corrects, molds,
strengthens, or perfects - in other words,
character formation itself, particularly as it is
guided from without by a parent or mentor.
("Discipline" and "disciple" have the same root.)
The word is also a synonym for punishment or
chastisement - he was disciplined by being denied
permission to play outside. Still another usage
points to the control gained by enforcing
obedience, the control implied, for example, in the
phrase, "military discipline." Finally, the term
can refer to rules or systems of rules that are
meant to affect conduct. Except when used with the
prefix "self," all of these meanings point to
something that is imposed on a boy from outside and
that relies heavily on rules of conduct.
Beating the Devil Out of Them
Would I be willing, an assistant attorney
general in South Carolina wanted to know, to
testify on behalf of a state action to close down a
day-care center where children were being subjected
to severe spanking? His call set off my pager a few
years ago. Of course I will come, I replied, if the
facts are as you allege. The facts are not in
dispute, he said. It's the defense that has us
perplexed. The day-care center is run by the
minister of a fundamentalist church. He claims that
spanking is endorsed by the Bible, and that it's
essential to controlling misbehavior.
The case began in a small South Carolina town
when the mother of a nine-month-old boy returned to
work, entrusting him to the church day–care
center several hours a day. She brought him home
one afternoon during his first week at the center
and found bruises on his buttocks and back when she
changed his diaper. She immediately rushed the
infant to the family physician, a general
practitioner.
The doctor was in a quandary. The injuries were,
obvious, and the mother's story was credible. The
law was clear. If he suspected abuse or negligent
care, he was required to inform the South Carolina
child protection agency. But he knew the minister
personally and many of his flock. If he offended
the minister, the doctor might lose some patients.
The day–care center rented space in a building
he owned, so the doctor could lose rental income as
well. His wife, who was also his nurse, prevailed
on him to report the evidence, sparking an
investigation.
The nine-month-old recovered quickly from his
bruises, and his mother made other arrangements for
childcare. State investigators were willing to
allow the center to remain open if the minister and
staff would agree in writing not to strike any of
the children. "No deal," the minister said. "The
Bible gives me the authority."
As an article in the Houston Law Review recently
pointed out, a function of corporal punishment
often stressed in evangelical Christianity is to
break and conquer the will of the child. Our
society as a whole, the article argued, overvalues
pain as a stimulus of good character, and
undervalues children.
Shortly thereafter, I flew to the state capital,
conferred with child protection officials, and then
rode with the attorney general for an hour and a
half to the small town where the hearing was to
take place. Several men in dark suits and equally
dark expressions stood waiting our arrival, and
followed us into the courthouse where I was sworn
in by a rather young judge. The judge qualified me
as an expert witness, noting that he had recently
read an article a colleague and I wrote for the
American Bar Association, critiquing a set of
proposed standards for court practice in child
abuse cases. (I understood he was both
complimenting me and warning me not to assume, just
because I came from a Harvard-affiliated hospital,
that my opinion would automatically prevail.)
Did I have an opinion on whether the admitted
spanking was abusive, the attorney general asked.
It was, I replied. There was no mistaking the
severity of the bruises described in the medical
report. A nine-month-old infant, I testified, is
not certain when his mother leaves the room whether
she will ever return; he hasn't achieved what
pediatricians refer to as "object constancy." When
a person or object disappears, an infant doesn't
understand that it continues to exist and, in the
case of his mother, will come back. When his mother
leaves him in a strange place, he may be terrified
until he comes to trust the strangers taking care
of him, and also trust that his mother will return.
He will almost certainly cry, maybe for extended
periods of time. He was spanked because he wouldn't
stop crying. The spanking could only terrify him
more, and prolong his crying. It was fortunate that
he didn't suffer fractures or internal organ
damage.
"Doctor Newberger," the black-suited defense
attorney asked loudly, drawling out each syllable
to its breaking point as he approached me, book in
hand, "have you ever seen this book?" I was so
amused by his play to the spectators that I almost
broke into a grin; he was marking me out as a
carpetbagger, probably a liberal, unreligious Jew,
coming down to Carolina to tell good Christian
Southern folk how to raise their children.
"Yes, I have. It's the Bible." Handing his book
to me after using one of its many colored ribbons
to find a passage in the Book of Proverbs, he asked
me to read aloud verse 24 from chapter 13: "He that
spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth
him chasteneth him betimes:' This passage isn't
exactly the traditional adage of "spare the rod,
spoil the child," which was enunciated in the early
sixteenth century (John Skelton: "There is nothynge
that more dyspleaseth God, Than from theyr children
to spare the rod.") And further popularized by
Samuel Butler in the mid-seventeenth century. But
it's close enough not to quibble.
"What does that passage mean to you, Doctor?" I
replied that the words spoke for themselves, but
ought not to be taken, so to speak, as gospel truth
that justifies spanking babies. There was no way, I
asserted, that this baby could be regarded as
disobedient. He was miserable and frightened,
'° and completely unable to understand an
order to be quiet. The hearing was astonishingly
polite for someone accustomed to the combativeness
of many Northern courtrooms. The minister testified
that the baby had disregarded a command to stop
crying. He obligingly showed how he held the baby
and brought his huge hand down on the baby's bare
back and buttocks. His demonstration made me wince.
The defense presented only one argument: If a child
misbehaves, the Bible gives specific warrant to
spank.
The judge eventually ruled in favor of the
state. He gave the day-care center the choice of
following written guidelines that forbade any kind
of corporal punishment, or of closing down. Faced
with this choice, the minister accepted the
guidelines.
The historian Philip Greven has written a book,
Spare the Child, showing the powerful connection
between apocalyptic religious thought (which
emphasizes a stark contrast between the forces of
good and the forces of evil in the world, and
anticipates a dramatic conclusion to human history
in which the good will be rewarded and the evil
destroyed) and the practice of corporal punishment
of children. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Tom's
aunt reflects on this long and deeply embedded view
in Western culture of the value of spanking in
character formation:
Hang the boy, can't I never learn anything?
Ain't he played me tricks enough like that for me
to be looking out for him by this time? But old
fools is the biggest fools there is. Can't learn
any dog new tricks, as the saying is. But, my
goodness, he never plays them alike two days, and
how is a body to know what's coming? He 'pears to
know just how long he can torment me before I get
my dander up, and he knows if he can make out to
put me off for a minute or make me laugh, it's all
down again, and I can't hit him a lick. I ain't
doing my duty by that boy, and that's the Lord's
truth, goodness knows. Spare the rod and spite the
child, as the good book says. I'm a-laying up sin
and suffering for us both, I know. He's full of the
old scratch, but laws-a-me! he's my own dead
sister's boy, poor thing, and I ain't got the heart
to lash him, somehow.
One married couple I talked to have three sons,
aged eleven, fifteen, and seventeen. When I asked
the McCrays how they have dealt with discipline in
their family, Terry spoke for herself and her
husband, Tom. "We've never really agreed about it.
My husband went to Catholic schools all his life.
He saw lots of spanking and he believes in it. But
he's six-feet-four and weighs two hundred pounds
and has a temper with the boys, and even though
they know he loves them, he can be frightening.
Sometimes the punishments he wants are way out of
whack, so I have to step in and stand up to him.
We've never tried to hide our disagreements from
the boys. To a degree, I've had to encourage them
to stand up to him as a way of keeping him under
control. With the boys, I've tried to show them
when punishment is justified. `If you feel that
something's unfair,' I say to them, `you can stand
up for yourself, but when you're being justly
punished, you need to recognize that."' "Did you
ever use corporal punishment with the boys?" I
asked. No. Terry said. I wouldn't allow it. My
husband didn't agree, still doesn't agree, and
we've argued about it, but I've said no." Countless
adults like Tom McCray appear to believe that
punishment is an indispensable ingredient in
building good character, particularly for boys.
Many traditions and laws, beginning, as we just
saw, with the Bible, endorse physical punishment.
The twenty-three states that still authorize
teachers in public schools to paddle or spank
children who have misbehaved are mostly in the
Southern tier, the Bible Belt. (A 1994 U.S.
Department of Education survey estimated that more
than 478,000 students, some as young as age five,
were punished by being hit at school that year.)
Unless physical punishment of children at home is
done so aggressively as to seriously injure the
child, it is not considered child abuse in most
legal jurisdictions.
How Violence Begins
Terry's worry that Tom might fly out of control
is well taken, as I know from experience. I see
enough instances of parents' losing control in my
work on child abuse that I always take serious heed
when a parent mentions it. When a mother uses the
word "frightening," she often is referring to more
than the kids. When hitting by adults goes on in a
family, it typically spreads in many directions.
Parents hit children. Children hit one another.
Fathers hit mothers. Mothers hit fathers. Children
hit parents.
The first experience many children have with
violence is when they have annoyed or enraged an
adult caring for them. A mother came to Children's
Hospital in Boston in the middle of the night with
her three-month-old son, Robert. She showed a nurse
and doctor on duty in the emergency room a reddened
patch on the baby's left cheek, and told what she
thought had happened. The baby had awakened an hour
earlier, she said, and it was her husband's turn to
get up, go into the nursery adjacent to their
bedroom, give the baby a bottle, and comfort him
back to sleep. In her half-awake state, she thought
she heard a slap, she said. She went into the
nursery, saw the red mark on Robert's cheek,
bundled him into the car, and drove to the
hospital.
The emergency room staff admitted Robert for two
reasons: for observation, because had the force
necessary to create this bruise also been applied
to other parts of his body that don't reveal
bruising marks so quickly-the abdomen, for
example-there could be serious underlying organ
damage; and for protection, because it looked as
though he might be in danger at home.
Early the next morning, my pager sounded. The
pediatric resident from Robert‚s ward was on
the line. Would I see an infant boy just admitted
with a suspicious injury. An hour or so later,
after reviewing the hospital records and examining
Robert, I was on my way back from Robert's room to
my office when I was stopped by a distinguished
member of the hospital's senior pediatric staff who
had just accepted Robert as a private patient.
"Eli," he said, "I knew you would be coming to
consult on this case, but I have to tell you I have
a problem with it." I asked him what the problem
was. "Well, perhaps the problem is mostly mine, but
I don't want to call this a case of child abuse.
I'd rather call it an accident:
"Can you tell me about the family?" I asked. My
colleague said that the father of Robert was a
physician in another of Boston's teaching
hospitals, a man known for his dedication to his
patients, a hardworking man, a good man. The
unstated but obvious implication was that public
knowledge of the episode could adversely affect a
colleague's career.
"Shouldn't we," I asked, "consider the downside
for the doctor's career if he were to injure the
baby again, with graver consequences for the baby's
health? Don't we have an ethical obligation to him,
as well as to his son, to protect them both against
a subsequent injury? Doesn't this include putting
the cards on the table, and squaring with him about
what appears to have happened?" Fortunately, my
argument persuaded my colleague, and we made
contact with the social worker assigned to the
floor to initiate the necessary interviews. Both
parents were interviewed separately during the next
few days. It was evident that the doctor associated
the birth of his son with a profound sense of his
wife's lessening her attentions to her husband.
Exhausted and overworked, he was angry at the
infant's interrupting his sleep.
It all ended well. Robert did not have to be
separated, for safety's sake, from his father, and
he was not injured again. Individual and family
therapy dealt successfully with the father's sense
of pressure and loss of attention, and the family
was helped to avoid a dangerous cycle of
frustration and violence.
To Spank or Not to Spank
Many people still believe that under certain
circumstances inflicting pain is necessary to teach
a child to avoid dangerous objects or situations.
I've heard this notion expressed in several ways
over the years. A former director of the national
child abuse center in the Department of Health and
Human Services told of a couple who worried that
their eighteen-month-old child approached the hot
stove too frequently, ignoring their warnings. They
chose to teach her not to do this by holding her
fingers against the hot stove until she cried. She
never went near the stove again. The story was told
with pride. The toddler was the director's own
daughter! "Caleb's Mom," an elementary school
teacher, posted the following message on an
Internet bulletin board devoted to child care:
When my son was a toddler, he was very
adventurous, and would often attempt to squeeze
past the front door and onto our porch, where stone
steps awaited his fall. Verbal reprimands and
redirecting his attention elsewhere were fruitless,
as he attempted time and again to get out that door
when my back was turned. Rather than allow him to
experience for himself the consequences of
wandering too close to those steps, I swatted him
smartly a couple of times on his diapered behind
and placed him in his playpen for a time-out! It
took two more swatting before he became convinced
of the certain connection between trying to get out
the front door and the painful consequences, but
after that, he needed no more reminders!
I have always saved physical discipline for
situations similar to this-instances where his
behavior is dangerous or could lead to serious
injury or worse. At the age of six, Caleb was
spanked soundly on the backside of his Levi's for
following two older boys who led him up to the
strictly forbidden train tracks behind our home.
Although he well knew the train tracks were
off-limits, he apparently needed a physical
reminder beyond just a verbal explanation - and I
complied! He knows well that these spankings are
done with great concern and love and I have never
detected any resentment or fear because of them. In
fact, he will tell you himself that he well
deserved his spanking for breaking such a critical
rule!
Caleb's Mom's main concern is enforcing the
rules. She sees herself as a loving parent who
rarely uses spankings to enforce sticking to the
rules. She resorts to spankings only when there is
something risky about her son's behavior that she
wants to deter him from repeating. Otherwise, she
doesn't strike or cuff her son merely because she
has lost her patience with him. Her concerns that
Caleb not fall down the stone front steps as a
toddler, or play on or near the train tracks behind
the house as a six-year-old, seem at first thought
to be only reasonable.
Most parents, I believe, would think her safety
concerns in these instances appropriate. The very
reasonableness of her approach, however, makes it a
good springboard for raising the question: Is
spanking, even for the sake of loving deterrence,
the only or best method of nurturing a boy's
character and capacity for making wise choices?
Most parents of toddlers today spank or slap their
boys at least occasionally when they misbehave. The
amount of home spankings of school-age boys has
diminished, but it certainly hasn't
disappeared.
Sociologist Murray Straus has done pioneering
research on corporal punishment and summarized the
research of others. As he noted recently, the
subject has been plagued by a central question of
causality. A correlation between suffering corporal
punishment and later aggression by the boys spanked
has been documented for some time. The more he has
received corporal punishment, for example, the more
likely it is that a boy will hit his spouse when he
grows up and marries. But does this connection
demonstrate that corporal punishment causes a boy
to become more aggressive, or is it simply those
boys who are temperamentally more aggressive and
challenging as children drive their parents to use
corporal punishment because nothing else works?
Most American parents, Straus has found, do
believe that corporal punishment works, that it
produces compliant behavior and a boy of stronger
character. Recent studies, however, offer strong
support for the view that corporal punishment is a
factor linked causally to later antisocial behavior
by boys. When corporal punishment was employed at
home with boys in one study, five years later they
engaged in more fighting at school than boys who
hadn't been spanked or slapped. Another study
showed that 28 percent of 1,000 boys interviewed
(average age fifteen) reported having been slapped
by their parents during the preceding year, but 11
percent of these boys reported also hitting a
parent during the same period. Slapping by parents,
rather than decreasing the chances of being hit by
an adolescent boy, increased the probability
parents they would be assaulted by their own
sons.
Other studies have shown that the more a child
is hit as part of discipline, the more likely he
will suffer depression in later years. Except in
those unfortunately numerous cases where a boy is
beaten so severely that he is injured physically,
the consequences for millions of kids who are hit
for punishment appears to be psychological damage
and various forms of aggressive and antisocial
behavior in later stages of their lives.
A study conducted by Straus himself offers an
additional fascinating insight into corporal
punishment. His study was prompted by the research
of others showing that talking to children
(including children who hadn't begun to talk
themselves yet) is associated with an increase in
neural connections in the brain and in cognitive
performance. Talking to them, in short, fires up
their brains more.
Straus theorized that when parents avoid
corporal punishment, they must use verbal methods
of behavior control (including the inductive
techniques I shall discuss later), and the
increased verbal interaction should enhance the
child's cognitive ability. His research on almost
1000 children age one to four when he first tested
them, followed by cognative ability tests four
years later, showed that the children who were not
hit increased in cognitive ability and the children
who were hit fell behind the cognitive development
of the others in proportion to how much corporal
punishment they experienced. Straus writes, "I am
convinced that if parents knew the benefits of not
hitting their children and the risk they were
exposing them to when they spank, millions would
stop.... These benefits are not limited to enhanced
mental ability. Studies in my book, Beating the
Devil Out of Them, indicate that the benefits of
ending corporal punishment are likely to also
include less adult violence, less masochistic sex,
a greater probability of completing higher
education, higher income, and lower rates of
depression and alcohol abuse."
Parents who hit their children are often unaware
of effective alternatives. They may have
uncritically accepted the advice of others that
hurting is a necessary part of discipline. Spanking
may be their default position, the method they
unthinkingly resort to when they are aggravated by
a child's behavior, and lose their
self-control.
Straus mentions the 1979 law in Sweden that sets
a national goal of eliminating corporal punishment.
It says in part: "Children are entitled to care,
security and a good upbringing. Children are to be
treated with respect for their person and
individuality, and may not be subjected to corporal
punishment or any other humiliating treatment." The
Swedes didn't stop there. They mounted a large
public education campaign, emphasizing the
objectives of discipline, including family harmony
and a more civil society. Twenty years later, there
is wide public acceptance of the policy, although
at the outset there was controversy about the
extent to which the government should involve
itself in family life. A significant part of the
law is that it is no punitive in its approach; no
one is to be criminalized for corporal punishment
that does not seriously injure a child. Instead,
the methods to be used after known violations of
the law are educational and therapeutic. To date,
eight other countries have followed Sweden's lead.
I think the United States should join them.
Straus's passing reference to sexual masochism
merits brief elaboration, for many other
professionals, including myself, have been aware
that spanking a boy's buttocks can lead to a
confusion between sexual pleasure and corporal
punishment pain. There are, as we know, men whose
most intense sexual pleasure as adults is evoked by
being spanked. But in a more diffuse way, many
men's capacity for sexual tenderness is compromised
to a degree by their mental association of sexual
stimulation with the pain and shame they felt when
they were spanked.
There are several alternatives to spanking as
ways of punishing boys who have misbehaved. Some,
which have their drawbacks, are verbal expressions
of disappointment or condemnation; loss of
privileges, including "grounding"; and "time-outs"
when a boy is made to spend time by himself after
misbehavior. For the most part, these are better
methods than spanking, but they also have their
limitations.
Timing, first of all, is important. Although
parents will say that they have to punish whenever
they learn about certain situations-for example,
that a son ran impulsively onto a busy street
several hours earlier–the most effective time
to deal with acts that are dangerous or
misconceived is immediately prior to their
occurrence or just as they begin. Punishment often
has no useful lingering effect when there is a
substantial time break between behavior and
response.
Verbal punishment usually consists of an attempt
to shame a boy. It is a method that is hard to
control-to make a certain point, without causing
more than the desired effect. The adult who is
doing it is often too overwrought to be able to
choose words carefully. Shaming done with very
general language-"You're no good:' "I wish you
hadn't been born."-can be accepted and internalized
by a boy so that it makes him feel bad about
himself rather than about the misbehavior that
provoked the shaming. Many times, a boy will feel
that the shaming is excessive. It makes him feel
mad, not sorry, especially when he reviews the
experience in his mind later. Excessive shaming is
associated with a propensity to violence, according
to my psychiatric colleague James Gilligan, who
theorizes that most violent behavior is a
compensation for feelings of shame.
Time-outs-removing boys from the setting by
sending them to their rooms, or to designated
time-out places in the household-may be helpful
when a young boy has lost self-control, and no
other discipline is available. In many cases, the
parent has lost patience, too. The time-out allows
everyone to calm down. But when used
indiscriminately, the frequency and length of the
time-outs can easily become excessive. Also,
time-outs may get linked to the threat of spanking:
"If you don't stay in your room quietly, you're
going to get a spanking!" Extended isolation of the
boy may cut off opportunities to have a calm and
helpful discussion with him of how the misbehavior
happened and how he might avert it another time. By
the time the time-out is over, life is moving on,
and everyone may be hesitant to revisit the
experience.
Loss of privileges, such as television, dessert,
or games suffers from the same drawback as
time-outs; the connection is gradually lost between
the misbehavior and the punishment. I suspect that
in many cases the loss of privileges isn't fully
carried out; everyone decides to ignore it after a
while. The method of withdrawing privileges is
essentially negative: I can't communicate with you,
and so I'll hurt you if you don't mind me. The
positive counterpoint is: We all make mistakes, and
you can trust me to help you do better in the
future.
The Cycle of Hostility
Punishments achieve intended results better when
they are not harsher than necessary to achieve
compliance. Boys are punished more severely than
are girls all through childhood. If punishments are
much more severe than a boy believes is reasonable,
compliance may be accompanied by fear and
resentment that, in turn, might prevent a boy from
adopting, for its own sake, the rule that is
involved.
Children of highly punitive parents have been
found to be particularly defiant and aggressive
outside their homes. Harsh punishment's adverse
effects include giving children adult models of
aggression instead of adult models of restraint and
kindness. Boys will tend to avoid, and of course to
mistrust, adults who punish them severely, reducing
the opportunities for friendly interaction with
those adults. Harshness may work in the short term,
and relieve an adult's feelings, but it often
begets long-term failure.
Observations of boys who are aggressive at home
have helped to identify how cycles of punishment
and resistance to it grow. As a parent criticizes a
boy for misbehavior and threatens punishment, the
boy whines and refuses to comply. The boy's
resistance is all the more predictable if his
parents are unpredictable and inconsistent:
Sometimes they follow through on their threats to
punish, sometimes they don't. This reinforces in
the boy's mind the possibility that if he keeps up
his resistance long enough, his parents will give
in and stop the threatening-and stop the punishing.
A confrontation between them may end in a draw.
Parent and child withdraw, feeling relief that the
confrontation is over, but resentful that nothing
has been resolved. Eventually a new misbehavior
triggers a response of greater threats and greater
resistance. Other members of the family may get
drawn in, as everyone feels forced to take
sides.
Boys who experience frequent confrontations with
their parents over discipline may favor friendships
with peers who are similarly resentful of their
treatment at home-and so the circle of hostility
moves beyond the home to the surrounding community.
From these cycles, boys develop outlooks toward the
world as being mean and hostile. They may begin to
see hostile intentions even where they do not
exist-for example, something truly accidental
occurs, or friends are trying to be helpful and
their attempts are misread. These unhappy boys may
fall into a pattern of provoking and attacking
others, stimulating further retribution. Boys as
young as four years of age have exhibited bleak
outlooks; when these boys enter kindergarten, they
display much higher levels of aggression than their
peers.
Dangers of Shaking
To stop babies from crying, parents or other
caregivers sometimes shake them, holding their
torsos and making their heads whip uncontrollably
back and forth. It happens more frequently than
most people think. The baby's neck musculature is
relatively undeveloped, and his head is
disproportionately large and heavy compared to the
rest of his body, so the baby has little capacity
to arrest the to-and-fro motions of his head.
The effects of shaking or striking the head are
both immediate and long term. But unfortunately too
many adults are unaware of the risks. The baby's
brain is softer, and thus more susceptible to
injury. Shaking actually causes the infant brain to
bounce around inside the skull. Blood leaks out of
its vessels and pools around the brain tissue. The
brain cells swell, also increasing the pressure
inside the skull. In extreme cases, blindness and
neurological damage can result. All parents should
be aware of the grave dangers of shaking a
baby.
What Is Discipline For?
Enforcing acceptable behavior in boys is not
enough, although I think most of us would settle
for that once in a while. If our objective is to
foster self-discipline and character in boys and
the men they will become, then it would be well to
consider how best to help boys-and men, too, for
that matter--to internalize a sense of
responsibility and obligation to treat others
considerately; to get them to be mindful of how
their interests, desires, and impulses affect
others; to guide them into being men who care and
who want to do right by others. It is no small
challenge, this task of promoting moral
understanding.
How does the capacity for moral understanding
develop in a boy? One study has shown that when
parents of one- to three-year-olds applied a
discipline that communicated with kindness how the
parents wanted their sons to behave, and the
parents bestowed abundant praise when the boys
succeeded, they reinforced the boys' desire to
please and faced fewer behavioral problems when the
boys were five.
In another study, children close to their third
birthdays were shown a picture of a child stealing
a playmate's apple (a moral violation) and a
picture of a child eating ice cream with his
fingers (a violation of social rule); the children
were able to signal that stealing the apple was
wrong in any circumstances. By forty-two months,
children indicated that stealing the apple would be
wrong even if the act weren't witnessed by an adult
and the child hadn't been warned that stealing it
could be wrong.
Studies by Turiel and others suggest that
children don't depend entirely on parental
instruction to derive a sense of what is right and
what wrong. They have emotional reactions when they
observe actions such as stealing. They somehow feel
it is wrong before they have been instructed it is
wrong. Parents and other care-giving adults can
build on this intuitive sense.
Notions of "distributive justice"-how to divide
things fairly-develop in the preschool years, with
four-year-olds understanding the importance of
sharing in curious, and in some respects
contradictory, and self-serving, ways. Asked why he
shared toys with a playmate, a four-year-old boy
may reply, "I shared because if I didn't, he
wouldn't play with me:" Fairness, at first, means
the same amount for everyone. By age six or seven,
fairness is seen by many boys as connected to
deserving-for example, that some should get more
because they've worked harder. Already, boys'
conceptions of what is fair are being influenced
significantly by the views of their peers.
Beginning at age four, boys' instrumental
aggression (trying to get something, grabbing the
toys of others, for example) begins to decline, but
hostile aggression (trying to injure another person
or hurt his feelings) is on the upswing. When boys
fight each other, they are less likely to be
labeled as aggressive by their parents than girls
are when they fight each other. School-aged boys
expect less parental disapproval for aggression
than girls, and they feel less guilty about being
aggressive than girls do. Even at age two, girls'
aggressiveness is beginning to decline while boys'
aggressiveness is staying constant, and parents are
beginning to apply harsher punishment to boys than
to girls.
Inductive Discipline: The Alternative to
Punishment The attractive alternative to discipline
by punishment is the employment of strategies that,
as one authority on moral development put it, "lead
children to focus on the actual standards that
their parents are trying to communicate rather than
on the disciplinary means by which the parents
enforce these standards." In an influential 1994
article, Joan Grusec and Jacqueline Goodnow
identified two steps in a child's processing of
parental messages about the child's conduct. The
first step is „understanding". If parents
explain their reasons as they evaluate a
child‚s behavior, the child will eventually
comprehend the principles underpinning the
messages. Such an approach is "inductive" because
it begins with concrete events and moves from the
concrete to the general. Events are discussed with
a child as an exploration of what was wrong from
the parents' point of view. The wrongness is
explained in terms of the effect the misbehavior
has had on others and/or on the child rather than
only in terms of whether an established rule has
been broken. Rules are discussed, but they aren't
invoked as the beginning and the end of the
discussions.
The opposite, or deductive, method is to
establish a rule and then punish a child when he
breaks it. In this method, it doesn't matter as
much whether the child understands the reasons for
the rule, while in the inductive method it is
crucial. For the inductive method to work, there
has to be consistent and informative communication
between parent and child.
The second component of the inductive method is
that the child has to accept the parents' views;
how and whether he can accept them is affected by
whether he believes that his parents' appraisal of
his behavior is commensurate with his own. If a
parent treats a boy's messy bedroom and a fight
between siblings as being of equal gravity, a boy's
agreement with that parent's judgment might
justifiably be impaired.
Inductive discipline has to be centered in the
basic relationship between the parent or other
caregiver and the child. It doesn't begin with a
problem. It begins with your love for your child,
and his attachment to you and respect for you.
Above all, you don't want to react to behavioral
problems in a way that threatens that relationship.
You want to protect the relationship steadfastly,
even fiercely. You want your son to see that you
are above all protective of him, and happy with
him. From that central conviction, you praise his
every achievement and reward his good behavior with
approbation.
Even when the parent-child relationship is
deeply rooted and loving, there will be
episodes-perhaps even repetitive types of
episodes-when your son's behavior is a problem. He
may become oppositional as he tests his own wish
for autonomy. He may play too aggressively with
other children. He may disregard your suggestions
in a way that embarrasses you publicly. The
problems may be very trying (to him as well as you)
at times.
Practicing the inductive method involves
distinguishing feelings from behavior, beginning
very early in a boy's life. Children's feelings are
always recognized and responded to empathically in
this method. "I know it's hard to share Mommy's
attention with your baby brother." "I know you are
angry when Ben refuses to share his toys." The
behavior, the acting out of feelings, is what is
subject to the setting of me, too." "But you can't
take away his truck just because you want to play
with it. Would you like to build a tower of blocks
with me?"
Sensitive adults will remove their children from
situations where other children have lost control,
when that seems the best way to calm the situation.
A mother of four-year-old twin boys who share their
toys with each other so equably that they have a
sense of fierce possessiveness only toward their
special blankets and teddy bears, took them for a
play date where the host child went into meltdown,
crawled into his bed, and sucked his thumb for
solace when the visiting children casually
commandeered some of his favorite toys. She calmly
put the twins' jackets on them and took them out
for an ice cream treat and then home.
Employing the inductive method doesn't mean that
you have to be passive or spineless. It is
inevitable that you will have to set reasonable
limits and to make a certain number of rules. But
you will take care to acknowledge and deal
respectfully with feelings when abiding by the
rules is frustrating. One of the fathers I've
talked to in the past year recalled his own boyhood
in South Africa. "I was out with a bunch of kids
during a holiday night," Nicholas Kriek said, "and
we were running around the neighborhood doing crazy
things. I must have been around twelve years old.
We were throwing stones onto roofs, and when they
bounced down we would run away.
"One of the other boys misjudged a throw, and
his stone went through the front window of a house.
Naturally, that wasn't funny. The family called the
police. We boys all scattered in different
directions. I managed to get home, but my father
was there and had heard by telephone that the
police were trying to find out who was in the
group. He sat me down and said to me, `I'm going to
make something very clear to you. If you ever do
something you shouldn't, and get in trouble, I'm
not going to rescue you. You have to pay the price
for your own behavior.'
"I don't remember exactly what my response was,"
Nick continued, "but I think I was taken aback.
Usually, boys think that their parents are going to
rescue them no matter what. In some respects I've
tried to be that kind of parent with my own boys. I
show them that I love them unconditionally, and I
try to provide every opportunity for them that I
can, but I also tell them: If you misbehave and get
in trouble with others, you have to deal with the
consequences yourself."
I'll tell more later in the book about how this
father's philosophy worked out with his boys, but
here I just want to emphasize that the father's
love for his son didn't prevent him from refusing
to cover up any of his son's public misbehavior;
their relationship of mutual love and respect was
not damaged by this stand. Nick grasped the reasons
for his father's position, and internalized them as
his own: He, and eventually sons, must accept
responsibility and the consequences for public
misbehavior.
When actions, not just words, provide
inspiration, one might call this inductive by
example. One father put it this way: "When I was
growing up, my mother stressed to me the importance
of learning how to cook, wash, iron, sew. I became
very self-sufficient. Now I do most of the cooking.
I look after the children. I take care of my
family, and I'm teaching Andrew all these things.
He sees it. It might be annoying for him at times,
but it's important that he make his bed every day
and learn how to do the laundry. If I model it for
him, eventually it will become natural for him.
Later on, he will appreciate it." Andrew's dad
reminds us here that discipline doesn't have to be
limited to a set of mostly negative rules.
Discipline is just as much a positive way of
life.
The mother of eleven-year-old Brad Jefferson
voiced to me another important aspect of inductive
parenting. In deductive methods of parenting, there
is enormous emphasis on keeping to the rules,
whatever they are. The parent is supposed to win
all the time. But in inductive parenting, where the
preservation of love and respect is at the heart of
the parent–child relationship, it doesn't seem
so important for the parent to win every
disagreement over behavior. "Brad is involved in
student government, and one of their issues this
fall was that the principal said no one could wear
a hat in school. You know, no baseball caps worn
backward, that sort of thing. The kids talked it
over among themselves, and decided they would make
a pitch for a change in the rule. Brad asked me my
opinion. I said, `you already know what I think. I
wouldn't vote for it. In the end the student
council won one day when anyone could wear a hat.
So I said to Brad, `You'd better be careful that
this doesn't go too much further, or I might have
to go down to the school and ask why the standards
have loosened up, 'Really, this is just an example
of where he clearly knows our opinion, and he
thinks something different. We've all talked about
it a lot, and we've agreed to disagree. For me,
that's been a nice experience."
Restitution
One of the readers of this book in its early
stages was a school principal who said she was
troubled by the very first story I told. You may
recall that I recounted how my cousin, Sam, decided
to sabotage the new housing development that was
destroying a lovely forest next to his parents'
theretofore pleasantly secluded home. Who paid for
the damage, the principal wanted to know. Did I
really want to begin my book with a story in which
there was no restitution? Well, I did. One of the
things I wanted to convey at the outset is that
character isn't about perfection. We all do things
we later regret, and that we believe were not
typical of the choices we usually make. Sam was the
acknowledged star of our extended family in my
generation, the envy of everyone. And he went on to
a distinguished career in public service that could
only have been achieved by a person who had adopted
very sound moral principles during his childhood
and adolescence.
But the principal has a point. At the time, Sam
and his family were preoccupied with the event as
something that might lead to punishment and a
damaged reputation. Where punishment orientations
prevail, restitution is sometimes required, but as
part of the punishment. When people switch from a
punishment philosophy of discipline to inductive
discipline, restitution becomes a much more
prominent aspect of the situation. Now the emphasis
is: whom and what have I harmed, and how may I make
amends? This outward capacity to make amends
requires an inner development of
self-discipline-the capacity to ask: What are my
responsibilities to others?
The goal of inductive discipline is to bring
everyone involved back to a good relationship,
having learned something about responsibility; that
will be all the harder if the person who has caused
harm isn't interested in restitution. Restitution
of damage to property is important, but the
restoration of relationships-often left in tatters
when punishment has been administered-is even more
critical.
I wish I had a better term for inductive
discipline. The phrase sounds too cold or abstract
for the humane purpose the phrase is meant to
convey. But I hope I've shown what I mean by it. It
involves both parent and child. The parent
establishes a foundation for communication and
trust. He, she, or they love, guide, teach, remind,
set limits for behavior-and make mistakes; every
parent-child relationship is strengthened when a
parent acknowledges mistakes to his child, and
makes amends. The boy learns the parents' values,
takes them in, makes them his own, makes mistakes,
begins to make amends for his mistakes, and begins
to take responsibility for his own behavior.
Eventually the boy's discipline will come as much
from within as without.
©2007 Eli Newberger
Eli Newberger,
M.D., a leading figure in the movement to improve
the protection and care of children, is renowned
for his ability to bring together good sense and
science on the main issues of family life. A
pediatrician and author of many influential works
on child abuse, he teaches at Harvard Medical
School and founded the Child Protection Team and
the Family Development Program at Children’s
Hospital in Boston. From his research and practice
he has derived a philosophy that focuses on the
strength and resilience of parent-child
relationships, and a practice oriented to
compassion and understanding, rather than blame and
punishment. He is the author of The
Men They Will Become: The Nature and Nurture
of Male Charaacter
and lives in Brookline, Massachusetts with his wife
Carolyn, a developmental and clinical child
psychologist." www.elinewberger.com
or E-Mail.
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