The ridiculous punishment inflicted on Collier County Sheriff’s Cpl. Susan Boylan for a very sensible handling of an undisciplined boy brings me to comment on the subject of corporal punishment of children or other immature people.
She was suspended for two days without pay and put on probation for six months for spanking the child of a complainant and threatening the child with a Taser.
About 30 or 40 years ago, some textbook psychologists (who probably had never raised children) came up with the idea that physical punishment would warp a child’s psyche, make him hate his parents and that he would become a child abuser with all sorts of deleterious effects upon our society.
Very odd — I am 84 years old, one of those who are lauded as “The Greatest Generation.” We survived the Depression. We fought a war. We developed radar and computers. We pushed the aviation, TV and other technical industries to incredible heights. We launched a post-war period of economic growth longer and stronger than any previous one in American history.
All of this was done by a generation that was routinely, physically punished when we broke a rule or disobeyed parents, teachers or police.
I doubt that most girls were so treated, but every boy I knew, except one, received some form of physical punishment for infractions. A belt across the bottom was common — a switch from a nearby tree — a crack across the knuckles with a ruler in the classroom.
What happened as a result of all this abuse? We learned to respect authority; we learned to obey the rules. We also acquired a good school education, since the classrooms were orderly and quiet. We learned to be responsible citizens.
We became “The Greatest Generation.”
We did not have a warped psyches. We did not hate our parents, and we did not become child abusers. We had sense enough to know that the punishment was the expected result of breaking a rule, not from some sadistic streak in our parents.
Those parents knew that we would be better adults and better off if we learned the results of misbehavior when the punishment was trivial instead of what we would encounter as adults.
What sort of society do we have after 30 years of this “no touch” system? Classroom discipline is poor to nonexistent in most schools. Students attack teachers; education levels have dropped steadily, till we sit at about No. 20 in the Western world. Early alcohol and drug use are rampant. Fatal accidents are alarmingly high in this unrestrained, undisciplined generation of teenagers.
We are first in some areas, however. The United States has the highest prison population per 100,000 of any country in the world. That includes places like Cuba, Russia, China and a few other places that we routinely look down on as repressive and uncivilized.
Yes, there were cases of abuse and overly severe punishment — and there still are — but these did not cause any wrinkle in our social order. They were aberrations and corrected when exposed. This did not justify demolishing the lessons of literally thousands of years of experience in child rearing.
Child abuse? I think the greatest abuse is to let a child grow and not know the consequences of breaking the rule until he is out in the big world with no parents to look after him.
I did not like the whippings I got, but I knew very well why they happened and I harbored no resentment (well, maybe until suppertime.) And I thank my parents for teaching me right from wrong and the consequences of breaking the rules.