One morning, as I dropped my son Bud off at his school’s front
door, I cautioned him, “Be careful!” He had a fragile art project
in his backpack and something squashable in his lunch bucket.
“Okay!” Bud gasped, in a hurry, as always. Out the car he
dashed, leaving the car door open, swinging his lunch box around by
the strap, flopping his unzipped backpack, running on the ice, let
me count the ways. It came to me then that children do not know how
to be careful, that we have to teach them in particular, bit by
bit.
This, of course, makes us nags: “Don’t run on the ice (in the
house, in your stocking feet, in the hall, on the basement stairs).
Zip up your backpack (put on your gloves, wear your jacket, tie
your shoes) before you leave the house (the car, the classroom, the
parish hall). Don’t swing that lunchbox (belt, jump rope,
leash).”
“How many times have I told you…?”
“Nearly All Parents Yell at Their Kids — Survey,” proclaimed a Reuters headline a week before
Christmas vacation.
Dr. Murray A. Straus of the Family Research Laboratory in
Durham, New Hampshire, surveyed 991 parents, and found that “98
percent had used some form of psychological aggression, such as
yelling, threats of spanking, and name-calling, to discipline their
children by the time they were five years old.”
(“Only 98 percent?” my wife asked. “Some lied,” I answered.)
Dr. Straus “questioned whether yelling and similar reactions
from parents are ever justified.” “I believe it is not,” he said.
Dr. Straus advocates “discussing the problem” and other such
methods of child correction.
The study was published in the November issue of the Journal
of Marriage and Family. Ridicule of it occupied the first hour
of Boston wiseacre talk show host Howie Carr’s show the next day.
One caller cordially invited Dr. Straus to come over and get his
kids ready for school some morning. (Another thing children cannot
understand: “We have to leave right now.”) Another offered to leave
her children with Dr. Straus and see how long he lasted.
Unfortunately, “experts” like Dr. Straus have taken over a
substantial swath of law enforcement in a number of states, most
especially our fair Commonwealth here. As Carr said, you always
have to worry about some busybody dropping the dime on you for
child abuse, and then you find the Department of Social Services on
your doorstep. You could be led away in handcuffs.
This raises an interesting question. Where do social service
weenies come from? What motivates them to nag, threaten, and
intimidate not children, but adults? Suppose you took away their
subpoena power, their Soviet system of snoops (daycare centers,
pre-schools, schools, all “mandated reporters”). Suppose you took
away their power to inspect and license.
Suppose you left them, in other words, in the position of
parents, with only the day-to-day power to influence behavior by
word and restraint and punishment and example in the persons of the
ones they love. Just a few people. Just their own children, who
cannot be replaced. Who offer you only one chance to raise them
right, to get them through school with some success, yea, verily,
to keep them alive. (“You HAVE to wear socks! It’s winter!”)
Do you suppose they might, once in a while, yell, “Don’t run
away from me in a parking lot! You could get hit by a car!”
I suppose they would have had a discussion in their
safety-approved minivan beforehand about the dangers of parking
lots. Yes, we all do that, too. We talk about how important it is
not to fight or tease or taunt, and to stay together in the
mall.
Children run away anyway, until they are trained not to.
Children display awful behavior, over and over. Okay, Dr. Straus.
There goes your three-year-old, toddling off in the jetway of a
parking garage. Dr. Straus, your eight-year-old has your
two-year-old in a hammerlock and will break the baby’s arm in less
than two seconds. What are you going to do now?
