The Defense Perspective
I certainly agree. We need a return to the system where the schools handled routine disciplinary problems and didn't involve the "system".
I really think that parents have to accept the ultimate responsibility of parenting. I certainly remember that much of my good behavior was the fear of what my father would think or do, should I stray. In those days, I don't think I even considered a policeman's response to my behavior. Of course I am 60 now and that was then.
jig:
It's amazing how so much of the discipline in the schools is handled by the police or other "system" representatives. Like you, when I was kid I would never have imagined a police officer coming into our school, let alone having an administrative office there. The assistance principle (Mr. Hoover, I believe) was the local enforcer who kept everyone in line with a paddle and a dirty look. That was good enough for 99% of the students. But like you, I agree that parents are to blame. The softening of discipline in schools was a direct result of the softening of discipline in the home. But that was then!
Bear Crawls and Wall Sits are a far cry from letting some teacher spank your kid.
(I'm getting old and fat, and don't particularly care for the idea of exercize at all but that's a different topic.)
Jamie:
You could start a program of self-imposed discipline, beginning with some crawls. I hear they are great calorie burners.
I'll get right on it.
:)
I must say, I am surprised (and refreshed) to read an avowed defense attorney advocating swift and severe accountability for wrongdoing – even for children. Not to stereotype too heavily, but criminal defense lawyers tend to want to blame-shift and minimize punishments in the name of giving people another chance, and another, etc. And for some reason, the image of the pro-spanking crowd has been relegated to somewhere near that of beer-swilling NASCAR high-school dropouts. The defense perspective would seem to align itself more readily with the spanking-as-bad view. I’m glad to see that’s not always the case.
It has yet to be adequately explained to me how this shift has come to pass. A whole generation of us were brought up under corporal punishment – as were dozens of generations before us – and by all accounts it seemed to work quite well. For every one horror story of punishment gone awry there are dozens of seemingly intelligent adults who will freely admit that, once they got that one spanking they really remember, they quit smoking / stealing / cheating in school / backtalking / whatever. And that’s the goal of punishment – not to cause humiliation or pain per se, but to use those things in measured doses to modify behavior. Last time I had a psych class that was called “operant conditioning” and was a widely accepted means of behavior reinforcement. Biblically it is a no-brainer that to avoid punishing your children leads to adverse consequences later.
So if corporal punishment’s a historically and biblically effective method of modifying behavior, and it’s worked for most of us when we were growing up, then how in the world did it somehow fall into disfavor? How did a generation of us convince ourselves that time-out is always more effective and that spanking is akin to torture?
Cat:
Thanks very much for your thoughtful comment on this post.
A defense lawyer needs to separate their personal responsibilities from their professional ones. At work, people hire me to deny, delay, and defend. It's my job to get them a second (or fifth) chance. I'm ok with that. It's part of the system and manipulating it to the benefit of the person paying the tab is my professional responsibility.
My kids are another matter. I don't want some defense lawyer in a position trying to get them a fifth chance if I could have nipped the problem 10 years earlier. With that said, I suppose I'd still pay the same lawyer to get my kid out of jam if it came to that.
My hypothesis on the shift? Cry-baby parents who's kids were getting a well deserved spanking at school believed our culture was more enlightened than having to resort to physical punishment. Further, they figured the best way to get their say and make their mark was to hire a lawyer shark to sue the school/teachers/whoever to make them pay. Furthermore, empowering the children became a mantra. Kids have rights, you know - just like the spotted owl - that needed protecting.
SG,
I confess that you lost me during your line of reasoning.
How do you go from "bear-crawls" and other "soft" corporal punishments in a P.E. class to solving the problem of overcrowded prisons and over zealous prosecution of citizens.
Unless you are saying that corporal punishment in school would somehow diminish the use of alcohol by minors or somehow help solve the multitude of prisons issues we face.
Can you clarify?
You bet.
First, I was attempting to show a correlation between the elimination of corporal punishment in the schools and the increase in our prison population over the last few decades. My hypothesis? . . . once discipline got soft at school (and at home), our ability to direct the aberrant behavior of our children suffered, leading to more crime and imprisonment.
My second, less well defined hypothesis, was the failure of our lawmakers and prosecutors to deal successfully with more crime, e.g., simply making punishment more severe, which obviously is not working. The tougher punishment addresses a symptom of the problem, rather than the problem itself.
Instead, the problem was the "I can do what I want" worldview caused by lack of stern discipline at earlier, more impressionable ages. The example of how a little pain and embarrassment worked on my son got me thinking about how a little corporal punishment early in life might have redirected many of the folks who currently clog our prison system. Since I didn't necessarily support someone at school paddling my child, the idea of "soft" corporal punishment and bear crawls was appealing.
Hope this helps more than confuses.
If anything, I think criminal defense attorneys as a whole tend to be MORE strict in disciplining their own children than the population at large because we are confronted every single day with the consequences of parents who are absent either physically or emotionally from their children's lives or are too concerned with being their child's "friend."
Stephen, I know what you mean about the gratuitous over-criminalization of "offenses" that in the past were handled by the parents or the schools. One local district here hardly ever disciplines anymore; whatever the infraction, they have the resource officer write a ticket, leading to a virtual full-time job of schoolyard cases for the local JP.
In that same vein, my children have seen the inside of our county jail during my "free tour." They remarked about the smell. It was great incorporating as many senses as possible into the experience. Thanks for your comment.
Gotcha
I tend to agree. Young children are like puppies, discipline them early and you will never have to do it again. :)
Thanks, as always, for stopping by.
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