Crime and Punishment

I saw a video clip yesterday, and as I watched it, I realized how much different parenting is now than it was when I was young. I can’t find a link to the story anymore; I guess it’s really not that newsworthy, but here’s what happened: An Ohio mother placed her 12 year old son on a street corner and for two hours had him hold a sign that said “I am a thief and a liar” for stealing a cell phone, lying about it, and refusing to apologize once he’d been caught. (Yes, she watched him the entire time and no, she didn’t get the apology). There are those now calling for child abuse charges.

As usual, I’m going to tell you what I thought of that. Because I have a hard time growing up, I find myself on the sympathetic side of children when they’re being disciplined, mostly because I remember being in that position with alarming frequency. For a 12 year old, there can be no fear like the fear of having to answer for something you thought you were going to get away with but didn’t. The cold feeling in the pit of your stomach when you get caught red-handed and you instantly know, KNOW that the hammer is going to fall is a pitiful (and sometimes funny) thing to behold, but I didn’t see a trace of fear on what I could see of this kid’s face. “Frustrated Mom makes son wear humiliating sign in public” is the tagline for this story. I really hoped to see a repentant and embarrassed child, but I didn’t. I saw a kid who might as well have been wearing a burka lolling on a street corner being ignored by almost everyone, and in the end, not apologizing for his actions. Where’s the lesson here?

I don’t have any kids, so no one wants to listen to my child rearing advice, and for once, I don’t have any (well, not much) to dispense. All I can do, as usual, is relate another story and hope the similarities as well as the differences don’t go unnoticed by you, the discerning reader.

From a very young age, I knew the difference between right and wrong. If I was right, everyone was happy. If I was wrong, I was the only one unhappy. Very unhappy. Painfully unhappy. As you might guess, even though I knew the difference between right and wrong, it still took me many years to solidify the concept that not doing what I wasn’t supposed to do was a good thing. I remember one hot fall Illinois day when I was unhappy about being grounded. My brother and sisters could leave the yard at will, but I, like a dog with a shock collar, could not, for leaving the yard would incur the wrath of my mother, and that was never a good thing. Just the thought of her gritting her teeth while she growled my name was the stuff of nightmares. My siblings, who were well aware of my predicament made no efforts at modesty; they pointed and taunted and gleefully screamed their plans for the afternoon, all of which entailed leaving sight and earshot of our house. Through my despair I hoped that one of them would pity me and stay, but none did. They all left, and I was alone in the empty back yard with the sun silently blaring down.

For a while I sat near the basement door, listening to my mother’s sewing machine droning on in the cool house while I baked in the heat. I wasn’t allowed to go inside (none of us were) except to eat lunch and have a glass of grape juice at 10 and 3. I hated my situation, hated my mother and hated the whole world. And in a moment of clarity, I suddenly realized that America is a free country and by God, I can do anything I want to do! So I left.

It doesn’t really matter where I went or what I did. Suffice to say that I behaved like a kid who wasn’t grounded and it felt really good. I had been gone for two or three hours and was playing contentedly with my buddy Curt in his back yard. His mother had just brought us some Kool-aid and I had utterly forgotten, or maybe just didn’t care that I was on the lam.

It has been said that a person is never more alive than when they’re about to die; their senses are heightened and they are keenly aware of the brink they’re teetering on…and most say they like it. I can understand that. But, as with all good things, they can end most abruptly. As I sat in Curt’s back yard, a marauding monster seized and crushed my idyllic bliss. Like a slavering demon loosed upon the neighborhood, my mother parted the shrubs and came marching across the yard, paddle in hand, teeth grinding and eyes blazing. I was frozen with fear. I sat and watched with mouth agape as she approached, saying nothing, but positively exuding anger. She snatched me up with one arm and commenced to paddling me with the other. I had already learned that there was no sense in trying to use my free hand to block the stinging blows. Not only did it hurt like hell being paddled on the fingers, it only served to infuriate her even more. It took about fifteen minutes to walk to Curt’s house, and I hopped while she paddled me every step of the way. I cried from pain and fear, of course, but I also cried because I knew that I could have avoided the whole awful scene if I had just done what I was supposed to do.

The spanking wasn’t the worst part of my penance. School was just starting, and for two solid weeks I had to come straight home, take a bath, put my pajamas with cartoon baseball players on and get in bed until it was dinner time. I got to eat, and then had to go right back to my bed. I could hear my brother and sisters outside playing in the twilight. The first weekend of my sentence was the annual block party, and I spent all day Saturday in bed, listening to the entire neighborhood partying and laughing and doing the things that people who aren’t grounded get to do. It was awful. The important thing is that I learned my lesson. Of course I got grounded again, but I NEVER walked away again. I never tried to get out of paying for what I’d done, and isn’t that the goal of punishment, to remind us that everything we do has consequences to accept if we choose to flaunt the rules?

It seems to me that the kid in the video got off real easy. If it had been me and my mother, I would have been standing in my underwear holding the sign and screaming to every passing car that I was a thief and a liar, and I probably would have been bleeding somewhere. No, I think this kid, unless he really gets himself together, is prison bound. He reminds me of a kid I knew once who (finally) had to spend some time at a juvenile facility. I went to pick him up, hoping that he had learned something. In a nonchalant way, he said that being locked up wasn’t that bad; he had made some friends and the food was good. Exasperated, I asked him if the fact that he couldn’t leave had any effect on him, and he said he hadn’t really thought about it while he was there. Hmmm. He went to real jail later.

My point here is that humiliation and fear are very powerful motivators and should not be shunned as a way of punishment. In fact, I’m all for it. The world is a tough place and children should learn from a very early age that it does not exist to make them happy. In fact, I daresay that not punishing swiftly and firmly is like setting out a welcome mat for later strife. Do I think children should be beaten, battered or broken? Of course not. I do think, however, that to mollycoddle them and feign anger and impose “a stern talking to” or time out for their misdeeds is just as bad, if not worse than real physical abuse. If you start early, and I mean from birth, and let them know that choices have to be made and consequences have to be dealt with, they are playing and learning on a level field. Feeling guilty and humiliated is the first step; the second is to turn them into the catalyst for creating empathy and modesty. If done correctly, with assurances that the world isn’t ending and the lesson is learned, punishment will be needed less frequently. You know why? Because they’ll learn right from wrong with your guidance. You don’t have to be a parent to know that. It’s common sense, isn’t it?