The Whip Hand : SPARE THE CHILD, <i> By Philip Greven (Alfred A. Knopf: $24.95; 244 pp.)</i>
In recent years we have become more alert to the harm done children by, of all people, their mothers and fathers, or their teachers in school--the bodily assaults that can scar the skin, break bones, damage vital organs, and, not least, evoke serious psychological troubles that don’t readily go away.
Such “child abuse,” a few decades ago, was all too commonly overlooked even by pediatricians who worked in the emergency rooms of hospitals, where many of the more seriously injured boys and girls are seen--brought, usually, by the very parents who had beaten them up, so often in the name of “discipline” or upholding a particular virtue. I well remember my own residency training in pediatrics--the bruised children described by their parents as victims of various “accidents.”
We did our best to restore the bodies of those children, and, too, pressed the parents for exact explanations of what had happened--and mostly met a solid wall of denials and lies from men and women not about to let us know what they had done with their bare hands, or with hockey sticks, pipes, baseball bats. The terrorized children whose bodies we attended also were unwilling to tell the truth, lest they pay with yet additional beatings later on.
Meanwhile, we doctors stood helplessly by, our doubts and apprehensions kept to ourselves. Today, of course, the world knows better, and any number of organizations are ready to respond to what is regarded as a serious matter indeed: the victimization of children by adults in the name of punishment for various (real or imagined) transgressions.
When a society starts taking note of a problem, and attempts to redress it, any number of scholars will do their own kinds of looking--investigations meant to ascertain what in a people’s history and culture has enabled a particular tragedy to exist for so long, even to be sanctioned and justified. So it was for slavery and segregation, the historical studies of which have reminded us that what we abhor now once was regarded quite otherwise, as both natural and desirable.
Philip Greven, a social historian at Rutgers University, has joined such a tradition of scholarship with his “Spare the Child,” an effort to help us understand how it has come about that for generations (for many centuries, in fact) children have been punished, and punished corporally, sometimes in the severest way--all, of course, in the interest of making them obedient, compliant, responsive to the will of their elders.
The author himself, he tells us right off, experienced such punishment: “Like so many other Americans--including many of those whose stories will unfold in the pages of this book--I was physically punished as a child.” Moreover, he goes further, acknowledging that he also is “one who, as a parent, has done it (inflicted physical punishment on his children) on at least a few occasions.”
He adds this poignant, instructive, confessional comment: “This book reflects my wish to be part of the process of changing the ways people rear children. Without the impulse both to change myself and to change others, this study would neither have taken place nor been completed.”
The most original and interesting part of the book draws on the author’s longstanding explorations into America’s religious history. The Old Testament repeatedly recommends physical punishment of children, and many of those Biblical passages are offered the reader, lest any of us forget the exhortations that, in their sum, provided a powerful rationale for generations of parents. For example: “He that spareth his rod hateth his son: But he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes”; or “A whip for the horse, a bridle for the ass, and a rod for the fool’s back”; or “Judgments are prepared for scorners, stripes for the backs of fools”; or yes, “Withhold not correction from the child: For if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell.”
Such recommendations have inspired any number of earnest, decent parents to vigorous action, and by no means only in earlier times. Millions of men and women are quite convinced that what is urged in those passages from Proverbs, or other Biblical passages, ought to be faithfully and vigorously pursued--the strap, say, as an essential part of the moral and psychological education children receive in the course of their family life.
Of course, not everyone willing to exert physical force on a child summons a religious tradition. “From John Locke to Benjamin Spock,” we are told, “some form of assault by adults has been justified as necessary in the disciplining of children.”
Certain schools of contemporary psychology, too, have offered support to those who would smack or paddle children. “Modern behaviorism,” the author asserts, “has made punishment into a science. Punishment has been embedded in the behavioral sciences just as it has been in schools and the law, and arguments for pain and suffering are as much a part of behavioral psychologists’ language as of educators’, lawyers’ and judges’. “ Prof. Greven sees B. F. Skinner, for instance, as a direct descendant of the stern Puritans who knew how to make anyone and everyone feel vulnerable, if not wicked. We are given this revealing quote from Skinner himself: “Much of my scientific position seems to have begun as Presbyterian theology, not too far removed from the Congregational of Jonathan Edwards.”
There is no question, as the author points out in some detail, that there can be psychological consequences to a child-rearing ethic that upholds repeated physical punishment of boys and girls; they can become anxious, frightened, sad, shy, hesitant, unsure of themselves or, alas, all too truculent--willing to inflict on others (friends, schoolmates, neighbors) what they have experienced themselves.
Nevertheless, this book regrettably fails to make a distinction between an occasional whack by a parent and the “abuse” that is understandably and repeatedly denounced. At times, the author slips into the most sweeping of generalizations whose veracity he certainly does not substantiate, but rather asserts rhetorically. For example:
“Child abuse is the primary means by which an authoritarianism--in both its religious and secular forms--is created. Authoritarianism, in turn, is one of the most enduring of all the consequences--both internal and external, private and public--of corporal punishments. The persistent ‘conservatism’ of American politics and society is rooted in large part in the physical violence done to children.”
Or this: “Americans have always been more prone to authoritarianism than the public ideology of participatory democracy would suggest, but the roots of this persistent tilt toward hierarchy, enforced order and absolute authority . . . are always traceable to aggression against children’s wills and bodies.”
Then, this further escalation: “Living in the age in which nuclear annihilation is always a possibility, we must reckon with the impulses toward destruction of life and the end of history and the Earth itself that arise from the abuse of children. . . .”
Such unqualified remarks are not only unconvincing, they also turn a scholar’s research into an arguable and quite polemical rhetoric. We are urged, at the end of the book, to be reasonable, “to commit ourselves to nonviolence,” to decide that “fear should be banished from child rearing and discipline”--and of course, no one would disagree. But one wonders, really, whether either the author or his children are all that worse off, given the physical punishment they once experienced. One wonders, too, whether certain remarks, even a kind of look, can be more devastating to a child than an occasional swipe.
More broadly, we look in vain throughout this book for some sensible context in its discussion--some willingness to look at the inevitable tensions that exist at times between parents and children, tensions that get worked out, day after day, in home after home, quite successfully. Nowhere does the author distinguish between the discipline of sane and sensible parents (including an occasional physical encounter) and a persistent, crazy, mean-spirited “abuse.”
We need to be reminded in a book like this that what matters is what parents do, overall, in the course of the years they spend with children. And we need some recognition that occasional lapses in any of us, children and parents alike, are more than often balanced by the good humor and common sense and decency to be found in millions of homes, where ordinary families do quite well, no matter the confrontations (verbal, even physical) that may arise from time to time.
