Stand by while I put on my ballistic vest. This topic is a lightning rod and even many Traditionalists won’t like what I’m going to say here. But I’m old and on this subject, grumpy, so I’m going to call it like I see it.
I’ll begin with an anecdote. Some years ago I was attending a church picnic held at a park not far from our home. Families of all shapes and sizes came with their picnic accoutrements and the food, music, games and fun were typical of raucous church picnics.
As my family and I drove toward the area of the park where the picnic was being held, I slowed the car to a crawl as kids and pets were running all over the place. Off in the distance I could clearly see a boy, about 11 or 12, riding his bike straight towards us on this roadway/quasi pathway. I could see even 30 to 40 yards away that the boy wasn’t paying attention to what was in front him but looking from side to side.
So I stopped the car altogether, but on he came, straight for the hood of my car. I thought of beeping the horn but now he was within 20 yards and I didn’t want to startle him. “Surely he’ll look up and see where he’s going,” was what went through my mind, but he never looked up until the very last 5 yards whereupon he slammed on his brakes. It was too late.
He was barely moving, thank goodness, when he crashed head on into the front of my car and fell off the bike. I immediately jumped out to make sure he was alright. He was, but the front wheel of his bike was slightly bent, not enough to prevent it from turning, but enough to make riding the bike wobbly. So my wife and I changed places, she now behind the wheel, and I started walking with the boy, whose family I knew well, towards where they were set up in the park.
As I approached the family with my arm around the boy his father approached us, took one look at the bike, dropped to his knee and put his hands on his son’s shoulders asking if he was hurt. “No,” replied the boy who had gone sullen. Then the Dad asked, looking at me, “what happened?”.
I could see the little guy was fearful that he was going to get into trouble and so I chose my words carefully, explaining not how reckless he was, but rather how he was slowing to pull to the side of the road when it appeared his hand slipped off the brake and he couldn’t stop and ran into the front of my car.
How unprepared I was for the father’s reaction. It would be a huge understatement to say that he overreacted. He practically threatened to sue me for reckless endangerment of his son! Meanwhile, the look on the boy’s face was a combination of astonishment, bewilderment, embarrassment, and humiliation not at what happened, but for how his father was behaving!
I said little to nothing, and began walking over to where I could see my wife had parked our car and had started to take our picnic paraphernalia out. I had to hide my shock and disbelief of how obnoxious and affrontive my neighbor and church acquaintance had been.
And then I thought to myself, “What did that father say to his son after I left? And, what did the whole episode teach him?
Another example. I’m walking through the grocery store one day and a mother is desperately trying to reason with her pre-adolescent son. He is demanding she buy him candy from the shelf predictably placed at the checkout counter. The child is quite literally yelling at his mother saying the most appalling things while mom looks furtively around her obviously worried about what people are thinking.
Practicing tortured restraint, mom says to her son: “Alright, I’ll get you the candy just this once, but you must not speak to mommy that way.” The boy doesn’t even wait for his mother to pay for the candy, and she doesn’t intervene when he tears the wrapper off, throwing it on the floor and begins to chomp down.
What have these parents both taught their children? I’ll let you, the reader, answer this yourself. In both cases, however, I’ll venture a guess that you’ll agree the parents taught them something wrong.
But this is what has happened to discipline in the new millennium. My parents would have hauled me out to the car if I behaved like that in the store, pulled down my pants in front of the whole world, and given me a couple of good swats on the behind. In fact, I’m sure something like this DID happen to me when I was young, but truthfully, I don’t even remember the incidents. Why? Because it only took a few times for me to learn that there are right and wrong ways to behave.
Today, my own kids face situations like those above with their own children, but they are TERRIFIED of meting out ANY discipline, except for time-outs and toy confiscation, even in the confines of their own home! Because if word got to a teacher or school administrator of a spanking, they’d be at risk of “child protective services” showing up at their door. We’ve all heard horror stories of government intrusion in the parenting/child-rearing process.
While the current limp-wristed approach to parenting may work in some cases, I firmly believe the swift swat on the butt I received was far more effective in teaching me right and wrong, and much more lasting.
And right and wrong is what children need to be taught. Unfortunately, in the current environment of moral relativism and permissiveness, the impact of families where these are not taught has a devastating effect on the community at large. Just look at Antifa or, almost as bad, various skinhead groups for examples. Do you think their parents taught them to behave that way, or was it the absence of parental guidance and moral teaching that created them?
We thought OUR generation was spoiled and undisciplined? Just look at the next two after us!
What we teach our children, and our grandchildren, matters!
