To the Editor:

In “Are Parents Bad for Children?” [March], Dana Mack poses a question which is loaded with potential for misinterpretation. A more suitable title might have been, “Have You Stopped Beating Your Children?”

Miss Mack gives the reader a grossly distorted critique of Alice Miller’s For Your Own Good. I have read this book repeatedly because of the strong words which Miller has for parents who beat their children to enforce obedience. Miller insists that parents have a right to discipline their children, but they have no right to punish them. What is the difference between discipline and punishment?

Discipline, which comes from the Latin word disciplina, means “to teach.” Discipline does not mean to hit, to push, to shove, or to force. The parent who knows how to discipline a child teaches that child how to control his behavior in an acceptable manner. Discipline inspires love between the teacher and the child.

Punishment is the willful infliction of pain to enforce obedience. A parent who believes in punishing a child for disobedience believes that his main task is to control the behavior of that child. If the child resists, the parent believes he has a right to break the will and the spirit of the child so that the child will learn to do exactly as he is told. An abusive parent will use fear, force, and pain to make certain that the child knows just who is boss. Punishment inspires hatred between the parent and the child—hatred which the child must suppress at all costs.

Would any adult who is free to change his job continue to work for a boss who regularly beat him with a whip when he failed to meet his sales quota? Of course not! Yet a child cannot leave a parent who whips him, curses him, and tells him that he is a useless dreg who is unfit to live in the family.

My mother used to beat me with a razor strap whenever I displeased her or made a mistake. Those beatings were so painful that I eventually shut down my body so that I could feel nothing. I grew up with a profound distrust of any person wielding authority and learned to avoid contact with people.

Has Dana Mack ever felt the pain of a razor strap lashing across her back? . . .

I believe that Alice Miller’s portrait of Adolf Hitler in For Your Own Good is the most profound analysis I have yet read of Hitler and offers the best explanation of why he had such power to persuade the German people to follow him.

Hitler’s father beat him with a razor strap for the slightest infraction of the rules. Adolf, who could not strike back at his father, endured those beatings with a stoic calm, yet burned with rage and anger toward his father. What happened to those feelings? Did Adolf forget? Not on your life! Those feelings of rage and hatred toward his father, which he had to suppress at all costs, emerged with full force when he became an adult. Now he had the power to inflict pain and punishment on weaker persons. Now he could release his venom at a target which could not fight back—the Jewish people. . . .

A person who has been beaten by a parent learns that the way to resolve a conflict is with a fist. The boy who is beaten grows up to be the man who beats his wife. There is no great mystery in this matter.

A person who believes and practices the principles of democracy will not beat his children in a dispute, because such a man believes that every person has a right to express his opinion—including his own children.

A person who believes in the principles of fascism will beat his children in an argument to settle the matter because the core of fascist belief is that “might makes right.” Or to put in the vernacular, “We’ll just see who’s boss!” From that premise, such a person will lash out with a razor strap, a stick, an ax handle, or anything he can get his hands on to smash and break the will and spirit of someone smaller and weaker—including his own children.

I take exception to the ideas of Dana Mack and her distorted criticism of Alice Miller. I suggest that Miss Mack stay in her ivory tower at the Institute for American Values.

Harold Theisen
Brooklyn, New York

_____________

To the Editor:

Dana Mack castigates Dr. Benjamin Spock for undermining traditional disciplinary methods that relied on anger and reprobation. To drive home her point, she cites the following example of Spock’s permissiveness:

In Baby and Child Care, he [Spock] suggested that parents might respond to school-age stealing by “thinking over” whether their child might “need more . . . approval at home,” and even a raise in allowance!

After reading this passage, I decided to look up what Spock had actually said in my well-worn and yellowing copy of Baby and Child Care (1962). In the section on stealing, I could find no evidence that Spock advised raising a young thief’s allowance, but I did read the following:

It is essential that a child know clearly that his parents disapprove of any stealing and insist on immediate restitution. . . . If you are pretty sure that your child (or pupil) has stolen something, tell him so, be firm about knowing where he got it, insist on restitution. In other words, don’t make it easy for him to lie. (If a parent accepts lies too easily, it’s as if he were condoning the theft.)

It seems to me, then, that Miss Mack’s assertion that Spock “turned the ideal of good parenthood on its head” is not a fair one. On the contrary—he advised parents to be firm and forthright in their disapproval of stealing.

John P. Bozzone
Ithaca, New York

_____________

Dana Mack writes:

John P. Bozzone seems to have missed Dr. Benjamin Spock’s advice to parents on childhood stealing: “It is time to think over whether the child needs more affection and approval at home, and help in making closer friendships outside. This is the time to give him, if possible, an allowance of about the same size as that of the other children he knows.” This sentence, which appears later in the section from which Mr. Bozzone quotes, is characteristic of Spock’s predilection for viewing childhood transgressions as indications of deprivation and psychic suffering. Yes, Spock does advise parents to insist on restitution of stolen objects, but he also advises them to sympathize with the child who steals, and even to make amends for the alleged need which provoked the stealing. The problem with this approach, of course, is that to offer children amends for stealing is to justify the act.

Notwithstanding my sympathy for Harold Theisen’s difficult childhood, I am immediately struck by his assertion that punishment “is the willful infliction of pain to enforce obedience.” That, of course, is not at all a definition of punishment; that is more accurately a definition of abuse. But then, these very separate things are today often confused.

Few parents teach obedience out of willfulness, and few parents teach obedience to themselves, per se. Rather, most parents teach obedience to the moral injunctions, rules of personal safety, and social forms by which they live, and which they know are best for their children. And they see occasional punishment as an important, if unpleasant, aspect of their parental duty to cultivate children into responsible members of family and community.

The idea behind “punishment,” I should think, is to impress upon a child, by means of some slight sacrifice on his part, the pain he may have inflicted on others by a wayward action. Moreover, when a parent punishes, he demonstrates to his children his own unwavering regard for good character and conduct.

Mr. Theisen reiterates one of Alice Miller’s most popular ideas: that traditional family life, in asserting the absolute authority of mothers and fathers over children, is a training ground for fascism and social violence. Miller’s polemical depiction of 19th-century German child-rearing conventions is, of course, designed to convince the uncritical reader that there is something to this idea. But her theories, unfortunately, do not hold up to the scrutiny of social science.

Not even the subtle minds of the Frankfurt School for Social Research got very far with the thesis that Nazism emanated from an old-world, “authoritarian” German family structure. And today, in studying the steady surge of juvenile crime and violence, social scientists find that it is not at all associated with “authoritarian” methods of child-rearing. Rather, they find that juvenile delinquents are overwhelmingly children who come from families where there is no consistent authority figure present.