A teacher was said to have yelled to prevent a boy from punching another student, and was recorded, spread all over the web, and reported to the police for “psychological abuse.” A mother in another town who slapped her teen for shoplifting money was threatened with prosecution for child abuse. That is the new normal: discipline is criminalized, and those willing to bring a child to order risk going to jail.
We live in an era when disciplining a child—particularly with tough love—is under suspicion. In a bid to swing away from child abuse, the pendulum has swung too far and deposed every type of conventional discipline. Teachers now flit nervously in front of misbehaving children, fearing the cellphone camera eye. Parents also walk around their children, wondering what will be the welcome mat to the knock on the door by a social worker, a scolding, or a pat on the back. We’ve made them unattainable in the interest of protection, but are we making them unreachable as well?
Discipline is not abuse. Discipline is a framework. Discipline is responsibility. Discipline is love in its grungiest, least glamorous incarnation. Kids, particularly when they’re young, push the limits. And if there is no regular punishing of ill manners, the limits dissolve and disappear. What we see now—these bratty kids who yell back, skip school, and have full-blown tantrums in shopping malls—is not liberty. It is the mess sown by the lack of discipline. Without censure, there can be no betterment.
There is sanity in the old practices, even if open minds disdain them. The slap on the hand, the time-out, the removal of electronics—these are not displays of brutality, but of concern. They say, “You can’t do that and do it with impunity.” But in the world today, even a tut-tutting eyebrow may be deemed trauma-inducing. We have pampered children into frailty, unaware that we are teaching them to snap at the first resistance life offers in their direction.
What is more deplorable is that most of those who would be quick to report instances of punishment do little when the same child turns hostile, reckless, or violent later in life. They blame the school, blame the parents, blame the community—but where were they when the child had to learn “no”? Yes, children do have the right to be safeguarded. But they have a right to be educated, too. Safety isn’t pampering. And discipline, meted out in love and purpose, is a gift, not a tool of exploitation.
Teachers, quasi-parents in the old days, are now suspected of something. They no longer stretch out on the limb emotionally or ethically for students for fear of crossing vaguely defined boundaries. Parents are being taken from themselves as well by intruders who feel they know better. And while this is happening, children are learning that consequences are at the discretion of anyone and authority is a joke. What are we creating as adults when we are afraid to correct the children we love?
The threat isn’t in the bedrooms and classrooms—it’s in our laws and policies that indiscriminately criminalize. One-size-fits-all policies, supposing all discipline is evil, close their eyes to cultural wisdom and parental instinct. Parental love needn’t be reduced to cruelty, but correction needn’t be ruled out as well. Or we’ll have an allergy to correction and an addiction to entitlement spreading across a generation.
If there is a way out, it has to be back towards balance. Let us safeguard children, yes—but not by removing from us the means to bring them up well. Let discipline be recognized once more, not as brutality, but as love teaching, molding, and settling the young. We cannot bring up responsible adults by treating them like precious dolls these days. Love has to be tough sometimes. Love has to say no sometimes.
