Your Child Today and Tomorrow | Page 6

to assume an attitude that will reduce in a great
measure their annoyance at the various awkward and inconsiderate and
mischievous acts of the youngsters. Such a study should make possible
a closer intimacy with the child. And, finally, it should make possible a
longer continuance of that intimacy with the child, which is so helpful
for those in authority as well as for the child himself.

II.
THE PROBLEM OF PUNISHMENT
Picture to yourself a dark hallway. Behind the door stands an indignant
mother with a strap in her hand. It is past the dinner hour and William
has not yet returned. But here he is now. He comes bounding up the
steps, radiantly happy, and under each arm a pumpkin. He bursts into
the house. His mother seizes him by the shoulder and proceeds to apply
the strap where she thinks it will do the most good. The little boy is
William J. Stillman, and the story is told in his autobiography. He tells
how just an hour before dinner a neighboring farmer had asked him to
go to his field to shake down the fruit from two apple trees. William
was so glad to do something for which he would receive pay that he
allowed the work to trench upon his dinner-time. The two large
pumpkins he brought were his pay, and he knew that they meant a great
deal to his needy family. Stillman, in writing of the incident, continues:
"It is more than sixty years since that punishment fell on my shoulders,
but the astonishment with which I received the flogging, instead of the
thanks which I anticipated for the wages I was bringing her, the haste
with which any mother administered it lest my father should anticipate
her and beat me after his own fashion, are as vivid in my recollection as

if it had taken place yesterday."
While I hope that not many of us are guilty of such flagrant abuse of
our power as is described above, still I am certain that on many
occasions we punish just as hastily, without giving a chance for
explanation and with as little thought as to whether "the punishment fits
the crime."
I have often been impressed by the great interest that mothers take in
uses of punishment and in kinds of punishment. It has sometimes
seemed as if the most valuable thing which they could carry away with
them from some child-study meeting was a new kind of punishment for
some very common offence. I have frequently felt as if the only contact
some mothers have with their children is to punish them, and that
punishment constituted the chief part of the poor children's training.
Now, punishment undoubtedly has a place in the training of children,
but only a negative place. The proper punishment, administered in the
right spirit, may cure or correct a fault; _but punishment does not make
children good_. If children are punished frequently, it may even make
them bad.
We can all remember some of the punishments of our own childhood.
How unjust they seemed then, and do even now, after all these years to
heal the wounds! How outraged we felt! Into how unloving a mood
they put us!
The history of punishment for criminals shows us three stages. With
primitive peoples and in early times the first impulse is to "get even" or
to "strike back." "An eye for an eye"--nothing less would do. Then
comes a stage in which punishment is used to frighten people from
wrong-doing and as a warning--a deterrent for others. Gradually, very,
very slowly, as we become more civilized and develop moral
insight--develop a love for humanity--we come to recognize that the
only legitimate purpose of punishment in the treatment of offenders is
to redeem their characters, to make them positively better, not merely
frighten them into a state of apparent right-doing--that is, a state of
avoiding wrong-doing.

It is said that each individual in his development lives over the
experiences of the race. How each of us passes through the three
attitudes toward punishment is very interestingly shown by a study that
was made some years ago on 3000 school children, to find out their
own ideas about punishment. Miss Margaret E. Schallenberger sent out
the following story and query and had the answers tabulated:
Jennie had a beautiful new box of paints; and in the afternoon, while
her mother was gone, she painted all the chairs in the parlor, so as to
make them look nice for her mother. When the mother came home,
Jennie ran to meet her and said: "Oh, mamma, come and see how pretty
I have made the parlor." But her mamma took her paints away and sent
her to bed. If you had been her mother, what