Your Child Today and Tomorrow | Page 6

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 would you have done or said to Jennie?
In the answers the most striking thing is the range of reasons given by the children for punishing Jennie. There are three prominent reasons.
The first is clearly for revenge. Jennie was a bad girl; she made her mother unhappy; she must be made unhappy. She made her mother angry; she must be made angry. A boy of ten says: "I would have sent Jennie to bed and not given her any supper, and then she would get mad and cry." One boy of nine says: "If I had been that woman I would have half killed her." A sweet (?) little girl would make her "paint things until she is got enough