Family Forum / Parenting / Spanking / October 2006

Hihihi!  IOW,  you can't handle the truth!

Have you done so, Kane?

AF

Your proof it's a 'fairy tale' would be?

We don't know. I don't, at any rate. Are you suggesting that no one
post anything here until all proof is in that it's exact, factual, and
true?

Please advise Doug of this new requirement of Greg the group
comptroler.

Really? That would lead one to believe that I intended harm. Or did not
care of anyone was harmed by reading the story.

What proof have you that that was my intent?

And what harm could come by someone reading the story and taking care
not to hit a child thereby?

Is a child going to lose a hand if they are NOT spanked?

No, it does not. I made no such judgement. I simply posted the story,
and even labelled it "A Little Bedtime Story," leaving it up to the
reader, with THAT obvious clue, to take the story with a grain of salt.

It's YOU and Doan that wish to declare it a lie, a false story. While
I've not said one way or the other, but simply invited you to determine
yourself.

By making a positive claim about it as a lie YOU have obligated
yourself to prove it a lie.

Of me? Sure. I labelled it accurately as being unknown as to it's
validity.

Surely you have read Bedtime Stories to children. Do you know for
certain that Humpty indeed had a great fall, or was he pushed? Did all
the Kings Horse and ALL the kinds men really try, or did they give up
to easily, and were some not even there, but off carousing with Queen
and her handmaidens.

Now, show where I exercised "reckless indifference" and that I claimed
the story was true, after calling it a bedtime story, or get honest for
once in your life and apologise for making false accusations against
me.

Or go find out for yourself if it were true or not.

Do you demand that everyone, by the way, provide full facts for their
claims here?

How is it you have not addressed Doan on this issue then?

Is your inconsistency honest, Greg? Or are you just expressing your
hatred and bias for someone that shows you to be a liar and fool, on a
regular basis?

0;-]

They are often fairytales!

Hihihi!

One can choose to believe or not believe.

Not until I have to deal with you! ;-)

With you? YES!

Hihihi!  It's obvious except to a STUPID LIAR like you.

And a reasonable person would think that a child who was abused by her
father would involve CPS being called.

Then why post it when you are are not claiming that it is true.  Am I to
believe that even you, with a limited brain, see that the story just
doesn't add up?

It's obvious!

Why would I have to convince anyone?  Do you see anyone here believe that
it is true?

Do you think that it should have?

Hahaha!  CPS is "supefluos"?

It's the truth!  ;-)

Do you see anyone believing it?

Of course!

Don't need to.  Like I said, it's obvious!

Hahaha!

Yes! It's a work of fiction.

Because it is obviously so!

Yup!

So?

Why waste my time when any reasonable person would see right through
the proganda?  Now, if you have someone who is gullible enough to
believe such story then maybe I'll spend sometime to enlighten such
a person.  Do you know of any such person?

Hahaha!  It's your sh.t!

Already answered.  How about you?

AF

THE HISTORY OF CHILD ABUSE
By Lloyd deMause

psychhst@tiac.net

Lloyd deMause is Director of The Institute for Psychohistory, Editor of
The Journal of Psychohistory and President of The International
Psychohistorical Association and can be reached at 140 Riverside Drive,
New York, New York 10024. This speech was given in May 1992 at The
British Institute for Psycho-Analysis in London and in August 1994 at
the American Psychiatric Association Convention in Philadelphia.

During the past three decades, I have spent much of my scholarly life
examining primary historical sources such as diaries, autobiographies,
doctor's reports and other documents that reveal what it must have felt
like to have been a child--yesterday and today, in the East and the
West, in literate and preliterate cultures.

In several hundred articles published by myself and my associates in
The Journal of Psychohistory , we have documented extensive evidence
that the history of childhood has been a nightmare from which we have
only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one
goes--and the further away from the West one gets--the more massive the
cruelty and neglect one finds and the more likely children are to have
been killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized and sexually abused by their
caretakers.

Indeed, my conclusion from a lifetime of psychohistorical study of
childhood and society is that the history of humanity is founded upon
the abuse of children. Just as family therapists today find that child
abuse often functions to hold families together as a way of solving
their emotional problems, so, too, the routine assault of children has
been society's most effective way of maintaining its collective
emotional homeostasis. Most historical families once practiced
infanticide, erotic beating and incest. Most states sacrificed and
mutilated their children to relieve the guilt of adults. Even today, we
continue to arrange the daily killing, maiming, molestation and
starvation of children through our social, military and economic
activities. I would like to summarize here some of the evidence I have
found as to why child abuse has been humanity's most powerful and most
successful ritual, why it has been the cause of war and social
violence, and why the eradication of child abuse and neglect is the
most important social task we face today.

THE CHILD AS POISON CONTAINER

The main psychological mechanism that operates in all child abuse
involves using children as what I have termed poison
containers--receptacles into which they project disowned parts of their
psyches, so they can control these feelings in another body without
danger to themselves. In good parenting, the child uses the caretaker
as a poison container, much as it earlier used the mother's placenta as
a poison container for cleansing its polluted blood. A good mother
reacts with calming actions to the cries of a baby and helps it
"detoxify" its dangerous emotions. But when an immature mother's baby
cries, she cannot stand the screaming, and strikes out at the child. As
one battering mother put it, "I have never felt loved all my life. When
the baby was born, I thought he would love me. When he cried, it meant
he didn't love me. So I hit him." Rather than the child being able to
use the parent to detoxify its fears and anger, the parent instead
injects his or her bad feelings into the child and uses it to cleanse
his or herself of depression and anger.

Consider an infanticidal and incestuous culture, the Bimin-Kuskusmin of
New Guinea. As is typical in pre-literate cultures, the mothers have
long post-partum taboos against sex with their husbands, sleep naked
against their children until they are about six years old, have orgasms
while nursing them and regularly masturbate them. One three-year-old
boy describes how whenever his mother was sad or angry she masturbated
him so roughly that it hurt him, and he struggled to get away,
complaining of a pain in his penis. "It hurts inside," he told the
ethnologist. "It goes 'koong, koong, koong' inside. I think it bleeds
in there I don't like to touch it anymore. It hurts when I pee..."
Sometimes, after his mother hurt him while masturbating him, he wounds
himself in the thigh and abdomen with a sharp stick and draws blood,
looking at his penis and saying, "Now it hurts here, outside, not in
penis. Look, blood. Feels good..." Although he is only three years old,
he understands quite well that he is being used as a poison container
by his mother to relieve her depression. He says, "Mother twist penis,
tight...Hurt inside...Mother angry, hurt Buuktiin's penis. Mother sad,
hurt Buuktiin's penis...Mother not like Buuktiin's penis, want to cut
off..."

Maternal incest and pederasty by men are quite common in preliterate
groups and were common during early human history. In my study "The
Universality of Incest" I concluded that rather than the incest taboo
being universal, it is incest itself that has been universal for most
children in most cultures in most times, and that a childhood more or
less free from adult sexual abuse is in fact a very late historical
achievement, limited to a few fortunate children in a few modern
nations, mainly in the West. To give you some idea of the extensive
evidence I have gathered for such an unlikely conclusion, I would like
to begin by summarizing the statistical evidence which exists for the
sexual abuse of children around the world today.

THE SEXUAL ABUSE OF CHILDREN TODAY

In America, the most accurate scientific studies, based on lengthy
interviews, report that 30 percent of men and 40 percent of women
remember having been sexually molested during childhood--defining
"molestation" as actual genital contact, not just exposure. About half
of these are directly incestuous, with the immediate family, the other
half being with neighbors, but with the complicity of caretakers in at
least 80 percent of the cases. These experiences of seduction are not
just pieced together from fragmentary memories, but are remembered in
detail, are usually for an extended period of trime and have been
confirmed by follow-up reliability studies in 83 percent of the cases,
so they are unlikely to have been fantasies. The seductions occurred at
much earlier ages than had been previously assumed, with 81 percent
occurring before puberty and an astonishing 42 percent under age 7.

As high as these molestation rates seem, however, they represent only a
portion of the true rates, not only because those interviewed do not
include populations that have been shown to have extremely high
rates--such as criminals, prostitutes, juveniles in shelters,
psychotics, etc.--but also because only conscious memories were
counted, and the earliest seductions of children are almost never
remembered except during psychotherapy. Adjusting statistically for
what is known about these additional factors, I have concluded that the
real sexual abuse rate for America is 60 percent for girls and 45
percent for boys, about half directly incestuous.

Other Western nations have made fewer careful studies. A recent
Canadian study by Gallup of 2,000 adults has produced incidence rates
almost exactly the same as those found in the United States. Latin
American family sexual activity--particularly widespread pederasty as
part of macho sexuality--is considered even more widespread. In
England, a recent BBC "ChildWatch" program asked its female
listeners--a large though admittedly biased sample--if they remembered
sexual molestation, and, of the 2,530 replies analyzed, 83 percent
remembered someone touching their genitals, 62 percent recalling actual
intercourse. In Germany, the Institut fuer Kindheit has recently
concluded a survey asking West Berlin schoolchildren about their sexual
experiences, and 80 percent reported having been molested.

Outside the West, the sexual molestation of children is a routine
practice in most families. Childhood in India begins, according to
observers, with the child being regularly masturbated by the mother,
the girl "to make her sleep well," the boy "to make him manly." The
child sleeps in the family bed, witnesses and most likely takes part in
sexual intercourse between the parents. The child is often "borrowed"
to sleep with other members of the extended household, leading to the
Indian proverb that "For a girl to be a virgin at ten years old, she
must have neither brothers nor cousin nor father." Childhood is so
eroticized that, as one Western observer put it, "The little Hindu
girls are deflowered by the little boys with whom they play, and repeat
together the erotic lessons which their parents have unwittingly taught
them on account of the general promiscuity of family life throughout
India. In all the little girls of less than ten years of age the
complete hymen is wanting...Incest is often the rule rather than the
exception."

Childhood in China has historically had the same institutionalized rape
rituals as in India, including the pederasty of boys, child
concubinage, the castration of boys to be used sexually as eunuchs,
marriage of young girls to a number of brothers, widespread boy and
girl prostitution and the regular sexual use of child servants and
slaves. So prevalent was the rape of little girls that Western doctors
found that, as in India, few girls entering puberty had intact hymens.
Even the universal practice of foot binding was for sexual purposes,
with a girl undergoing extremely painful crushing of the bones of their
feet for years in order that men could make love to her big toe as a
fetish, a penis-substitute.

Childhood in contemporary Japan, although somewhat more Western than
that of other Eastern nations, still includes masturbation by mothers
"to put them to sleep." Parents usually have intercourse with the
children in bed with them, and "co-sleeping," with parents physically
embracing the child, often continues until the child is ten or fifteen.
One recent Japanese study found daughters sleeping with their fathers
over 20 percent of the time after age 16. Recent sex surveys report
memories of sexual abuse even higher than comparable American studies,
and "hot lines" of sexual abuse report mother-son incest in almost a
third of the calls, the mother saying to her teenage son, "It's not
good to do it alone. Your IQ becomes lower. I will help you, " or "You
cannot study if you cannot have sex. You may use my body," or "I don't
want you to get into trouble with a girl. Have sex with me instead."

The sexual use of children in the Near East is as widespread as in the
Far East. Historically, of course, all the institutionalized forms of
pedophilia which were customary in the Far East are documented
extensively for the Near East, including child marriage, child
concubinage, temple prostitution of both boys and girls, parent-child
marriage (among the Zoroastrians), sibling marriage (quite common among
Egyptians), sex slavery, ritualized pederasty and child prostitution.
Masturbation in infancy is said to be necessary "to increase the size"
of the penis, and older siblings are reported to play with the genitals
of babies for hours at a time. Mutual masturbation, fellatio and anal
intercourse are also said to be common among children, particularly
with the older boys using younger children as sex objects. The nude
public bathes (hammam) are particularly eroticized in many areas, being
especially notorious as a place of homosexual acts, both male and
female. Girls are used incestuously even more often than boys, since
females are valued so little. One report found 80 percent of Near
Eastern women surveyed recalled having been forced into fellatio
between the ages of 3 and 6 by older brothers, cousins, uncles and
teachers. The girls rarely complain, since "if there is any punishment
to be meted out, it will always end up by being inflicted on her."

Arab women, of course, know that their spouses are pedophiles and
prefer having sex with children to having sex with them. Their
retribution comes as follows. When the girl is about 6 years old, the
women of the house grab her, pull her thighs apart and cut off her
clitoris and often also her labia with a razor, thus usually ending her
ability to feel sexual pleasure forever.

A recent survey of Egyptian girls and women showed 97 percent of
uneducated families and 66 percent of educated families still practiced
clitoridectomy. Nor is the practice decreasing--UN reports estimate
that more than 74 million females have been mutilated, with "more
female children mutilated today than throughout history."

THE EVOLUTION OF CHILDHOOD

Historically, the routine use of children as poison containers to
prevent adults from feeling overwhelmed by their anxieties has also
been universal. Examples from the history of childhood regularly reveal
children are expected to "absorb" the bad feelings of their caretakers.
As one peasant community in rural Greece puts it, you must have
children around to put your bad feelings into, especially when the "Bad
Hour" comes around. An informant describes the process as follows:

   One of the ways for the Bad Hour to occur is when you get angry.
When you're angry a demon gets inside of you. Only if a pure individual
passes by, like a child for instance, will the "bad" leave you, for it
will fall on the unpolluted.

Newborn infants, in particular, were perfect poison containers because
they were so "unpolluted." The newborn then became so full of the
parent's projections that he or she had to be tied up--tightly swaddled
in bandages for up to a year or more--to prevent him or her from
"tearing its ears off, scratching its eyes out, breaking its legs, or
touching its genitals."

Children were particularly useful as poison containers in past
societies when adults felt anxious about recent or impending success.
Success stirs up superego retaliation, and the sacrifice of children to
appease the gods--that is, the punitive parents--was an extremely
widespread guilt-reducing device. Most early states practiced child
sacrifice. Typical was Carthage, where a large cemetery has been
discovered called The Tophet filled with over 20,000 urns deposited
there between 400 and 200 B.C. The urns contained bones of children
sacrificed by their parents, who often would make a vow to kill their
next child if the gods would grant them a favor--for instance, if their
shipment of goods were to arrive safely in a foreign port. Some urns
contain the bones of stillborn babies along with the bones of
two-year-olds, indicating that if the promised child was not born
alive, an older child had also to be killed to satisfy the promise. The
sacrifice was accompanied by a music, wild dancing and riotous orgy,
and was probably accompanied by the ritual rape of virgin girls, as it
was with the Incans. Plutarch told how the priests would "cut their
throats as if they were so many lambs or young birds; meanwhile the
mother stood by without a tear or moan [while] the whole area before
the statue was filled with a loud noise of flutes and drums..."
Sacrifice, rape and genital mutilation of young girls continues to take
place today in the Andean mountains, particularly to ward off the guilt
coming after successful cocaine deliveries. These ceremonies, from
antiquity to today, resemble closely the satanic rituals made familiar
recently in the newspapers, using the infliction of rape, sexual
mutilation and other horrors in order to visit upon child victims
elements of the traumas of the satanists' own childhood.

That child sacrifice was carried out mainly by the rich in each of
these early societies confirms the theory that it is a guilt-reducing
technique. Whenever new ventures were begun, children would be
sacrificed. Whenever a new building or bridge was built, a child would
be buried within it as a "foundation sacrifice." Whatever one's
physical ills, a child could be used to "absorb" the poison that was
responsible for the disease. When one wanted to be cured of leprosy,
one was supposed to kill a child and wash one's body in its blood. When
one wanted to find out if a house whose previous occupants had died of
plague was still infected or not, one rented some children to live in
it for several weeks to see if they died--rather like the use of
canaries in mines to detect poisonous gas. When one was impotent,
depressed or had venereal disease, doctors prescribed having
intercourse with a child. As late as the end of the nineteenth century,
men who were brought into Old Bailey for having raped young girls were
let go because "they believed that they were curing themselves of
venereal disease." Raping virgins was particularly effective for
impotence and depression; as one medical book put it, "Breaking a
maiden's seal is one of the best antidotes for one's ills. Cudgeling
her unceasingly, until she swoons away, is a mighty remedy for man's
depression. It cures all impotence." And, of course, whenever a parent
had a disease, they always had their children handy to absorb the
poison. Thus British doctors in the nineteenth century regularly found
when visiting men who had venereal disease that their children also had
the same disease--on their mouths, anuses or genitals.

No matter what anxieties one had, one had children always at hand to
use to relieve their anxieties. The evolution of childhood from incest
to love and from abuse to empathy has been a slow, uneven path, but one
whose progressive direction is, I think, unmistakable. This evolution
of parent-child relations is, I contend, an independent source of
historical change, lying in the ability of successive generations of
parents to live through their own childhood traumas a second time and
work through their anxieties in a slightly better manner this second
time around. It is in this sense that I say that history is like
psychotherapy, which also heals through revisiting one's childhood
traumas and reworking earlier anxieties. If the parent--the mother, for
most of history--is given even the most minimal support child care by
society, the evolution of childhood progresses, new variations in
historical personality are formed, and history begins to move in new,
innovative directions.

The crucial relationship in this evolution is the mother-daughter
relationship. If little girls are treated particularly badly, they grow
up to be mothers who cannot rework their traumas, and history is
frozen. For instance, although China was ahead of the West in most ways
during the pre-Christian era, it became "frozen" and fell far behind
the West in evolutionary social and technological change after it
adopted the practice of footbinding girls. Similarly, the
clitoridectomy of girls in Moslem societies has inhibited their social
development for centuries, since it likewise puts a brake on the
ability of the next generation of mothers to make progress in caring
for their children. Clearly, different groups have moved different
distances up the ladder of psychological evolution, since some
contemporary groups still practice brain-eating as our Paleolithic
ancestors did, and different subgroups of our more advanced nations
still terrorize and abuse their children in ways identical to those
that were commonplace centuries ago, producing the "historical fossils"
we now call borderline personalities and other severe character
disorders.

The "generational pressure" for psychological change is not only an
independent historical force--originating in inborn adult-child
striving for relationship--it occurs independent of social and
technological change, and can be found even in periods of economic
stagnation. My "psychogenic theory of history" posits that a society's
childrearing practices are not just one item in a list of cultural
traits, but--because all other traits must be passed down from
generation to generation through the narrow funnel of
childhood--actually makes childrearing the very basis for the
transmission and development of all other cultural traits, placing
definite limits on what can be achieved in the material spheres of
history. Regardless of the changes in the environment, it is only when
changes in childhood occur that societies begin to progress and move in
unpredictable new directions that are more adaptive. That more
individuated and loving individuals are ultimately more adaptive is
understandable --because they are less under the pressures of infantile
traumas and are therefore more rational in reaching their goals. But
that this childhood evolution--and therefore all social evolution--is
terribly uneven is also understandable, given the varying conditions
under which parents all over the world have to conduct their
childrearing tasks.

THE SIX CHILDREARING MODES

The patterns of evolution of childhood have been traced by myself and
other psychohistorians. I would like to summarize the six childrearing
modes that I have suggested are common to all groups that have
traversed the path of evolution so far. These modes are, in fact, quite
independent of technological development--there are loving families in
a few pre-literate groups as well as among some sections of
economically developed nations. They are achieved by only a portion of
each society during the period I assign for their first
appearance--indeed, our own nations today contain parents at each of
the six levels of childrearing. But the overall evolutionary direction
of parent-child relations is, I think, evident in the historical
record, regardless of what labels one chooses to put on its stages.

The earliest childrearing mode I have called infanticidal to highlight
the constant presence of infanticidal wishes in the parent. Actual
infanticide is, of course, common in most preliterate cultures even
today, and evidence remains of widespread infanticide among all
historical records. Primates, after all, are infanticidal, and early
archeological evidence shows children's skulls among early hominids
bashed open in a way to remove and eat their brains. In addition,
surveys of Pleistocene skeletons show evidence of differential female
infanticide by the presence of more boy skeletons than girl, since far
more girls were killed at birth than boys. By historical times, census
figures from antiquity show boy/girl ratios as high as 400 boys to 100
girls--a believable figure since, as Poseidippos said, "even a rich man
always exposes a daughter." I have estimated that about half of all
children born in antiquity were killed by their caretakers, declining
to about a third in medieval times and dropping to under one percent
only by the eighteenth century. Since these skewed sex ratios do not
vary by economic class--the rich doing away with their children at
about the same rates as the poor--the evidence suggests that the
parents were coping with the emotional anxieties of childrearing more
than economic conditions.

That incest is also traditional in the infanticidal mode is harder to
prove conclusively, since what really happened in the family bed does
not often leave historical traces. Yet all the records we have suggest
that this was so. Man undoubtedly began, after all, as an incestuous
primate--along with other primates, who remain incestuous today. I
realize primatologists often write that their subjects have a "natural
incest barrier," but what they are not revealing in that phrase is that
this is only in the genetic sense--that is, mature primate males don't
often mate with their mothers and pass down their genes. But what
primatologists rarely mention is that during infancy chimp and bonobo
and baboon mothers usually use their children for their sexual
satisfaction, thrusting their genitals against the genitals of both
their male and female offspring. In fact, most non-human primates
cannot later mate unless they were taught this genital thrusting by
their mothers. In addition, in most simple societies today in such
areas as New Guinea, boys and girls and used sexually by both their
mothers and by the men, who gang rape girls and often are also
pederasts who use the boys sexually, have boy-wives, or force all the
boys to fellate them daily from age seven to fourteen. So it is likely
that Homo sapiens began fully incestuous and that the human "incest
taboo" is a myth.

By the time historical records begin, the sexual use of children is
well documented. The Greek and Roman child lived his or her earliest
years in an atmosphere of sexual abuse. Girls were commonly raped, as
reflected in the many comedies that have scenes that were considered
funny of little girls being raped. Both Greek and Roman doctors report
that female children rarely have hymens--just like the Indian and
Chinese girls I described above. In order to find out if your young
wife was really a virgin (girls usually married before puberty to older
men), one had to use mystical tests for virginity, since intact hymens
were so rare.

Boys, too, were regularly handed over by their parents to neighboring
men to be raped. Plutarch has a long essay on what was the best kind of
person a father should give his son to for buggering. The common notion
that this occurred only at "adolescence" is quite mistaken. It began
around age seven, continued for several years and ended by puberty,
when the boy's facial and pubic hairs began to appear--actually at
about age 21, very late, since most children suffered from
"psychological retardation" from being so severely abused. Child
brothels, rent-a-boy services and sex slavery flourished in every city
in antiquity. Children were so subject to sexual use by the men around
them that schools were by law prohibited from staying open past
sundown, so their pedagogues--slaves who were assigned to protect them
against random sexual attack--could try to see that their teachers
didn't assault them. Petronius, especially loved depicting adults
feeling the "immature little tool" of boys, and Tiberius was said by
Seutonius to have "taught children of the most tender years, whom he
called his little fishes, to play between his legs while he was in his
bath. Those which had not yet been weaned, but were strong and hearty,
he set at fellatio..."

Although Christianity attempted to reduce the outright killing of
newborn, thus moving beyond the infanticidal mode, it continued the
abandonment of children--whether by child sale or by sending to wet
nurse or monastery or nunnery or foster family or to other homes as
servants--which is why I labeled this second stage the abandoning mode.
The refusal of parents to raise their own legitimate children was so
powerful that through the nineteenth century over half of the children
born in Florence, for instance, were dumped into foundling homes at
birth, to be picked up by their families--if they lived that long (the
majority died)--when they were five years old, thus avoiding having
families where crying babies disturbed the peace. The same abandonment
was common in France, where, in 1900, over 90 percent of the babies
born in Paris were carted out to the countryside to wetnurses at birth.
As one author put it, "mother love" was a late historical achievement,
not an instinctual trait.

The erotic beating of children became, if anything, worse in Christian
times, because of the anxieties of living with a child who is so full
of your projections. Children were experienced as always about to turn
into "changelings," those who, as St. Augustine puts it, "suffer from a
demon"--which usually meant just that they cry too much, since the
Malleus Maleficarum says that one can recognize changelings because
they "always howl most piteously," and since Luther says they "are more
obnoxious than ten children with their crapping, eating, and
screaming."

That children with devils in them had to be beaten goes without saying.
A panoply of beating instruments existed for that purpose, from
cat-o'-nine tails and whips to shovels, canes, iron rods, bundles of
sticks, the discipline (a whip made of small chains), the goad (shaped
like a cobbler's knife, used to prick the child on the head or hands)
and special school instruments like the flapper, which had a
pear-shaped end and a round hole to raise blisters. The beatings
described in the sources were almost always severe, involved bruising
and bloodying of the body, began in infancy, were usually erotically
tinged by being inflicted on bare parts of the body near the genitals
and were a regular part of the child's daily life. Century after
century of battered children grew up to batter their own children in
turn. Public protest was rare. Even humanists and teachers who had a
reputation for gentleness approved of the severe beating of children.
Those who attempted reform did so only to prevent death. As a
thirteenth-century law said, "If one beats a child until it bleeds,
then it will remember, but if one beats it to death, the law applies."
As Batholomew Batty put it, parents must "keep the golden mean," which
is to say they should not "strike and buffet their children about the
face and head, and to lace upon them like malt sacks with cudgels,
staves, fork or fire shovel," for then they might die of the blows. The
correct way, he said, was to "Hit him upon the sides...with the rod, he
shall not die thereof."

By the thirteenth century in the West, abandonment via oblation, or the
giving of young children to monasteries for sexual and other uses, was
ended, the first disapproval of pedophilia appeared, the first
childrearing tracts were published and some advanced parents began to
practice what I have termed the ambivalent mode of childrearing, where
the child was not born completely evil, but was seen as being still
full of enough dangerous projections so that the parent, whose task it
was to mold it, must beat it into shape like clay. Church moralists for
the first time began to warn against sexual molestation of children by
parents, nurses and neighbors. The length of time of swaddling was
reduced from a year or more to only a few months. Pediatrics and
educational philosophy were born. Parents of means began suggesting
that perhaps rather than sending their infants out to be wetnursed in
some peasant village--and thereby condemning over half of them to early
death--the mother might herself nurse her infant. The baby, said some
mothers who tried nursing their own babies, even responds to this care
by giving love back to the nursing mother, stroking her breast and face
and cooing. And if the father, as usually happens, complains that his
wife's breast belongs to him not the baby, these mothers suggested that
he should be allowed to hold the baby too!

These childhood reforms immediately preceded--and I believe
produced--the humanistic, religious and political reforms we associate
with the Renaissance and Reformation. For the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries in Western Europe represent the great watershed of
psychogenic change, wherein much-improved childrearing allowed the
schizoid and borderline personalities of antiquity and medieval
times--who regularly heard voices and hallucinated visions--to move on
to the more integrated, less splitting modern neurotic personality more
familiar to recent times.

By the seventeenth century, the intrusive mode of childrearing began,
particularly in England, America and France, whereby the child was seen
as less full of dangerous projections, so it could actually be
unswaddled soon after birth, not given regular enemas (which had until
then been given daily from birth to remove the bad contents felt to be
inside the infant), toilet trained early rather than late, hit but not
regularly whipped, and punished for masturbation rather than being
masturbated by adults. It eventually became unacceptable for men to go
about with a mistress on one arm and a catamite on the other, though
underground seduction of minors continued. Intrusive parenting, in
essence, began to substitute psychological pressure for physical abuse,
so that rather than whipping the child to prevent it from sin, it was,
for instance, shut up in the dark closets for hours or left without
food, sometimes for days. One mother shut her three-year-old boy up in
a drawer. Another had a house she described as "a sort of little
Bastille, in every closet of which was to be found a culprit--some were
sobbing and repeating verbs, others eating their bread and water..."
Another five-year-old French boy, in looking at a new apartment with
his mother, told her, "Oh no, mama...it's impossible; there's no dark
closet! Where could you put me when I'm naughty."

A considerable confusion between parent and child can be seen in the
severe punishments for masturbation championed by the child-training
literature since Tissot. Prior to this, children were masturbated by
adults and even licked on their bodies as though they were substitute
breasts. For instance, Little Louis XIII, in 1603, was described by his
pediatrician as having his penis and breasts kissed by everyone in the
court, and his parents would regularly make him part of sexual
intercourse in the royal bed. But childrearing reformers beginning in
the eighteenth century began to try to bring this open sexual abuse
under control, only it was the child who was now punished for touching
his or her genitals, under threat of circumcision, clitoridectomy,
infibulation and various cages and other genital restraint devices.
These terrorizing warnings and surgical interventions only began to die
out at the end of the nineteenth century, after two hundred years of
brutal and totally unnecessary assault on children's bodies and psyches
for touching themselves. Despite the reformers' efforts, progress was
so uneven that one British journalist could write in 1924 that "cases
of incest are terribly common in all classes. [Usually] the
criminal...goes unpunished...Two men coming out from [an incest] trial
were overheard saying to a woman who deplored there had been no
conviction, 'What nonsense! Men should not be punished for a thing like
that. It doesn't harm the child.'"

It goes without saying that the effects on the child of such severe
physical and psychological punishments were immense. Adults remembered
that as children they had had recurring nightmares and even outright
hallucinations as they lay awake at night, terrorized by imaginary
ghosts, demons, "a witch on the pillow," "a large black dog under the
bed," or "a crooked finger crawling across the room." History is filled
with reports of children's convulsive fits, dancing manias, loss of
hearing and speech, loss of memory, hallucinations of devils and
confessions of intercourse with devils. Nor did the parents help their
children's mental anguish by giving them comfort. It was thought that
the way for children to get over their fears was to make them face fear
even more concretely, so adults used to take children on visits to the
gibbet to inspect rotting corpses hanging there, while being told moral
stories. Classes used to be taken out of school to witness hangings,
and parents would also sometimes take their children to hangings and
then beat them when they returned home to make them remember what they
had seen. Even humanists, like Mafio Vegio, who protested the severe
beating of children, would admit that "to let them witness a public
execution is sometimes not at all a bad thing."

The effect on the children of this corpse-viewing was of course
massive. One little girl, after her mother showed her the fresh corpse
of her nine-year-old friend as an example, went around saying, "They
will put daughter in the deep hole, and what will mother do?" Another
woke at night screaming after seeing hangings, and "practiced hanging
his own cat." Religion was a further source of terrorizing. God was
said to "hold you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or
some loathsome insect, over the fire" and children's books depicted
Hell as follows: "The little child is in this red-hot oven. Hear how it
screams to come out...It stamps its little feet on the floor..."
Various terrorizing figures were used to control the child. If you were
bad, the werewolf would gulp you down, Blue Beard would chop you up,
Boney (Bonaparte) would eat your flesh, the black man or the chimney
sweep would steal you away at night. This need to personify punitive
figures was in fact so powerful that adults actually dressed up dummies
to use in frightening children. As one English writer, in 1748,
explained the practice:

   The nurse takes a fancy to quiet the peevish child, and with this
intent, dresses up an uncouth figure, makes it come in, and roar and
scream at the child in ugly disagreeable notes, which grate upon the
tender organs of the ear, and at the same time, by its gesture and near
approach, makes as if it would swallow the infant up.

By the nineteenth century's socializing mode, some parents no longer
needed to terrorize, beat and sexually seduce their children, and more
gentle psychological means began to be used to "socialize" the child.
The socializing mode is still the main model of upbringing in Western
nations, featuring the mother as trainer and the father as provider and
protector, and the child is seen as slowly being made to conform to the
parents' model of goodness. Many of the abusive practices are reduced
in the home but remain elsewhere in society. While Elizabeth I was
sexually seduced as a girl by her caretakers and Louis XV had Madame du
Barry procure little girls for the King to rape in his royal bedroom,
by the nineteenth century parents would less often commit incest
themselves but still sent their children to schools where they were
erotically whipped on the bare buttocks and usually buggered by the
older boys and masters.

Reformers during the nineteenth century tried to bring the rest of
society into the socializing mode by legislation designed to prevent
outright battering and sexual abuse of children, which of course still
went on in the majority of families around them. But those who tried to
oppose buggering and beating boys in schools were opposed by parents
who said "It didn't hurt me." Those who tried to pass child labor
legislation to reduce horrendous working conditions and hours were
labeled Communists. And those who thought one could bring up children
kindly were considered impractical visionaries.

What kind of society might be envisioned by children brought up under
the latest childrearing mode--what I have termed the helping mode
--whereby a minority of parents are now trying to help their children
reach their own goals at each stage of life, rather than socializing it
into adult goals--is yet to be seen. I suspect it will be far less
class-centered and more empathic of others than is the socializing
modern world with which we are familiar. That helping mode children
grow up to be incapable of creating wars is also becoming evident from
watching the anti-war activities of my children and those of their
friends who have been brought up by other helping mode parents. For war
is only understandable as a sacrificial ritual in which young men are
sent by their parents to be hurt and killed as representatives of the
independence-seeking parts of themselves. That periodic sacrifices are
in fact lawful is suggested by the regularity with which they occur,
nearly every state producing a major war on the average of about every
25 years throughout the past two millennia. In between wars, periodic
economic sacrifices serve to relieve our guilt for too much prosperity
and to cleanse us of our dangerous economic and social progress. Depth
psychology has shown that in individuals progress toward individuation
and success often produces regression, including both fears of leaving
mommy and wishes for maternal re-engulfment, along with fears of losing
one's self. In nations, the same thing occurs after periods of rapid
change and prosperity, and is defended against by the sacrificial
ritual called war.

THE TASK OF THE FUTURE

That all social violence--whether by war, revolution or economic
exploitation--is ultimately a consequence of child abuse should not
surprise us. The propensity to reinflict childhood trauma upon others
as an adult in socially-approved violence is actually far more able to
explain and predict the actual outbreak of wars than the usual economic
motivations, and we are likely to continue to undergo our periodic
sacrificial rituals of war if the infliction of childhood trauma
continues. The human race is now quite able technologically to satisfy
its needs if we can live together without violence toward each other.
But unless we employ our social resources toward consciously assisting
the evolution of childrearing, we will be doomed to the periodic
destruction of our resources, both material and human. To Selma
Freiberg's dicta that "Trauma demands repetition" I would only add
"repetition in social behavior." We cannot be content to only continue
to do endless repair work on damaged adults, with our therapies and
jails and political movements. Our task now must in addition be to
create an entirely new profession of "child helpers" who can reach out
to every new child born on earth and help its parents give it love and
independence.

Such a community parenting center movement is already under way in a
few cities, and special issues of The Journal of Psychohistory have
been published to document its operation (a special issue on "Changing
Childhood: Practical Utopian Proposals" will in fact come out in the
Spring). The success of parenting centers has been astonishing. They
have actually reduced child abuse--as measured by followup visits and
by hospital entrance rates--to near zero. All this has been
accomplished with very small monetary outlays, since the parenting
centers operate mainly with volunteer labor, while it has the potential
to save trillions of dollars annually in the costs of social violence,
police enforcement, jails and other consequences of the widespread
child abuse of today.

Such a parent support movement would resemble the universal education
movement of over a century ago. People then objected to providing
universal education, by saying, "Well, yes, perhaps free education
isuseful for all children--but that would require hiringmillions of
teachers. How can we afford it?" We, too, admit that we will eventually
need millions of parent helpers to teach parents how to bring up
children and produce non-violent adults. But the teaching of parenting
is just the unfinished half--the most important half--of the free
education movement of the past, with its goal the empowerment of
children to realize their innate capacities for love and work.

To those who object to the cost of helping all parents, we can only
reply: Can we afford not to teach parenting? What more important task
can we devote our resources to? Do we really want to have massive
armies and jails and emotionally crippled adults forever? Must each
generation continue to torture and neglect its children so they repeat
the social violence and exploitation of previous generations? Why not
achieve meaningful political and social revolution by first achieving a
parenting revolution? If war, social violence, class domination and
economic destruction of wealth are really revenge rituals for childhood
trauma, how else can we remove the source of these rituals? How else
end child abuse and neglect? How else increase the real wealth of
nations, our next generation? How else achieve a world of love and
laughter of which we are truly capable?

It appears we have our work cut out for us.
For a sample issue of Lloyd deMause's Journal of Psychohistory, write
him at 140 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10024 or e-mail to
psychhst@tiac.net.

       BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE:
       This speech is based upon extensive primary source material
fully referenced in the 689 footnotes contained in the following
sources:

       Lloyd deMause, "The Evolution of Childhood." in his Foundations
of Psychohistory. New York: Creative Roots, 1982.
       _____________ "On Writing Childhood History." The Journal of
Psychohistory 16 (1988): 135-171.
       _____________"The History of Child Assault." The Journal of
Psychohistory 18(1990): 1-29.
       _____________"The Universality of Incest." The Journal of
Psychohistory 19 (1991):123-164.

http://www.nospank.net/gordon3.htm

THE CASE AGAINST DISCIPLINING CHILDREN
AT HOME OR IN SCHOOL
By Thomas Gordon

Gordon Training International, Solana Beach, California
See http://www.thomasgordon.com/aboutdtg.asp

The article examines and evaluates the commonly held belief that
children must be disciplined (controlled) by parents and teachers.
Semantic imprecisions in books authored by discipline advocates are
illustrated, and more precise definitions are provided for such terms
as discipline, authority, power, control and influence. Why both
rewards and punishments are ineffective and hazardous to the mental and
physical health of children is extensively documented. Finally,
alternatives to disciplining children are proposed, illustrated, and
supported by research findings. These include methods that encourage
the involvement of children in family and classroom rule-setting,
methods that foster participation in all phases of the learning
process, skills that influence children to solve their problems
themselves and control their behavior out of consideration for the
needs of others, and a non-power method of resolving adult-child
conflicts so that neither loses (or both win).

Thomas Gordon (B.A., DePauw University; M.A., Ohio State University;
Ph.D. Human Development, University of Chicago) has been a faculty
member in the Psychology Department and at the Counseling Center of the
University of Chicago; Director of Aviation Research, American
Institute of Research; an organizational consultant; and a private
practitioner as a client-centered therapist. He is the founder of
Gordon Training International, an international human relations
training organization that distributes his programs for parents,
teachers, managers, youth, salespersons, and couples. Beginning in 1951
with his chapter, "Group-Centered Leadership and Administration" in
Carl Rogers' Client-Centered Therapy, the main focus of his
professional career has been applying client-centered theory and skills
in training people how to create satisfying and therapeutic
relationships at home, in schools, and in the workplace. Over a million
persons in twenty-four countries have taken his training. He is the
author of eight books: Group-Centered Leadership (1955), Parent
Effectiveness Training(1970), Teacher Effectiveness Training(1974),
P.E.T. in Action(1976), Leader Effectiveness Training (1977),
Discipline That Works (1989), Sales Effectiveness Training (1993), and
Making The Patient Your Partner (1995).

It is my strong belief that an in-depth analysis of the practice of
disciplining children at home and in the schools is long overdue. Any
idea so universally accepted and so rarely questioned deserves to be
evaluated. As an avowed person-centered therapist, student-centered
teacher, and group-centered leader, I bring strong biases to this
analysis. These are tempered, however, by the findings from the many
pertinent research studies I have discovered and by a quarter of a
century of teaching parents and teachers viable alternatives to
discipline-effective non-power methods. Some of these methods are
rooted in the person-centered philosophy so ably championed by Carl
Rogers-methods that grant children a lot of freedom but freedom within
limits, methods that promote self-discipline and self-responsibility,
methods that foster motivation, creativity, and emotional health.

THE WORD "DISCIPLINE"

One of my first discoveries was that people writing about discipline
were not using the same definitions of certain words they were commonly
employing. This made for muddy waters and widespread misunderstanding,
to say the least.

Take the word discipline itself. As a noun, the definition of which is
"behavior and order in accord with rules or regulations," discipline
provokes no controversy. Everybody appears to be in favor of discipline
in the classroom or good discipline of a basketball team. The noun
conjures up order, organization, cooperation, following rules and
policies, and consideration for the rights of others.

The verb, "to discipline," has two quite different meanings. The first
is "to train by instruction and exercise; to drill, edify, enlighten."
This variety of discipline, too, seldom causes arguments. However, the
second meaning of the verb, "to discipline," is what makes hot and
heavy controversy. Here are some synonyms for the second kind of
discipline, which is a controlling-restricting-chastising-punishing
type of action:

correct, direct, keep in line, regulate, restrain, check, curb,
contain, arrest, govern, oversee, manage, harness, birdie, rein in,
leash, muzzle, restrict, constrain, confine, inhibit, chastise,
reprimand, reprove, rebuke, criticize, make an example of, punish,
castigate, penalize.

Clearly, the teach-train-inform kind of disciplining is an effort to
influence children, while the second kind of disciplining is an attempt
to control them. Most teachers and parents want nothing more strongly
than the ability to influence youngsters, but in their zeal to do so,
fall into the trap of using control methods-imposing limits, making
rules, sending commands, coercing, punishing, or threatening
punishment. Control methods don't really influence children to choose
particular ways of behaving, they merely coerce or compel them to do
so.

We must also recognize two radically different kinds of the control
type of discipline: externally imposed or internally imposed,
other-imposed or self-imposed, discipline by others or self-discipline.
I didn't find anyone against self-discipline, although most of the
dare-to-discipline advocates fail to mention it. There is controversy,
however, and it's quite widespread, over what is the best way to foster
self-discipline in children and youth-a conflict over the "means" to
achieve the agreed upon and valued "ends"-namely, self-disciplined
children. Most teachers and parents, I suspect, take the position that
children "internalize" adult-imposed discipline, hoping it will be
eventually transformed into self-discipline, a theory championed by
Freud and by most psychologists who advocate disciplining to control
children. Seldom did I find anyone challenging this traditional belief,
as I shall do later.

Another source of semantic confusion comes from the term authority.
Everybody who writes about discipline uses this word, but few authors
recognize the existence of the various meanings the term has. First,
there is the authority derived from a person's special expertise: "He
is an authority on corporate law," "He speaks with authority." This is
often referred to as earned authority. I've adopted the convention of
labeling it Authority "E" - for expertise.

Second, there is the authority derived from the job (or role) a person
occupies in life. Airline pilots ask passengers to fasten seat belts,
and they usually comply; a committee chairperson is given the authority
to open and close its meetings and to guide and direct what goes on in
between. I've termed this kind of authority Authority "J" - for job.

A third kind of authority is derived from understandings, agreements,
rules and contracts people make in their relationships with others. I
agree to drive my daughter to the auto repair shop; in our family we
have an understanding (policy) that we knock before entering another's
bedroom; we have agreements as to who does each and every one of many
jobs in our house. I call this Authority "C" - for contract.

Finally, there is the authority derived from possessing power over
another-power to control, dominate, coerce, bend one's will, and so on.
Call this Authority "P" - for power. This type of authority is what
people mean when they talk about "obedience to authority," "exercising
your authority," "a breakdown of authority," "rebelling against
authority." Understandably, it is the authority many teachers believe
they need to discipline (control) children at school.

I found countless examples of cloudy thinking due to failure to
recognize the difference among these four kinds of authority. Most
frequent was the common assertion that teachers or parents are
justified in using their authority (Authority "P") to discipline
youngsters because kids need and want the adult's superior wisdom and
knowledge. Wisdom and knowledge obviously are Authority "E," not
Authority "P." Another common rationalization I often found in the
dare-to-discipline books is that power-based authority (Authority "P")
is justified because the word discipline was derived from the root word
disciple, meaning a learner. A perceptive reader would see through this
deception, recognizing that you use Authority "E" to teach and instruct
disciples, not Authority "P."

I also discovered that dare-to-discipline advocates try to make using
Authority "P" sound less authoritarian and coercive than it is by using
euphemisms for this type of authority. These are nice-sounding terms
interchangeable with authority-such as the "leadership" of teachers and
parents, "benign" authority, the "loving leadership" of one's parents,
"guidance," or "being authoritative."

Even when using the Bible to justify adults' punishing children
(Authority "P"), James Dobson, perhaps the most widely known
dare-to-discipline advocate, confuses two kinds of authority. He first
cites this scriptural admonition, "Children obey your parents in all
things, for this is well-pleasing unto the Lord." Then he cites another
passage (Ephesians 6:4) to further justify parents using authority, but
this second scriptural definition of discipline involves giving
children suggestions and advice, which is clearly Authority "E":

   Don't keep on scolding and nagging your children, making them angry
and resentful. Rather bring them up with the loving discipline the Lord
himself approves, with suggestions and godly advice. (my italics)

"Suggestions and godly advice," as I see it, are ways of instructing or
teaching (Authority "E") and not demanding obedience (Authority "P").
One might assume, as I did, that dare-to-discipline defenders at some
deeper level actually disapprove of disciplining children. Why else
would they need to use so many euphemisms and Biblical passages to
justify using their power? And one might guess that many
disciplinarians feel guilty about using their power over persons
smaller than they are ("This hurts me worse than it does you").

HOW DISCIPLINE IS SUPPOSED TO WORK

To control children, teachers and parents obviously need some kind of
power. What is it and how does it work? Power to control another (not
influence another) is derived from possessing the means to satisfy some
need of the other person or to deprive the other of satisfying some
need. To use the terminology of psychologists, power to control others
comes from employing rewards and/or punishments. In theory, when
behavior that the controller wants is rewarded, it strengthens or
reinforces that behavior (increases the probability of the behavior
recurring); and when behavior that the controller does not want is
punished, it weakens that behavior (decreases the probability of the
behavior recurring).

In practice, however, rewards and punishments don't always produce the
results desired by the controller. Parents and teachers seldom can
ensure the existence of certain conditions that are necessary for
rewards and punishment to work effectively. Let me explain. For rewards
to work (1) the child must be kept completely dependent on the
controller to provide the rewards (be prevented from obtaining the
rewards himself or herself), (2) the rewards selected by the controller
must be needed strongly enough by the child, and (3) the rewards must
immediately follow the desired behavior.

For punishment to work (1) the child must be prevented from escaping
the punishment, (2) the punishment must be severe enough to be
aversive, (3) the punishment must be administered without delay right
after the unacceptable behavior occurs, and (4) the child must be kept
in a state of fear of the controller's punishment.

With very young children, these conditions may occasionally be met, but
with children over 8 or 10 years of age, it becomes almost impossible
to meet some or all of these conditions.

Another severe limitation of rewards and punishment is the fact that
both parents and teachers gradually run out of both effective rewards
and effective punishments as their children grow older and move into
the teen ages. This is one of the principal reasons why the adolescent
years bring on so much storm and stress for families and
schoolteachers. Having relied so heavily on controlling children with
power, adults haven't learned methods of influencing them without it,
so when their supply of power runs low when the adolescent years are
reached, they are literally left impotent.

In fact, I have observed a common scenario both in families and in
schools. When children are very young, most adults start using rewards
to control them. When they see mounting evidence of the failure of
rewards to work, they begin to administer punishment, usually in a mild
form. When mild punishment fails to deter unacceptable behavior, as it
most often does, then they resort to more severe punishments (harder
beatings, more severe deprivations). But at the same time the children
are growing older and bigger, and the adults run out of severe
punishments. Or the kids learn how to avoid it by lying or escaping
from it or by running away. It's then that many parents, recognizing
their impotence, give up completely trying to control, a posture
incorrectly perceived as "permissiveness," when in fact it would more
accurately be called "helplessness." It's ironic that many so-called
permissive parents are actually autocratic parents who have lost all
their former power to control their youngsters.

SOME NEGATIVE EFFECTS OF REWARDING
Most people are already aware of many of the negative effects of trying
to control children with rewards:

  1. Children begin to "work for the rewards," as, for example,
students working for grades instead of for learning.
  2. Children can become addicted to getting rewards-they habitually
seek praise, approval, or compliments, as well as tangible rewards.
  3. As children grow older they begin to see the hidden agenda
(control) behind adult rewards.
  4. Praise often conveys to children a certain element of
unacceptance, as in this statement, for example, "Today you understood
the lesson because you weren't daydreaming as you were yesterday."
  5. Children often disbelieve praise when it doesn't match their
self-concept.
  6. Praise and other rewards heighten rivalries and competitiveness
between children.

DEFICIENCIES AND DANGERS OF PUNISHMENT

Punishing children is endemic in the United States. Evidence shows that
more than 90% of American parents hit toddlers and most continue to hit
their children for years (Straus, et al., 1997). In a 1994 USA
Today/CNN Gallup Poll, 67% of a national sample of American adults
agreed that "It is sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a
good hard spanking." In schools, the frequency of corporal punishment
has been decreasing steadily as more and more states have enacted laws
prohibiting corporal punishment, yet the practice is still prevalent.
Schools are now the only public institution in the U.S. where corporal
punishment is still legal. It is no longer permitted in the military,
in prison or in mental hospitals.

We can only guess how many parents and teachers employ other kinds of
punishment-for example, deprivations, extra work, confinement, verbal
abuse, the silent treatment, and staying after school. No doubt in my
mind, close to 100% of teachers and parents regularly employ some form
of punishment to control youngsters despite the proven deficiencies and
dangers of punishment. Here are some of the principal ones:

  1. For punishment to work, it must be severe, and yet when it is
severe, youngsters look for all kinds of ways to avoid it, postpone it,
weaken it, avert it, escape from it. They lie, put the blame on someone
else, tattle, hide, plead for mercy and make promises to "never do it
again."
  2. Boys of 12 years of age whose parents scored high in
restrictiveness and punishment showed strong tendencies toward
self-punishment, accident proneness, and suicidal intentions (Sears,
1961).
  3. The more corporal punishment a person has experienced, the more
likely he or she is as an adult to: be depressed or suicidal,
physically abuse his or her child or spouse, engage in other violent
crime, have a drinking problem, be attracted to masochistic sex, and
have difficulty attaining a high-level occupation and high income
(Straus, 1994).
  4. Mothers of children with low self-esteem were found to have used
less reasoning and discussion and more arbitrary, punitive discipline
(Coopersmith, 1967).
  5. Children of punitive authoritarian parents tend to lack social
competence with peers, to withdraw, to not take social initiative, to
lack spontaneity (Baldwin, 1948).
  6. Children of controlling (authoritarian) parents who valued
obedience and respect for authority showed relatively little
independence and social responsibility (Baumrind, 1971).
  7. Less than 1 out of 400 children whose parents did not hit them
were found to be violent toward their parents, as opposed to children
who had been hit by their parents. Half of the latter group had hit
their parents in the previous year (Straus et al., 1980).
  8. Studies of the family backgrounds of both male and female
juvenile delinquents consistently show a pattern of harsh, punitive,
power-assertive parental punishment, in contrast to non-delinquent
youngsters (Martin, 1975).
  9. Schools using more physical punishment often have more vandalism,
student violence, poor academic achievement, truancy, and higher drop
out rates (National Coalition to Abolish Corporal Punishment in
Schools, 2001).

It is quite clear: Punitive discipline is hazardous to the mental
health of children.

ALTERNATIVES TO DISCIPLINING CHILDREN

Although the philosophy and practice of trying to control children by
administering rewards and punishments is nearly universal in both
families and schools, promising alternatives to this ineffective method
do exist, and pockets of innovation and change can be found, if one
looks diligently enough.

INVOLVEMENT OF CHILDREN IN RULE-SETTING

It is a well-established principle that people are more motivated to
comply with rules or limits if they have been given the opportunity to
participate in determining what they should be.

For over quarter of a century, in my Parent Effectiveness Training
(1962) and Teacher Effectiveness Training courses (1974), our
instructors have been advising parents and teachers to avoid making
rules unilaterally. Via tape-recorded examples, demonstrations, and
role-playing, we teach methods for involving children in the process of
determining the policies and rules they will be expected to follow.
Among such family policies and rules are those covering bedtime, TV
usage, household chores, storage of playthings, use of the telephone,
allowances, privacy, homework, and any other activity that has the
potential for generating problems or conflicts. Over a million parents
have been exposed to this new way of determining family rules.
Similarly, in Teacher Effectiveness Training (T.E.T.) we offer the same
methodology for involving a class of students in the process of
classroom rule-setting. I am grateful to Norma Randolph and William
Howe, then working at the Cupertino, California school district, for
convincing me years ago that even first-graders are capable of assuming
responsibility for participating with their teachers in setting rules.
It was a common practice for children in the lower elementary grades in
that district to use posted "activity cards," which helped them manage
their own classroom behavior and remove the teacher as the major
controller (Randolph & Howe, 1966). Here are examples of these
"reminder" cards:

   * Getting myself into the room
   * Getting ready to work
   * Listening
   * Group discussion
   * Working with the teacher
   * · Following directions
   * Working alone
   * Working with a partner
   * · Working in a group
   * Getting myself out

Some students, when tempted to ignore a classroom rule they had helped
set, rose out of their seats, walked up to the front where the cards
were posted, and touched the appropriate card as a reminder of the
rules.

NONBLAMEFUL "I-MESSAGES"

Another non-controlling method taught in the P.E.T. and T.E.T. is
sending "I-messages." Typically, teachers and parents confront children
with "You-Messages," those containing heavy loads of blame, judgment,
criticism, each of which provokes resistance and lowers the child's
self-esteem:

   * "You're acting like a first-grader!"
   * "You take your seat right away!"
   * "You ought to be ashamed of yourself!"
   * "You're driving me crazy!"
   * "You're being naughty!"
   * "You will have to stay after school now!"

In P.E.T. and T.E.T. we provide a variety of experiences for learning
and practicing non-blameful "I-messages" as the means for telling the
child exactly why his or her behavior is unacceptable to the adult:

   * "When there is so much noise, I can't hear what anyone is
saying."
   * "When the paints aren't put away, I have to take a lot of time to
do it myself."

I-messages are actually "appeals for help," which partially accounts
for their superior effectiveness in influencing children to change
their behavior. In addition, they place full responsibility on the
child for initiating the change, are less likely than You-messages to
injure the relationship, and do not damage self-esteem. A teacher
reported this incident shortly after taking the T.E.T. course:

I was reluctant to try an I-message with the kids I have. They are so
hard to manage. Finally, I got up my courage and sent a strong
I-message to a group of children who were making a mess with water
paints in the back of the room by the sink. I said, "When you mix
paints and spill them all over the sink and table, I have to scrub up
later or get yelled at by the custodian. I'm sick of cleaning up after
you, and I feel helpless to prevent it from happening." I just stopped
then and waited to see what they would do. I really expected them to
laugh at me and take that "I don't care" attitude they've had all year.
But they didn't. They stood there looking at me for a minute like they
were amazed to find out I was upset. And then one of them said, "Come
on, let's clean it up." I was floored. You know, they haven't turned
into models of perfection, but they now clean up the sink and tables
every day whether they've spilled paint on them or not.

Baumrind (1971) found that nursery school children who rated high in
self-control and self-discipline had parents who refrained from
punitive messages or punishments and instead made extensive use of
reasoning and what she termed "cognitive structuring." This
academic-sounding term turns out to be our I-message-telling children
the negative effects of their behavior on others. Baumrind explains
that these messages help children internalize the consequences of their
behavior and develop conscience or inner control-what I call
self-discipline as opposed to externally administered discipline.

To influence infants and toddlers, however, parents and teachers
obviously must assume a more active role and employ nonverbal
(behavioral) methods. When very young children whine or pester or throw
their food on the floor or dawdle or make messes, adults have available
a variety of such nonverbal methods:

  1. Guessing what the child needs or what deprivation lies behind the
unacceptable behavior and then satisfying the need.
  2. Substituting for the unacceptable behavior some other behavior
that is acceptable to the adult-as, for example, giving the child a
damaged pair of nylon hose as a replacement for the new pair the child
pulled out of the drawer.
  3. Modifying the environment to produce a change in the child's
behavior-for example, childproofing the classroom or home, enriching
the child's environment so as to capture the full interest of the
child, providing designated areas for messing or painting, and
assigning storage areas.

PARTICIPATIVE MANAGEMENT IN SCHOOLS

Today, we are seeing a quiet revolution in the way many companies are
being managed. This new leadership style is called "participative
management," because it relies on extensive employee involvement in
making decisions and solving problems related to the workplace
environment, the design of products, the methods of production, quality
improvement, cost control, and the like.

More and more U.S. companies are instituting some form of participative
management. Some have trained their managers and supervisors with our
course, Leader Effectiveness Training, (L.E.T.). The benefits of this
more democratic style of leadership can be quite remarkable: increases
in employee productivity have jumped 100%, grievances have fallen from
3,000 per year to 15, absenteeism has been cut in half, 80% decrease in
products rejected because of poor quality (Simmons & Mares, 1983).

Also, we have been witnessing a growing recognition of the importance
of increasing student participation in order to improve learning
motivation and decrease discipline problems among teachers, school
administrators and teacher educators.

Urich and Batchelder (1979) describe how an urban school drastically
changed its social climate by increasing student involvement in
tackling such important problems as tardiness, absenteeism, apathy, and
low achievement. The students worked with teachers and administrators
to come up with improvements in each of the problem areas.

In other schools, students have been given the opportunity to monitor
their own academic progress and identify areas of needed improvement.
In one study, such students were found to make significant gains in
study habits and achievement (McLaughlin, 1984).

Some schools have allowed students to participate in academic goal
getting and in designing their own tailor-made high school courses
(Burrows, 1973). Other schools have involved students in cooperative
projects with peer workgroups, resulting in enhanced academic and
social skills (Johnson & Johnson, 1975).

Students also have been given responsibility for correcting
unproductive behavior of their peers (D uke, 1980), for sharing their
opinions concerning the quality of their teachers' instructional skills
and teacher-student relationships (Jones & Jones, 1981). Student
participation has been extended into some of the schoolwide
administrative issues, such as school discipline, school climate,
textbook adoptions, new curricula, budget-cutting, and energy savings
(Aschuler, 1980).

Renowned psychiatrist William Glasser, author of the bestseller Schools
Without Failure (1961), prescribed a challenging remedy for
disciplinary problems in our schools in his book, Control Theory in the
Classroom (1986). Students are organized into teams of two to five
students made up of low, medium, and high achievers. The high achievers
help the lower ones, team members are urged to depend a great deal on
themselves and their own creativity, they choose how to offer the
teacher evidence of how much they have learned, and each student gets
the team score.

The superiority of such cooperative learning efforts over the
traditional competitive student-student relationships has been
conclusively established in a comprehensive review of 122 studies,
published from 1924 to 1980. The results were remarkable: 65 studies
found that cooperation produces higher achievement than competition,
only 8 found the reverse; cooperation promoted higher achievement than
independent work in 108 studies, only 6 found the reverse (Johnson,
Maruyama, Johnson, Nelson, & Skon, 1981).

In a study of 18 "alternative high schools" in California, where there
were personalized teacher-student relations, student participation in
school governance, and a non-authoritarian rule structure, the
researchers found that both teachers and students reported fewer and
less serious disciplinary behavior problems than in the conventional
high schools with minutely defined adult-made rules and rigid ways of
dealing with infractions (Duke & Perry, 1978).

HELPING CHILDREN FIND THEIR OWN SOLUTIONS TO PROBLEMS

When children experience some form of deprivation or unmet needs, they
often react by behaving in disruptive or non-cooperative ways-both in
their families and at school. Acting-up children are usually troubled
children-youngsters carrying around a lot of frustration,
disappointment, resentment, or anger. And troubled children also make
poor learners. Consequently, it seems obvious that both discipline
problems and low achievement could be reduced in schools if teachers
could be taught how to be more effective as helping agents or
counselors. This is precisely one of the principal objectives in the
T.E.T. course.

I naturally chose the client-centered methodology of counseling as the
model to be taught in both T.E.T. and P.E.T., having been trained by
Carl Rogers and having many years in private practice as a
client-centered therapist. Our training has three principal objectives:
(1) to show teachers and parents how their habitual ways of responding
when children share their problems can act as communication-blockers
and convey nonacceptance. We call these non-facilitative messages the
"Twelve Roadblocks"-ordering, warning, moralizing (shoulds and oughts),
giving solutions, teaching, evaluating negatively, evaluating
positively, ridiculing, psychoanalyzing, reassuring (consoling),
probing, and kidding (diverting); (2) to help teachers and parents
reach a reasonable level of competence in responding to children with
Active Listening, which conveys acceptance and shows accurate
understanding; (3) to influence parents and teachers to have more trust
in children's ability to solve problems themselves.

By and large, I'm convinced that we have succeeded rather well in
accomplishing these objectives. Considerable evidence of this can be
found in some of the research studies that have evaluated the effects
of P.E.T. and T.E.T. We have located over sixty separate studies, many
of which unfortunately have flawed designs or inadequate statistical
procedures. Robert Cedar at Boston University took twenty-six of the
more carefully designed of these studies and included them in a
meta-analysis, a statistical technique for combining and analyzing the
findings from many different studies. The results of his meta-analysis
were as follows:

  1. P.E.T. had an overall "effect size" of 0.33 standard deviation
units, which was significantly greater than the effect size for a group
representing alternate treatments-such as behavior modification
training, Adlerian-based parent training.
  2. The better-designed studies were found to show significantly
greater effect sizes of P.E.T. than the less well-designed studies.
  3. P.E.T. was shown to have a positive effect on parent attitudes
and parent behavior, and this effect endured for some period (up to 26
weeks) after the course was completed.

Cedar (1985) concluded: "Most of Gordon's claims were (with
qualifications) substantiated."

There is also a wealth of "hard data" showing conclusively that the
same facilitative skills we teach in T.E.T. greatly help teachers
better achieve even the traditional and commonly accepted goals of our
schools-such as, scholastic achievement, good attendance, creative
thinking, and high motivation for learning. In one study (Aspy &
Roebuck, 1977), involving 600 teachers and 10,000 students (from
kindergarten to grade 12), the students whose teachers were trained in
the skills of empathic understanding, acceptance, respect, and positive
regard for students as persons were compared with students whose
teachers were not trained. The students of the trained teachers were
found to:

   * Miss fewer days of school (4 fewer days a year)
   * Make greater gains on academic achievement measures, including
both math and reading scores
   * Be more spontaneous
   * Use higher levels of cognitive thinking
   * Increase their scores on 10 tests
   * Make more gains in creativity scores
   * Show increased scores on self-regard measures
   * Commit fewer acts of vandalism
   * Present fewer disciplinary problems

Another study showed a significant reduction of disruptive behaviors as
a result of teachers being trained in facilitative skills. Roebuck
measured the teachers' empathic understanding, respect for students,
and the degree of student involvement provided by the teachers. Her
findings: more disruptive behavior in classes whose teachers were low
in empathic understanding, respect, accepting students' ideas, and
inviting students' thoughts and opinions (Roebuck, 1980).

Under the leadership and supervision of two German social scientists,
Reinhard and Anne-Marie Tausch, a large number of doctoral
dissertations and masters' theses produced evaluations of the effects
of teachers' facilitative skills on student effectiveness. Here is a
clear and beautifully worded summary of the findings:

In all of the school studies, empathic understanding, genuineness, warm
respect, and non-directive activities proved to significantly
facilitate the quality of the pupils' intellectual contributions during
the lesson, their spontaneity, their independence and initiative, their
positive feelings during the lesson, and their positive perception of
the teacher. If we want to diminish stress, aversion, and impairment of
physical and emotional health in schools and at the same time
facilitate the development of personality and the quality of
intellectual performance, then we will need a different kind of teacher
than we seem to produce at present. Teachers are needed who can create
in their classes an atmosphere in which there is empathic
understanding, pupils receive warmth and respect, genuineness is
encouraged, and the teacher can be facilitative in non-directive ways.
(Tausch & Tausch, 1980, pp. 217-218)

THE NO-LOSE METHOD OF CONFLICT RESOLUTION

Although getting youngsters to participate in mutual rule-setting
significantly prevents a lot of adult-child conflicts in families and
in classrooms, conflicts will always arise for which no rules have been
previously established. Parents and teachers have to deal
constructively with these unexpected situations or else their
relationships will suffer. Most teachers and parents, with few
exceptions, are locked into "either-or" thinking about resolving
conflicts with children: They are either strict or lenient, either
tough or easy, either authoritarian or permissive, either their
solution in the conflict prevails or the youngster's solution prevails.
In our classes we show how both of these "either-or" approaches to
conflict resolution are win-lose methods-either the adult wins and the
child loses or the child wins and the adult loses.

A father shows this either-or thinking when he describes the power
struggle in the parents' relationships with their children in this
excerpt from a recorded interview:

You have to start early letting them know who's boss. Otherwise they'll
take advantage of you and dominate you. That's the trouble with my
wife-she always ends up letting the kids win all the battles. She gives
in all the time and the kids know it.

Children, too, see their conflicts with adults as win-lose power
struggles. Cathy, a bright 15-year-old, expressed this clearly in a
recorded interview:

What's the use of arguing? They always win. I know that before we ever
get into an argument. They're always going to get their way. After all,
they are the parents. They always know they're right. So, now I just
don't get into arguments. I walk away and don't talk to them. Course it
bugs them when I do that, but I don't care.

In P.E.T. and T.E.T. we teach parents and teachers how to resolve
conflicts with an alternative method called the No-Lose Method (or the
Win-Win Method), in which both the adult and the child participate in a
process of six separate steps:

   Step I: defining the conflict in terms of needs
   Step II: generating possible solutions
   Step III: evaluating the possible solutions
   Step IV: reaching an agreement on the best solution
   Step V: determining what is required to implement the solution
   Step VI: evaluating the effectiveness of the solution

Readers may recognize that these six steps are similar to John Dewey's
six steps for effective individual problem solving. We have found they
work equally as well as steps for effective resolution of conflicts
between individuals.

The No-Lose Method of resolving conflicts requires a firm commitment to
an entirely different posture from that assumed in the traditional
win-lose methods. The parent or teacher conveys this message to the
child:

We have a conflict-a problem to be solved. I don't want to use power to
win at the expense of your losing. But I don't want to give in and let
you win at the expense of my losing. So let's put our heads together
and search for a solution we can both accept.

The No-Lose Method derives its influence from Authority "C," the
authority derived from people having made a mutual commitment to an
agreed upon solution.

CONCLUSION

Despite the universal use of rewards and punishment in families and
schools, I have found abundant evidence of the ineffectiveness of both
as a method of control. In addition, punitive discipline itself has
been shown to be deleterious to the physical and mental health of
children.

Since the early 1960s I have been deeply involved in offering training
to parents and teachers in non-power and non-controlling methods, which
I firmly believe are far more effective than discipline in influencing
children to be cooperative, considerate, responsible, and, above all,
self-disciplined. I have briefly described these methods, documenting
their positive effects on children's mental health.

These non-power methods add up to a new and far more effective model of
parenting and teaching. By giving up using power, parents and teachers
will foster self-disciplined children. By relating to children
democratically and refusing to be either dictators or doormats, parents
and teachers will increase children's compliance with rules through
involving them in the process of making the rules. By helping
youngsters find their own solutions to problems, parents and teachers
will foster more independence, more control over their own destiny, and
higher self-esteem. By involving children in their own learning process
and in the process of governing their classrooms and schools, teachers
will make schooling far more interesting, prevent disciplinary
problems, and foster higher achievement motivation.

And by making a commitment to resolve all conflicts with children so
nobody loses, parents and teachers will equip children with the skills
to become a new species of world citizen-persons who will eschew the
use of violence in dealing with conflicts between individuals, between
groups, between nations.

No one has expressed more clearly how power-based methods create
psychopathology than Abraham Maslow (1970):

Let people realize clearly that every time they threaten someone or
humiliate or hurt unnecessarily or dominate or reject another human
being they become forces for the creation of psychopathology, even if
these be small forces. Let them recognize that every man who is kind,
helpful, decent, psychologically democratic, affectionate, and warm is
a psychotherapist's force even though a small one.

All of us working in the field of human relations owe a debt of
gratitude to Carl Rogers for his development of an effective method of
counseling and psychotherapy, rooted in a basic trust of the client's
capacity to find constructive solutions to his or her problems. And all
of us have profited from the theory growing out of Carl's experiences
as a client-centered therapist-particularly his "necessary and
sufficient conditions" for facilitating therapeutic change or helping
another person function more effectively.

Rogers' important contributions became the basic core of my
Effectiveness Training programs-the starting point for the later
development of my own model of helping relationships. While Rogers
developed his list of characteristics of a helping relationship
principally from his experiences as a professional helping agent, my
model emerged in the context of my attempt to teach lay people how to
be more effective as managers, parents, or teachers. In the position of
being professional therapists, we seldom get into serious conflict with
our clients; we put aside our own needs (and problems) so we can devote
nearly full attention to helping our clients meet their needs and solve
their problems; communication is predominantly one-way from client to
therapist; we don't live with our clients, or work with them; and we
are not in a dependent (or interdependent) relationship with our
clients as we are, for example, in the manager-worker relationship.

Consequently, for me to teach parents how to have better relationships
with their children, managers with their workers, or teachers with
their students, I found it necessary to offer them additional skills
and methodologies, which seldom are required in the counselor-client
relationship-for example, modifying the environment (enriching,
limiting, childproofing), sending confrontive I-messages, mutual
rule-setting, using the No-Lose Method of conflict resolution, and
democratic governing facilitating subject-matter classroom discussions.

If I were called upon to find a convenient way to describe my model for
effective relationships of the kind we deal with in our training
programs, the word democracy first comes to mind. I believe we have
been teaching parents, teachers, managers, and spouses how to create
and maintain democratic relationships-relationships in which I help you
meet your needs and you help me meet mine, relationships that are
synergistic (separate persons working cooperatively together with
greater total beneficial effects than the sum of their individual
effects), and relationships that are equalitarian.

I happen to believe that relationships that are democratic will
necessarily be therapeutic, and the more democratic, the more
therapeutic. Carl Rogers knew this from his personal experience and he
expressed it in a variety of ways:

My influence has always been increased when I have shared my power of
authority. (1977) By refusing to coerce or direct, I think I have
stimulated learning, creativity, and self-direction. These are some of
the products in which I am most interested. (1977) Where control is
shared, where facilitative conditions are present, it has been
demonstrated that vital, sound, enriching relationships occur. (1977)

REFERENCES

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New York: McGraw-Hill.

Aspy, D. N., & Roebuck, F. N. (1977). Kids Don't Learn from People They
Don't Like. Amherst, MA: Human Resource Development Press.

Baldwin, A. L. (1948). Socialization and the Parent-Child Relationship.
Child- development, 1 , 127-136.

Baumrind, D. (1971). Current patterns of parental authority.
Development Psychology Monograph, 4 (1, Pt.2).

Burrows, C. (1973). The Effects of a Mastery Learning Strategy on the
Geometry Achievement of Four and Fifth Grade Children, Unpublished
doctoral dissertation, Indiana University, Bloomington.

Cedar, R. B. (1985). A Meta-Analysis of the Parent Effectiveness
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Dobson, J. (1970). Dare to Discipline. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House.

Duke, D. L. (1980). Managing Student Behavior Problems. New York:
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Duke, D. L., & Perry, C. (1978). Can Alternative Schools Succeed Where
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Glasser, W. (1961). Schools Without Failure. New York: Harper &
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Gordon, T. (1955). Group-Centered Leadership. Boston: Houghton Miffin.
Gordon, T. (1970). Parent Effectiveness Training. New York: Wyden.

Gordon, T. (1974). Teacher Effectiveness Training. NewYork: Wyden.

Gordon, T. (1976). P.E.T. in Action. New York: Wyden.

Gordon, T. (1977). Leader Effectiveness Training. NewYork: Wyden,

Johnson, D. & Johnson, R. (1975). Learning Together and Alone:
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Johnson, D. Maruyama, G., Johnson, R., Nelson, D., & Skon, L. (1981).
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Martin, B. (1975). Parent-Child Relations. In M. L. Hoffman & L.W.
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Roebuck, F.N. (1980, March). Cognitive and Affective Goals of
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for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Atlanta.

Rogers, C. R. (1977). On Personal Power. New York: Delacorte.

Sears, R. R. (1961). The Relation of Early Socialization Experiences to
Aggression in Middle Childhood. Journal of Abnormal and Social
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Simmons J., & Mares, W. (1983). Working Together. New York: Alfred
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Straus, M.A. (1994). Beating the Devil Out of Them: Corporal Punishment
in American Families. New York: Lexington Books.

Tausch, R., & Tausch, A.M. (1980). Verifying the Facilitative
Dimensions in German Schools - Families - and with German Clients.
Unpublished manuscript.

Urich, T., & Batchelder, R. (1979). Turning an Urban High School
Around. Phi Delta Kappan, 61, 3.

Watson, G. (1943). A Comparison of the Effects of Lax Versus Strict
Home Training. Journal of Social Psychology, 5 102-105.
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