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Why do many parents easily cross the line, showing cruelty towards those who are weaker and dependent on them? And how will this affect the psyche of the child? The specialist tells about how physical punishments affect children.
Unjustified cruelty
The court * sentenced a resident of the Krasnodar Territory to 23 years in a strict regime colony for beating his four-year-old stepdaughter to death. The details of the crime are striking in their cruelty.
From the point of view of the law, the guilty person was sane, that is, he was aware of his actions and their possible consequences. From the point of view of psychology and psychiatry, obviously, one could speak of a lack of empathy and the presence of mental pathology or personality disorders.
But the main thing is that the killer has already been convicted. And most parents, caregivers and other adults who use severe physical punishment on children go unpunished. And no one can guarantee that the one who “just” spanked a child today will be able to stop in time tomorrow, and the matter will not end in another tragedy.
Recently, a video has gone viral on the internet.** — in a tuberculosis hospital, a nurse treats a minor patient cruelly: she grabs the girl by the hair and throws her on the bed. The child is met with abuse from someone who should actually help him. And how much it hurts him, how it will affect the trust in people — the question is still open.
«To make a man»
The tradition of «teaching the mind» for many centuries: this is how children were raised in many countries. In pre-revolutionary Russia, corporal punishment could be applied even to persons of royal blood. In «Domostroy» it was recommended to beat children for offenses and generally keep them in fear.
In educational institutions in Russia, Europe and America, spanking was an absolutely permissible act. We can remember the scene from Mark Twain’s book where Tom Sawyer gets hit by a school teacher for tricks. Today it shocks us, and half a century ago it did not seem to young readers something out of the ordinary.
Scenes of «education» are described in many literary works. Everyone from school remembers Vanka Zhukov’s letter “to the village of grandfather”: “And last week the hostess told me to clean the herring, and I started with the tail, and she took the herring and started poking me in the mug with her snout.”
In detail, so that it gives you goosebumps, Maxim Gorky described the scene of flogging in his memoirs. Figuratively and very vividly, he speaks of a childhood traumatic experience: “Grandfather caught me until I lost consciousness, and for several days I was ill <...> Since those days, I have had a restless attention to people, and it was as if they had skinned my heart, it became unbearably sensitive to any insult and pain, one’s own and someone else’s. Everyone who has experienced this will agree with the classic. Even if he never admits it out loud.
The era of humanism
Attitudes towards this issue began to change in the middle of the 1946th century. In many ways, this was facilitated by the development of humanistic psychology. Among other things, pediatrician Benjamin Spock wrote about the inadmissibility of physical punishment in his legendary book “The Child and Care for Him”, published in XNUMX.
From 1979 to 2010, 29 countries, mostly European, banned corporal punishment of children. In some countries, they are allowed (for example, in the form of slaps), but, according to the law, they should not turn into beatings.
Situation today
According to a survey*** for 2019, in Russia children were flogged with a belt for educational purposes by 25% of respondents. 67% of respondents consider such “serious physical punishments” unacceptable, but with a caveat: for theft, hooliganism, smoking, alcohol and drug use, such measures are possible.
Many, unfortunately, also consider spanking and slapping to be acceptable: more than half of the survey participants committed such actions.
“The perception of physical punishment is changing before our eyes”
Olga Shikhova, child psychologist
Those who support such inhumane methods see the «effectiveness» of physical punishment in the fact that the desired result (for example, the rejection of a particular behavior) can be achieved quickly and easily. But the long-term side effects of such an outcome are very large and include deterioration in the child’s behavior, reduced self-control, increased aggressiveness, and impaired cognitive development.
How do children perceive them?
There is now a general consensus that knowingly physically punishing children is bad. If parents deliberately, in a cold head, hurt the child, sooner or later he realizes that these actions go beyond the social norm, that something wrong is happening in the family.
Humiliation and pain negatively affect parent-child relationships and destroy the child’s sense of security. But the impression, for example, from impulsive strikes depends on their strength and danger.
If, in the heat of the moment, a child is lightly slapped on the hand, this is one thing, but if it is hit hard on the face, it can be shocking. I would say that an impulsive light slap is easier on the child, especially if the parent later apologized and discussed what happened with him.
What is wrong with parents?
To hurt a child in a cold head, it is necessary to “turn off” normal parental empathy and sympathy for him, which also inevitably affects relationships. My guess is that parents who ignore their child’s pain are also not very good at dealing with their own emotional pain, used to ignoring feelings or suppressing some of them.
In what families does this happen?
More often children are beaten by those parents who themselves were beaten. Demographic data is not very reliable: when it comes to polls, for example, less educated people may be more likely to confess, not because they generally hit more often, but because they hide it less. It cannot be said for sure that this is a problem of poor families, or a problem of single-parent families, or a problem of uneducated families. Like spousal abuse, physical punishment of children can be used in any (even a very prosperous in appearance) family.
How to change «traditions»
It takes a lot more conscious effort to raise children differently from the way their parents were raised than when you have good relationships and are generally happy with the way you were raised. If you have been beaten, it will be harder for you to hold on than someone who has not been beaten. But it’s worth it, and success is more than possible. After all, a few generations ago, almost all children were beaten, not only in the family, but also at school, and now systematic physical punishment is much less common.
I think that there is no one magic measure that could quickly solve the problem as a whole. But a slow «dripping on the brain» from different sides will definitely work:
- discussion,
- education about the real consequences of physical punishment,
- legal liability for systematic physical punishment,
- a general perception of spanking as deviant, rather than normal (and even less necessary) parental behavior,
- reduction of general stress and especially parental stress,
- realistic requirements for parents and for the behavior of the child, including in public places.
After all, the perception of physical punishment is changing before our eyes. A non-violent upbringing is something that each of us should strive for.
* https://zona.media/news/2020/11/05/girl?fbclid=IwAR2ItdL_TDH31F1g1zxS2VMmlT0EcEZsWhrhd_kZ6YuTiN2YJ85fifET9zs
** https://ria.ru/20201106/medsestra-1583332531.html?in=t
*** https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/3953855