Shaping the Scale

Trying to work out the list of expected potential punishments wasn’t easy. First of all you have to identify the form the list will take. Do you grade it from the size of the offence, the size of the punishment, the embarrassment level of the punishment? Do you work it out on the psychological effect, the post-traumatic indices, or, do you simple count how many strikes formed the punishment. On a scale of one to ten, with one being a general smack, or a simple slap up to ten being… well, perhaps for legal reasons we had better not go into the specifics, but it wasn’t pleasant (no, that wasn’t a mistake of tense or person, it wasn’t pleasant to get what as I child I would today call a ten). Then there were other ways to scale punishments of course, and the primary one would be how effective or not the punishment was.

I am sure everyone has their own memories of what they may or may not have ‘got away with’ when a child. Could you help yourself to a biscuit from the kitchen and when discovered, received a quick slap on the hand and a ‘telling off’ from your mother (I say mother, only because in our house she was in charge of the shopping and stores)? Was the balance of the taste of the pilfered biscuit, and the pain of the slap a suitable trade off? And how many times could you get away with one slap per biscuit, before the price went up to two slaps, or, to a smack on the hand, or leg, with the wooden spoon. At what point did you deem the pain wasn’t worth the biscuit? Or did you take it one step further and steal more than one biscuit? To ‘equate’ the extra cost of the inflicted punishment you received. Before you think to yourself, that’s only fair, let’s briefly look at the reason for the punishment. You were taking something, which you were not entitled to. So, fair reason for the punishment. You were in fact stealing. Not yours to take, so, not allowed, therefore punishment deserved. Your parents were simply attempting to teach you a moral law. I stress moral law, rather than illegal, but it is the start of the ‘slippery slope’.

So often today I hear the complaints that, when children behave badly it was the fault of the parent, for not teaching the child good moral rules to abide by. In many cases I have to agree, however, good guidance has also become restricted by civil libertarians and these ‘do-gooder’s misguided sense of duty to the young, based mainly on the extreme cases of a few. Once again we are legislated against because of a few knee-jerk responses to what could be, better considered and informed decision making for the masses. There are definitely some serious issues to be addressed, but not every situation is the same.

(Continued tomorrow)