On Hitting Children

Stephen L. Doll

1993

Published in:

Social Trends Newsletter Aug 1993, No. 116

We can sympathize with children and their parents who must strike them to maintain discipline. All are perfectly adjusted to the society that has created them. All come into the world as virtual clean slates, upon which adults promptly scribble a disjointed value system fragmented with paradoxes, hypocrisy, and contradictions. If our children lie, cheat, steal and hit, it is an indictment of what they see in the world.

We teach them to hold hands, then in our blind rush to create competitive drones, we engineer them for a world in which they will be pitted against each other for a decent living. For the sake of the sale, we bury their analytic and creative abilities in regimentation, mindless nonparticipatory video drivel, and do-it-for-me gimmick toys. When they emerge into a society that fails to do it for them, they react. We have robbed them of their sensibility by subjecting them to thud-and-grunt gladiatorial contents and blood-and-guts sensationalism.

Our children ask why people go hungry while we destroy food. They long for a clean world as we sell permits to pollute the air.

We have glutted ourselves on resources in wasteful excess and walked out of the restaurant patting our bellies, leaving our children to pick up the enormous biological and financial tab. Then we tell them of all the wonderful opportunities they have to pay it, while the job base dwindles and real purchasing power declines.

We have foisted upon our children a topsy-turvy world in which if they are good, they might have a chance at decent housing, food, clothing and medical care. If they are bad, they go to jail and have all those things provided. If they are bad and rich, they get it all and go free.

Swat 'em. Stuff 'em in jail. Reaction is easy. Reflection and self-analysis are tough, for they bring up unsettling questions about our own legitimacy as individuals and as a society.

In our technological age, our children are becoming less our own and more reflective of society. If we don't like what we're turning out, we should take a look at the factory.

Rather than smacking our kids, we need to smack ourselves awake to the seeds we are sowing for the demise of our civilization.