Why kids need a good hiding

BBC NEWS | England | Manchester | Man arrested for hitting daughter

A man who was arrested and cautioned for slapping his 13-year-old daughter across the face fears he will no longer be able to work with children.

I remember when this legislation was first tabled, and the wary among us spoke out that it would mean we’d be unable to discipline children, but the Government reassured us stating that it would only stop systematic child abuse and couldn’t be used by children as a weapon against their parents.

Now we are seeing the result of that outright lie. In Britain it is no longer legal to smack your own child. Worse, any form of physical punishment can see you arrested should your child decide to make good on the usual childish threat of telling on their parents.

This is the root cause of the ‘What can I do?’ parenting that pervades Britain, parents are either scared of their children, or scared of being reported by them or some other busy body. The idiots that claimed that smacking children is wrong as it shows them violence is OK, have been show up for what they really are, pansies. My generation, my father’s generation and my grandfather’s back centuries, have all used physical punishment to keep unruly children in check.

Yet today we live in incredibly violent times, the streets are run by young thugs who’ve never had a good hiding. If violence breeds violence, why is it that children who escaped violence in the schools and violence in the home have grown up to be so violent?

Could it be because they failed to learn the simple rules during their formative years that even a dog learns.

There is a line, to cross it means pain, and pain hurts. Dogs sniff the fire but once, then they learn.

In Britain the youth today have no boundaries, there is quite literally no one to tell them what they cannot do, so they do what they want to. Teachers today complain that they are unable to eject unruly children from the classroom if they refuse to leave, the reason? If a teacher lays a hand on a pupil it is assault, and those unruly children know it. The teachers are powerless and all they can do try to reason with a spoilt child and come to an understanding.

When I was at school things were different, one boy in particular was always causing trouble. Today he would held up as the example of ‘It’s not his fault…’ ‘It’s society/single parent/ circumstances…’ and that violence wouldn’t solve these problems. His name was Daniel and his father had recently died, leaving Daniel a very troubled boy. Young Daniel had his problems, but he made sure that his problems were also the problems of the other 30 children in the class. Of course I had sympathy for Daniel, but I had my own life to lead and didn’t see then, or now, why his problems should ruin my education and that of 30 other children.

Daniel was disruptive whenever possible, but he wasn’t stupid, back then too there were teachers that didn’t use physical punishments, especially the women and it was these teachers that felt the full force of Daniel’s ire. I remember one occasion when Daniel was pulling out all the stops and the poor teacher just couldn’t cope, Daniel’s disruption was spreading and the class was in chaos, so she popped next door for help.

The door slammed open and 6 foot 7 inches of angry gym teacher came charging in straight for young Daniel, I had never seen such fear on Daniel’s face before, the teacher grabbed Daniel and threw him several feet through the air at the wall which had all the coat pegs on, I don’t think there was anyone in the room that didn’t flinch at that. He then opened the classroom door (that had shut behind him), grabbed Daniel again and flung him down the corridor before slamming the door on his way out.

Needless to say our class was suddenly transformed into the best behaved class in the school, even with the ‘weak’ teachers. Daniel was never as disruptive again, but naturally it wasn’t a magic bullet for him, he was eventually moved to a ’special school’, but for the 30 other pupils in the classroom that day, it was a lesson that they’d never forget. They’d been clearly shown where the boundaries of good behaviour lay, and knew what to expect should they cross them.

This is of course the point that the pansies do not understand, violence may not necessarily help all children, but it will certainly help keep those who are just out for pushing their luck in check. When I was a child what I and my school mates feared was the good hiding we’d get from our parents for our misbehaviour, the worse thing that an adult could do was tell our parents about the bad things we’d been up to.

Today if you were lucky your complaint would be met with a shrug from the parents, if you were unlucky it would be abuse or ironically, violence.

People talk of boot camps and other ways of getting unruly kids to respect their elders and behave responsibly, but I think that more needs to be done. Children need to be stripped of these stupid rights that mean that to all intents and purposes, they are untouchable, even to the police. I understand that removing the right for anyone to discipline unruly children was done to protect children, but it has failed. Removing the right of parents to discipline their own children was just plain stupid.

Corporal punishment should also be reintroduced into schools. The vast majority of British school children over the past 100 years faced the cane on a daily basis, yet grew up into far better behaved youngsters and adults than today’s molly coddled kids.

We listened to so called experts who claimed that violence is wrong in any form and and said that we should try and reason with children and understand them, apparently oblivious to the fact that we were all children at one time and that we should really think back to what we would have done in those circumstances. When I was a child, such actions would only be seen in one way, as a soft touch.

Britain, Yobs, Hoodies, Schools, England, Corporal Punishment, Education, Rights Laws, Violence, Teaching, Teachers