By Sidney Craig, Ph.D.
People have never been surprised to find that many irresponsible,
delinquent, drug-addicted, or otherwise troubled children have been
raised in very poor home environments. This relationship between the
"sick" home and the "sick" child has been known for
centuries. It is entirely reasonable to expect, and repeated experience
has confirmed, that children raised by parents who are morally
defective, infantile, indolent, irresponsible, incompetent, or criminal
should turn "bad." ("Like father, like son.") We may
infer safely that in such families the parents set a poor example,
failed to teach proper ethical standards and paid insufficient attention
to the child's physical and emotional needs. We may even suspect that
such parents did not really want or love their children. Common sense
tells us that "problem children" should arise within such a
family context.
However, what has been extremely puzzling to parents for centuries is
the problem of how to explain those "wild," irresponsible,
delinquent children who were reared by parents believed to be honest,
responsible, and hard-working citizens. This opposition between the
parents' morality and that of the child has occurred so regularly
throughout the period of man's recorded history that it has become part
of our folklore. Numerous novels and stage plays center around a
prominent person whose son becomes the town's ne'er-do-well or the
clergyman's daughter who becomes the town harlot
Historically, in their attempts to explain this phenomenon, the
public has utilized three major theories. The oldest of the three held
that the bad child had been possessed by the devil or some other evil
spirit. Common sense then dictated that the proper course of action to
cure the condition was to "beat the devil" out of the child.
As mankind turned away from this primitive demonology, a new idea more
compatible with modern, scientific thinking developed. This was the
theory of the hereditary transmission of behavioral or personality
traits. According to this theory, if a "bad" child suddenly
showed up in the middle of a "good" family, it was suspected
that one of his ancestors had possessed a defective gene. Presumably
then, this gene suddenly manifested itself in the child wino was the
carrier of the "bad seed." Gradually this idea, too, came to
be discredited by twentieth-century geneticists, biologists, and
psychologists. There remained, then, but one widely accepted explanation
for this phenomenon which has not been refuted by more advanced
thinking.
This third explanation places the blame for delinquent children on
permissive treatment by the parents. This theory has always coexisted
with the other two. But now, since the other two theories have passed
from the scene, this one has emerged as the overwhelming favorite.
Specifically, according to this explanation, the parents of
delinquent children have been either too ignorant or too irresponsible
to have punished their children for various minor and major
transgressions. Accordingly, it is the parents' failure or refusal to
have used firm, fair, consistent, and even harsh punishment that
permitted the child to develop a wild, irresponsible, or antisocial
pattern of behavior. Since, according to this theory, the parents'
aversion to using punishment as a restraining force permitted the child
to develop his delinquent pattern, this particular form of parental
failure is known today as permissiveness.
As I said previously, this explanation which holds the parents to
blame is no less ancient than the demonic and hereditary theories that
it has survived. The fact that it is labeled with the rather
contemporary-sounding word "permissiveness" merely disguises
its antiquity. Its roots, however, can be clearly seen in admonitions to
parents such as, "As the twig is bent, so grows the tree," and
"He who hates not his child, spares not the rod."
Currently, then, warnings against parental permissiveness represent
the major theoretical guideline available to parents and responsible
authorities in their efforts to understand, prevent, and treat
behavioral disorders, including prominently today the excessive use of
dangerous drugs.
I hope to convince you that permissiveness should not be accepted as
a valid explanation for what is wrong with large numbers of young people
today. This is not to defend or condone overpermissiveness. To
the extent that it is practiced it would have a detrimental effect on a
child's personality. However, my own experience with a great many
families has convinced me that there are very few people in this country
sufficiently remote from the mainstream of information available as to
have remained uninformed concerning the dangers of genuine
overpermissiveness. Such information is provided daily in massive
amounts through churches and school systems, through the courts and
law-enforcement agencies, through government-sponsored education
programs, and directly and indirectly through all the forms of the mass
media. The dangers of overpermissiveness are described in full-length
books, in magazine articles, in the advice columns of daily newspapers,
and in pamphlets produced by public-spirited citizens. The majority,
popularly held viewpoint is presented almost universally as the most
valid model for parents to follow.
At one time during the course of my work as a psychologist I was
employed by an institution that provided custodial care and treatment
for mentally ill patients. These people had been declared insane, and
legally confined within a locked institution. In my talks with these
patients, many of whom were parents, I found that they were acutely
aware of the dangers of permissiveness in the raising of their own
children. Years later I worked extensively with adults diagnosed as
either borderline or mentally defective (IQs of 65 and below). Most were
eligible to receive financial aid from the state because of the severity
of their intellectual deficit. These people, too, in their own
inarticulate way, described to me repeatedly how careful they had to be
in raising their children in order to avoid spoiling them.
It is unlikely that any subject in this country could produce such
widespread agreement as that of the dangers to the child of parental
permissiveness.
Yet, what I hope to convince the reader is that the "enemy"
of the child is not permissiveness, but rather the fear of being
permissive. It is this fear which drives good, middle-class American
parents to behave toward their children in those callous, unsympathetic,
insensitive ways which ultimately result in youthful delinquency. It is
this fear of permissiveness which frightens parents away from
demonstrating those humane, constructive, conciliatory forms of behavior
which would enhance rather than destroy their relationship with their
children. It is the parents' fear of permissiveness that forces them to
abandon as the major child-rearing resource their own legitimate
Judeo-Christian heritage which stresses gentleness, kindness, trust,
faith, and forgiveness in one's relationship with others. Having been
forced by an antiquated theory to abandon those forms of behavior which
could produce loving feelings in their children, the parents must
inevitably produce angry feelings with tragic consequences.
The new insight I am trying to present to the reader is that,
contrary to what you may now believe, vast numbers of children who
become delinquent and turn to the use of dangerous drugs have not been
raised permissively. Nor do they come from homes in which the parents
have been irresponsible, incompetent, or otherwise derelict in meeting
their responsibilities to their children. Rather, these drug-using
children have been reared by parents who are the most well-organized,
highly informed, sincere, intelligent, dedicated, and responsible
members of the community. It is the average, middle-class parent, being
guided primarily by the fear of being permissive, who, during the normal
process of responsible child-rearing, produces unknowingly a degree of
hostile feelings in the child which in turn produces various forms of
antisocial behavior.
For centuries, people have been raising their children following the
age-old theory that a sufficient degree of punishment judiciously
applied would create good character and good behavior. Yet, as I have
already indicated, the failures of this technique are so numerous that
they have become enshrined in our literature. How does one account for
the incredible longevity of this ancient theory in the face of massive,
non-supportive evidence? I should like to discuss several reasons with
you in detail so that you will be better able to assess the usefulness
of this fear-of-spoiling theory for your own children.
The primary reason for the persistence of public confidence in the
effectiveness of punishment is that punishment does affect behavior and
the results are almost immediate. Particularly when the child is young,
punishment produces the immediately observable changes in behavior the
parent desires. As any parent knows, if a young child's hand is slapped
often enough and hard enough, the child will stop doing with that hand
what the parent does not want him to do with it. This immediately
observable cause-and-effect sequence gives the use of punishment the appearance
of indisputable validity. The common sense of the parent inclines him to
accept the evidence of his own senses. Thus, logic and "common
sense" backed up by widespread social approval dictate that parents
continue to depend on the theory that demands punishment for
misbehavior, rather than gamble on some more abstract theory that
promises good behavior later, but provides less immediately observable
results in controlling the child's behavior here and now.
Let us look at a case history and see how the parents become
increasingly confident that their technique of child-rearing is the
correct one.
The parents were able to eliminate their child's tendency at age two
and one half, to open certain cabinet doors by slapping his hands.
(Punishment "worked") When he was three and one half, they
were able to put a stop to his temper tantrums by spanking him.
Occasionally, they used a long stick if the bare hand alone was
insufficient. (Punishment "worked".) When he was five years
old, they put a stop to his using "dirty" words by washing his
mouth with soap. (Punishment "worked".) He presented no
problem at the dinner table because he was punished if he showed poor
manners. If he "ate like a pig" or refused to try new foods,
or if he didn't finish all the food on his plate, he was sent to his
room. (Again punishment "worked".) At age nine, the parents
stopped his tendency to come home late for dinner by
"grounding" him for one week each time he was late. Thus, all
the child's behavior problems were "solved" by the consistent
use of mild to moderate degrees of punishment.
Now "suddenly" at age thirteen, the child becomes apathetic
and hostile. He does not work in class and is in constant conflict with
school authorities. He uses foul language right to his mother's face. To
culminate a sequence of minor delinquent actions, the child is caught
"popping" pills in the lavatory at school.
What would any sensible parent believe was called for next? Obviously
the same thing that had been successful in "solving" all the
child's behavior problems during the preceding yearn. Only now, because
of the seriousness of the child's misbehavior, a more severe punishment
than had ever been used before would appear appropriate. In such a
situation, the avenge, sincere but now terribly alarmed parent might
administer the most severe beating the child had ever received.
As you can see, the fact that punishment appeared to work
successfully every time it was used makes it impossible for the parent
to conceive of using any other technique. Thus, the immediately
demonstrable effect of punishment has seduced generations of sensible
adults into embracing it as the technique of choice in raising children.
The second factor that accounts for the longevity of this old
approach is the overwhelming public belief in its effectiveness. This
massive public belief in the usefulness of punishment is itself created
by factor number one described above. However, once the nearly universal
public acceptance is achieved, the public pressure itself becomes a
factor that perpetuates the belief. The individual parent is hopelessly
intimidated by the existence of a theory that historically and to the
present has achieved the status of an unassailable virtue.
For the individual parent to deviate from this accepted dogma would
have the same meaning and social consequences for him as if he had
deviated from one of the Ten Commandments. First, of course, he would
feel guilty because he would believe that he was contributing to the
destruction of his own child. Secondly, for the individual parent to
deviate from the accepted pattern would expose him to public rebuke,
ridicule, and condemnation. The parent's belief in the correctness of
what he is doing with the child reinforced by the massive societal
approval for his actions makes it almost impossible for him to deal with
the child in any other manner than is prescribed by the "Don't
spoil them" approach.
Thus, the responsible parent is trapped by his conscience into
alienating the child. But the theory itself maintains its aura of
rightness. The blame, if things go wrong, ultimately comes to reside in
the child, whose nervous system presumably was so defective that it
would not respond correctly to the obviously correct system of
discipline.
A third reason for continued public acceptance of this archaic theory
is the ready availability of numerous rationalizations that explain away
all failures of the theory to produce the desired results. It has proven
extraordinarily difficult to discredit this theory because of these
rationalizations. The proponents of this theory do not reassess its
validity when it produces unwanted consequences. Rather, they seek to
blame one of the participants involved in the situation, either the
parents, for failure to use it sufficiently, or the child, for failure
to respond to it properly. These attempts to redistribute blame become
so distorted at times that obvious failures of the theory are redefined
as success. If these obvious failures are viewed as successes, it is all
but impossible to assess this theory with any degree of objectivity.
The foremost of these rationalizations takes the form of blaming the
parent for various deficiencies. The first deficiency attributed to the
parent is that he was not sufficiently intelligent or informed to be
aware of the dangers of permissiveness. The assumption is made,
automatically, that whenever a child becomes delinquent the parent has
raised him permissively. This is only an assumption, since there is
usually no evidence whatsoever that the child was raised permissively.
What is taken for "evidence" is the fact that the child is
"in trouble." This type of reasoning is circular and logically
indefensible.
This assessment of the situation is most likely to occur in those
cases in which the parent of the delinquent child is a publicly known
figure who is politically liberal and/or wealthy. The consensus of
public opinion, then, is that the liberal parent raised his child
permissively, consistent with his liberal political philosophy. The
wealthy parent is presumed to have spoiled his child "rotten"
by giving him "everything he ever wanted." Even in the absence
of independent confirmatory evidence, liberals and wealthy people may
find it very difficult to prove that they did not, in fact, spoil their
children.
But with increasing frequency now, it has come to the attention of
the public that many irresponsible, delinquent, drug-using, suicidal
children come from homes in which the parents (even if wealthy) are
known, unmistakably, to be responsible, civic-minded, and politically
conservative. Such parents might include clergymen, physicians,
law-enforcement officers, police chiefs, judges, career military
officers, conservative businessmen, politicians, and workingmen.
What do proponents of this theory do with the evidence that
delinquent children come from homes in which the parents were obviously
well-informed as to the dangers of permissiveness and spoiling? One
would hope that this would weaken the public's belief in the value of
the theory. However, this does not occur. Rather, new rationalizations
are introduced that vindicate the theory, but find fault with the
parent. Now, since these parents have publicly embraced the virtuous
theory so that it must be assumed that their children were not raised
permissively, the excuse is offered that the parents themselves were
defective people. The new position taken, then, is that the theory they
used was correct but they were such non-virtuous people that the theory
could not produce its good results.
Thus, the public begins the intriguing but uncharitable search for
flaws or defects in the parents' character. There are many variations of
what the conservative parent may be accused of. Hypocrisy is currently
the "in" word. The reasoning goes approximately like this:
"Oh, yes, I know that Senator (an ex-FBI man) would never have
raised his child permissively, but you know politicians are all
hypocrites. How else would you expect the son of a hypocrite to turn
out?" (The parent might also be accused of having been covertly
alcoholic, a swindler, and/or an adulterer.)
Who among us has not seen the final confrontation scene of the
television drama in which the teenage son, locked up in jail for drug
use, snarls at his outwardly respectable father: "It's your fault.
You've been playing around with your secretary for years? In another
variation of this, the teenager blames both parents for his
predicament-his mother uses prescription drugs for her headaches and his
father spends too much time at the office. (The father's "sin"
here is materialism.)
Such ideas, of course, find a receptive audience among young people
who enjoy holding such fantasies of adults whom they both fear and envy.
However, it is highly irresponsible for mature adults to present such
distorted fantasies as if they represented sensible explanations for
children's misbehavior.
The purpose of these rationalizations, encouraged and supported by
public opinion and the mass media, is to demonstrate to the audience
that the traditional theory is valid, but only when applied by virtuous
parents. Even respected experts are sometimes guilty of this form of
rationalization.
On April 5,1971, Time magazine quoted Mr. Barr, the headmaster at
Manhattan's private Dalton School, as follows: "The trouble with
many children is that their fathers are mothers and their mothers are
sisters." Apparently desperate to find any rationalization that
would appear to support the old theory of parental incompetence, Mr.
Barr would have us believe that paternal homosexuality is the
significant factor in childhood delinquency.
The following statement appeared in Time magazine, August 17, 1970:
"It is among many middle- and upper-class Americans that the
estrangement of the young is strongest ... Parents who lose control of
their children are usually confused about their own values and
identities. Lacking authority, such parents cannot provide the key
ingredient of growing up: a loving force to rebel against." The
article continues, "Psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch believes that many
parents themselves are still emotional adolescents and it is evident not
only in their adoption of youthful dress and fads but in a lack of inner
maturity as well."
And the noted authority on infant care, Dr. Spock, comments,
"The delinquent child is often acting-out his parents' unconscious
desires." Thus, if you can't find an obvious flaw in the parents'
personalities, search for one that is deeper-hidden and unconscious.
The message from these people is always the same: "Our theory is
correct. If it appears that it didn't produce the desired result, it
must be someone else's fault The parent didn't know about the evils of
permissiveness." If he did know and the knowledge didn't help, then
the parent must have been secretly defective. If an obvious defect
cannot be discovered, an unconscious one can be postulated. If the
"unconscious" defect is not demonstrable, then the society can
be condemned en masse as hypocritical. With all those rationalizations
available, you can see how well insulated against objective criticism
this theory remains.
The following are two case histories that illustrate again how other
rationalizations keep this theory from being discredited:
After the death of a young adult who had committed suicide while
under the influence of drugs, I spoke with his father. This man was a
law-enforcement officer. As part of his service to the community, he had
given lectures on the evils of permissiveness.
One might suspect that the death of his son would have forced a
reassessment of his views. However, this was not the case. Rather, the
father told me that he had raised his son properly (i.e.,
non-permissively), but that he had "let up" on him too soon.
The father recalled that when the son first began wearing his hair too
long and dressing "freakishly," the father had not protested
vigorously enough. The father believed that he had failed his son and
"lost" him that one summer when he had not forced the son to
trim his hair and to dress differently.
Here is another example of a similar situation that came to my
attention. Note, again, how the traditional theory escapes with its
reputation intact in spite of its obvious failure:
A six-year-old boy who was attending private school had been acting
very mischievously in class. Following a conference between the parents
and the principal, the conclusion was reached that the child had been
"spoiled" and that what he needed was more discipline. The
principal asked that he and the teacher be given permission to use
various forms of punishment at their own discretion, with the promise
that their firmness would "straighten the child out(' for the
parents. Note in the principal's offer the implication that the parents
themselves were either weak-willed or incompetent.
Parental permission was given. Subsequently the child was punished in
all possible ways known to the school authorities, from loss of
privileges to severe beatings with a paddle. After one month of this the
child had regressed to a completely infantile level of functioning. His
speech regressed, he was incontinent day and night, and almost wholly
unresponsive to adult authority.
It took a year of kindness, patience, and understanding on the part
of the parents to return this severely regressed youngster to his
appropriate age level of functioning.
It is to be hoped that after an experience of this sort, the
authorities who recommended the "no nonsense" approach would
go through a period of prolonged reappraisal of their pet beliefs. This
was certainly a situation in which some learning should have occurred.
Unfortunately, however, no new learning took place. The school
authorities expelled the child. But they did not apologize to the
parents for having been wrong. Instead, they told the parents that the
child had been spoiled so badly that even the school had been unable to
straighten him out. Undoubtedly the school authorities, in good
conscience, will use this case as a "horrible example" to
illustrate to other parents how dangerous it is to spoil a child.
It is time now for us to stop trying to place the blame for
delinquency on either the parents, the child, or society as a whole.
These modern attempts to find a source of evil somewhere inside the
child, the parents, or society represent nothing more than a
sophisticated, twentieth-century form of demonology, in which the public
and some professionals are playing the role of high priests in assigning
the guilt
Although it will be difficult to do so, we must desist from our
self-righteous intellectual, yet basically superstitious, attempts to
find fault with the parents' intelligence or character or morals when
children become delinquent. We must come to recognize that the average
middle-class parent in this country is neither mentally, morally, or
psychologically defective. We should all graciously, generously, and
compassionately accept the idea that the majority of those parents whose
children turn any from parental values or toward the use of dangerous
drugs are just as intelligent, informed, sincere, conscientious, moral,
and responsible as we ourselves. If we could grant them these virtues
instead of attempting to assign blame, we could focus our attention on
the real "enemy": the theory and approach to child-rearing
prevalent in this country that forces parents to interact with their
children in ways that inevitably accentuate angry rather than loving
feelings - and thereby produces delinquency. Moreover, we could more
readily comprehend the apparent paradox that has been a source of
perplexity for centuries: why it is that the most conscientious parents
would be so highly prone to producing rebellious, delinquent children.
In the introduction to this book1 I stated:
There is no necessity for your child to become remote from you, to turn
away from your most respected values, or to turn to the use of dangerous
drugs - if you have the courage to act toward him in a manner consistent
with those compassionate, humanitarian principles which you have learned
from your own Judeo-Christian religious training.
Why is it that I recommend something as commonplace and
unsophisticated as the principles of a religious tradition to the
post-Freudian, twentieth-century parent? Because upon careful analysis,
when all the irrelevant elements are removed, the essence of the
problem of drug abuse and other forms of delinquency are the feelings of
love or lack of love that exist between people.
Therefore, whoever has spoken most authoritatively on the subject of
love between people hat also spoken most authoritatively on the subject
of delinquency. In my opinion, no one has ever spoken with greater
clarity or authority on this subject than have certain of the Old
Testament prophets, the scholarly rabbis, and Jesus.
In various discussions in this book I have attempted to persuade the
reader that delinquency is a "disease" which is produced by
mismanaged feelings. I have said that the child turns toward drugs
and delinquency as the relative strength of his feelings of anger
gradually comes to outweigh the feelings of love he holds toward his
parents.
If parents understood how positive or negative feelings were created
in children, they would know also how delinquency was created. If
parents could learn how to produce loving feelings and to avoid
producing anger, they would have it within their power to eradicate
delinquency. The most excellent guide available for parents in this
endeavor is that body of ethical principles given us centuries ago by
the Biblical authorities described immediately above. These principles
comprise the most complete statement possible on the subject of creating
love and reducing anger.
The following is a list of the basic principles which I urge parents
to follow at all times in dealing with their children:
- The Golden Rule - Behave toward others primarily as you would like
them to behave toward you.2
- Maintain unswerving faith in the basic goodness of the individual
no matter what his current deficiencies in behavior might suggest.
- Be ready to forgive without limit no matter how often the
individual fails to live up to a particular standard of conduct.
- Repay anger and irrationality with kindness. "Turn the other
cheek", "walk the extra mile".
- Be generous.
The usefulness of these principles derives from the fact that each of
them does something constructive about the child's feelings toward the
parents. While stated originally as "moral" principles, each
of them is in reality a powerful and practical psychological
"tool" that can be utilized by the parent to produce loving
feelings in the child and to prevent the buildup of anger.
You will recall that I explained in
