Why do modern parents not discipline their kids properly?
Mon 1:11 pm +00:00, 9 Sep 2024This paper is ostensibly about Matthew Perry, of Friend fame. But also contains some very good, very old fashioned, advice about child rearing. Admittedly from a man who has no kids, but still, what he says is well worth reading….
I’ve posted below the bits that really impressed me. Maybe that is because my own parents were very similar in their methods. I was taught discipline, particularly self discipline, and it has served me very well over my whole life, right into my current septuagenarian years
His take on Perry’s “death” is also worth a look. Did he really die, or was it just his “retirement”? He presents the evidence and you are of course free to make up your own mind…
“Which leads us into the thesis of this paper. The explicit and stated theme that runs through the book is
that addiction is a disease, and that Perry was very “unlucky” to have the genetic make-up that made
him highly addictive. He wants you to know that above and before anything else: none of this was
ultimately his fault. He was born with a weakness for alcohol and drugs, neglected by his parents, and
left early on with a big hole he could never fill.
He blames his parents over and over, and I have to say that blame does land. The rest of his blame
game sort of fizzles, but if anything he is too easy on his parents. Even here, though, he secretly hates
them for the wrong things. He hates them for leaving him alone, putting him on planes alone as a
child, and generally not being there. All horrible, but as it turns out not as horrible as not teaching him
any discipline. His Dad abandoned him and his mother at age one, and she soon abandoned him as
well to be Pierre Trudeau’s assistant/mistress. So it is easy to see where the hole comes in. But that
hole was made fatal by a second hole, one that Perry never once sees: no one ever taught him
discipline. Like most of these famous people, he was both neglected and spoiled. We take it that he
was living with his maternal grandfather as a small child, so that grandfather must have also failed to
teach him anything about discipline or self-discipline. He was later completely self-indulgent, so he
must have been totally indulged as a child. No one ever told him no, so he had no way to say no to
himself. ”
and
“So why am I so disciplined? Or, why do I think I am so disciplined? Was I born with a non-additive
personality? Maybe, but I doubt it. I will start by nodding deeply to Matthew Perry by admitting I was
breast-fed and rocked for hundreds of hours by my mother as a child. My father was also present and
loving, and though he had a temper, when I saw it I almost always deserved it. So I never had the hole
Perry did, from the start. I give him that as his first cause, though as you see it isn’t a disease. Parental
neglect isn’t a disease, it is more like a crime. That said, I was brought up in a very disciplined house.
My mother has told me many times she spanked me almost every day in my terrible twos. No meant
no and there were consequences. My father also spanked me often, and as my brother and I got older
Dad did more and more of the disciplining. My mother could no longer make it hurt, and he knew that.
Dad had an old belt that put the fear of God into us. We only hoped he would hit us in the butt, and not
hit lower on the back of the legs, since that hurt twice as much. We also got “licks” in school in those
years. My last paddling in school came at age 14 in 1978, in 9th grade. The paddles at school hurt even
worse, since they were wooden.
That is all sold as very barbaric now, but I didn’t see it that way then and don’t now. Except for a
couple of times, I deserved it and learned from it. Some of the arguments I have heard against it
include the idea that it promotes violence, that it promotes bowing to raw authority over reason, or even
that it promotes sado-masochism. All I can say is that in me it did none of those things. I am not a
violent person, I am not sado-masochistic in the least—I have no fascination with pain, especially
during sex—and as you know I don’t bow well to any authority. But because the rules then being
enforced were (mostly) based on reason, and I could see that, what I learned was the value of discipline
and self-discipline. I learned that there were consequences for all actions, and that it was best to study
those consequences before you acted. Not simply to bow to authority, but to make things easier on
yourself. A lot of those rules were about not creating unwonted harm, and I didn’t want to accidentally
harm myself or anyone else by stupidity, ignorance, or indulgence.
But let’s back up and look even closer. I think the reason I didn’t see the spankings as barbaric,
unreasonable, or violent, is that they came first from the mother who had also breast-fed me and rocked
me for a whole year. I trusted her and knew these spankings weren’t just her being violent and
unreasonable. I learned pretty quickly that there was love and reason behind them, and that I was being
saved from worse things like getting burned by hot lights, shocked by sockets, chewed up by animals,
poisoned by plants, or drowned by water. Yeah, I was clever that way.
It is the same reason my kittens don’t hate me for swatting them occasionally, to keep them out of
trouble. They know beyond any doubt that I love them and so they trust me. They know I am not
whacking them for the sheer sport of it, and understand that they are doing something I don’t want them
to do. I am pretty sure that after a few rounds of that they realize I am trying to teach them something,
just as their mother teaches them by cuffing them. Cats are clever that way, too.
I know because they do learn.
More confirmation comes from my own family. My younger brother was not breast-fed, and he didn’t
respond to discipline as well as I did. He was spanked, but he often didn’t stop doing whatever it was
he was doing. Grounding and detention didn’t work, either. He didn’t become a drug addict or
alcoholic, but he was somewhat less disciplined than I am. What this tells me is that the full dose of
love and trust has to come first, before any attempt at discipline.
Spare the rod spoil the child was the maxim for hundreds of years, and that has only changed in the
past 40 years. But it hasn’t really changed since the maxim continues to be proven: children just get
more spoiled every decade. Society is spinning out of control for many reasons, but one them
obviously is because people don’t have any discipline or self-discipline anymore. Society has more and
more stupid rules every year—rules that apply only to the non-rich—but enforcement of rules (good
and bad) has gone out the window for almost everyone. Like Perry, kids are now both neglected and
spoiled, and the schools are now both more chaotic and more top-loaded with asinine government
programs. Young people are squashed and stirred in about equal amounts now, but they aren’t molded
or educated in any logical fashion. ”
Source: https://mileswmathis.com/mperry.pdf
