SPARE THE ROD by Laura Brownell Collier

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jan 23, 1893

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 19, No. 12.

SPARE THE ROD.

By Laura Brownell Collier

SHALL we punish our little ones? and, if so how? is the question that taxes the brain and wrings the heart of many a fond mother. One would think she feared she might be called upon to play the part of a Jameson, compelled to act as Stanley's slave driver, while longing to sketch the savage and catch butterflies. It is so much pleasanter, if Karl or Katherine has been guilty of naughtiness, to gather the plump little sinner close into one's arms and invent some telling story of the "naughty spirit" that is in each of us, warring against the good we would do. The small man or woman is comforted, while unconsciously stimulated to resist temptation. But, spite of all the kindergarten talk of love and sunshine, a need is sometimes felt of sterner force—a real deterrent power.

In this last decade of the nineteenth century we have grown so much wiser than our mothers and grandmothers, poor dames! that most of their approved methods fill us with pity and amazement; none more so than those they followed in disciplining their children. But even Herbert Spencer, who has done more than any other one man of our time wisely to modify the training of children, does not limit parents to the application of natural penalties. He distinctly says that in the earlier years it is often necessary to supplement such penalties by severer arbitrary ones.

All punishment seems to the unthinking, cruel; but it may veil the deepest tenderness. Not long ago a little blue-eyed maiden, dear to me as my own life, was seen with a pin in her mouth. It had been expressly forbidden. From babyhood, pins, pennies, and buttons had been occasionally allowed as playthings,

partly with an idea of training her not to subject all things to the sense of taste. But now, as she was nearing her fourth birthday, and becoming an adept in the business of dolls' dressmaker, she fell before a seamstress' temptation to make a pin dish of her mouth. As I told her the great danger that might follow the swallowing of a pin, and the grief it would be to all of us to have her suffer, she was gravely attentive, and submitted without a murmur to have all the paraphernalia of her trade taken away from her for the day.

After sitting in a high chair in silent meditation for a while, she solemnly announced, "I sink I can 'member," and was allowed to betake herself to other play, while I complacently reflected how seldom severe measures were necessary. To my dismay the very next afternoon, as the little woman stood by me completely absorbed in pinning and fitting these pathetic first attempts, a pin was put into the mouth ready for instant use. I could see how convenient it was, how unconscious the act. But a tragedy in the family of a friend had made me as afraid of a pin as of a pistol, and I had to break in upon the pleasant contriving and go over again the story of danger, asking her to think for me what would be the best way to help her. With quivering lips and gathering tears she decided that she must be punished, and that of all punishments a whipping was the worst, adding, "But I'm soor one tip would be enough to keep me 'membering." And it was. For weeks there has been the greatest care in laying down pins, and the habit seems formed. It would have been the reverse of kindness merely to cuddle and comfort the wee lassie after she had judged herself.

While the whipping of an elder child has in it an element of degradation that often arouses the worst passions and justifies the protests that have been raised against brutal flogging, is it not possible that in rare cases, with young children, the sudden sharp tingling of pain is the best help in deterring from dangerous experiments? May not the reaction from faith in Solomon's warning o'erleap its bounds?—Laura Brownell Collier, in Christian Union.