His twins are tearing up the house. A father weighs his options.
6/18/99
The Wall Street Journal
(Copyright Daniel Akst; all rights reserved.) 

By Daniel Akst

Two-year-olds are the world's great refuseniks. My twin boys, having just reached that fearsome milestone, would make Bartleby the Scrivener look like a yes man. Getting such ornery devils to do what 's required while keeping them from doing what's forbidden (e.g., wear socks but don’t burn the house down) is a constant struggle.

Thus, at our house, Father's Day will dawn this year on a large collection of child-rearing books.

Like most fathers, I pay almost no attention to these, but my wife keeps bringing them home even though all we’ve never gleaned a single useful suggestion from them. That’s because their advice in these books falls into two broad broad categories: things painfully obvious to any rational person and things too ridiculous to take seriously. (That my wife reads these books illustrates another of their chief limitations: They are onlymainly consulted by parents whose conscientiousness and devotion to their children leads them to read such things in the first place. a self-selected group of the most conscientious and literate parents The last people on earth, in other words, who need a book on child-rearing.)

When I look at these books, I am especially struck by their views on discipline. Almost all of the experts oppose such time-tested parental standbys as yelling, spanking or threatening to "wring your neck if you don't get back in bed this instant!" Sheer intimidation, the specialty of fathers from time immemorial, is out. No, parents in these books live in a kind of rationalist utopia, in which children are preternaturally responsive to the most transparent adult stratagems. Discipline in this bucolic dream world is always based on positive reinforcement or, when necessary, the mere withholding of affection.

I say "mere," but it’s startling how casually this creepy technique is advocated. A whack to the bottom is held to violate the taboo against violence, but for some reason ostracism, physical isolation and emotional withholding are broadly approved, often in the widely adopted form of the "time out," which for the uninitiated resembles very closely what Dennis the Menace’s parents must have inflicted when the cartoonist drew him sulking in a rocking chair in the corner.

With its emphasis on silence and isolation, coupled with its faith in rehabilitation, the rise of the time out recapitulates the Quaker-inspired embrace of solitary confinement prison generations ago as a proper response to transgression. The idea was that the the wrongdoer could reflect on his sins without distraction. The time out is supposed to have the same effect, and justreplacement for corporal or other punishments in society at large. And just as America is a world leader in penitentiaries, American parents seem to lead the world in time outs (as well as in disrespectful children, it sometimes seems)., so too are we world leaders in incarceration.

As the With its sporty name and air of thoughtful "hold everything," The time out is the emblematic punishment of our times, the time out is . It’s in keeping, to cite one example, with our preference in recent years for economic sanctions in lieu of war. Leaving aside our recent belligerence in Iraq and Yugoslavia, generally speaking we prefer to punish rogue countries nowadays by expelling them "from the community of nations." Diplomatic ties are broken, and trade is at least threatened. If you can’t be good, we won't let you play in our markets.

On a more prosaic level, the time out reflects a certain feminization of culture in which traditional fatherliness has become as dispensable as fathers themselves. Calling a time out--shunning your child until he does what you like--substitutes emotional manipulation for physical force, thereby replacing one dubious form of compulsion with another. Its lasting effect, such as it is, arises from the fear of psychological rather than physical pain, and contrary to appearances, its widespread adoption is based not on kindness but on weaknessselfishness. Except in the case of abusers and other sickos, whacking a kid’s bottom probably does hurt parent more than child, and inflicting pain on the psyche has somehow come to seem more palatable.

In my friends' arguments against spanking, I sense a lot of groping for an ex post facto rationale. Nobody wants to spank, and so people keep coming up with reasons not to.

In this, as in so much else, adults are as susceptible to peer pressure as their kids. Parents who divorce, for example, batting the little ones back and forth like shuttlecocks, or who spend so much time at work that they hardly see their children, inspire at most an embarrassed certain averting of the eyes, since marital dissolution is beyond criticism and workaholism is accepted as an excuse for child neglect. But in my social circle one who spanks risks becoming an outcast.

That's one reason parents who do administer the occasional smack don't talk about it much. Another is that in the current climate it seems reactionary and declasse, as down-market as cigarettes. Some people even fear meddling government authorities, who not so long ago were busier chasing Satanists in preschools.

The time out, by contrast, is now almost universally approved among bourgeoisupscale parents. A law professor I know even contends, with something like satisfaction, that her son hates and fears a time out more than a spanking, to which I can only reply, "Then why is it better? What makes psychological torture preferable to 15 seconds of stinging buttocks?" She also contends that striking your child simply teaches your kids that hitting is OK, and that we only spank children "because we can."

But if spanking teaches by example, what of the time out? Doesn't it suggest that withholding and manipulation are acceptable ways of "resolving differences"? And If spanking will make our children into overbearing bullies, won't time outs inflict the kind of psychic injury that inevitably results in postal shooting sprees? How can we be so sure of one and not the other? AndBesides, don’t we administer the time out on the same basis--parental authority--as the spanking? True, we wouldn’t spank an errant co-worker. But would we try to make a colleague, or even a subordinate, sit quietly in a chair facing the wall until a timer goes off and we consider him fit for human company again? Neither measure, it seems, is fit for anyone but a child, and it's impossible to see how shunning is the more civilized.

Still, most of us will want to reserve spanking for moments when massive retaliation is called for, so in the best "father knows best" tradition, I've developed some subtler alternatives. a number of subtler tactics for keeping my sons in line. If withholding affection from your children is okay during a time out, after all, than why not keep them on their toes all the time by regularly threatening to give them away? Whenever possible, for example, I like to remind my sons of the huge demand for boys in China ("even Jewish boys," I tell them). Just think of all the Chinese girls we import. Sooner or later somebody will notice this trade imbalance, and my sons know that if they continue acting up, they’re going to have to learn to use chopsticks. Another good trick, especially effective for twins, is to insist that you only plan to keep one. A little healthy competition can’t hurt, can it?

Aside from these humane ploys, I’m a pragmatist. On mornings when it's up to me to dress bmy sons, for instance, I throw shirts and pants onto them as fast as I can, regardless of what they think or whether they're ready. I know I'm supposed to solicit their views in all this, but that usually results in a wrestling match. Work fast, and by the time they figure out they're missing a golden opportunity to argue, it's too late: they're already dressed. I figure if I keep this up, before I know it pretty soon they'll be old enough to read Bartleby instead of emulating him.

And neither of us will have to suffer through too many time outs or sore bottoms along the way.