“Spare the rod and spoil the child.”
This is something you won’t hear many parents saying today, but you don’t have to go too
far back to when it was often said.
The term, that originated in the bible, basically means that if parents don’t give their kids
a good beating now and again they will become spoiled.
For the most part corporal punishment is frowned upon today, and in many countries it’s illegal.
But go and ask a bunch of Generation X’s about their childhood and no doubt you’ll
hear stories of parents taking a slipper to them or teachers in school bringing out the
cane or paddle and reddening backsides in front of the class.
Today we are going to delve into the worst sorts of punishments metered out on kids in
the past, and we should tell you that the brutality was rather surprising to us when
we first started researching this topic.
While those beaten Generation X’s may still be traumatized today relating to the punishments
they suffered, we can’t even imagine what the kids of the past must have felt.
Parenting back in the day was for the most part just more barbaric in nature, so before
we tell you exactly how it was barbaric, let’s first touch on why it was.
The obvious thing you might think of is just because life was harder in general.
Listen to older folks talk about their wartime years in say, the UK, and you’ll hear stories
of hardships and Christmas’s in which they were presented with the wonderful gift of
an apple.
If parents lives were full of hardships and woes, of course that might sometimes mean
kids’ lives were hard.
We’ve likely all heard the words from an older person, “Oh, when I was your age we…”
and then you are told how life was so tough for them.
You might well say that one day yourself.
Trust us, you might say you’ll never say it, but it might well happen.
Our research led us to the writer Steven Pinker, and in his huge book on the history of human
violence he has a part on what he calls the “Rights Movements”.
This included Human Rights in general, Women’s Rights, Civil Rights, Gay Rights, Animal Rights,
and the topic of today’s show, Children Rights.
You see, before these great movements people had few channels to redress abuse when it
happened.
If you were a kid you were at the mercy of your parents, or teachers, and you might be
told that you should be seen, but not heard.
You took your beating on the chin, and if you open your mouth, or spill too many tears,
and you might just get more of a beating.
Social services were not going to get in on the act; kids essentially had no rights.
According to Pinker, the majority of people in the past believed parents needed to be
savage like this because if they weren’t the kid would grow unruly and have no respect
for them or other authority.
He mentions a French saying that went, “Better to beat your child than see him hanged when
grown.”
In the 18th and 19th centuries in America he writes that kids were “hardened” with
whips, sticks and rods, but all over the world kids were neglected or tortured.
He also mentions something called the parent-offspring conflict, which means that parents and children
might be in conflict over the amount of investment the parents should put into the upbringing
of a child.
Having kids was hard work, it was even dangerous for the woman back then, and so the kids were
often seen as just lucky to be alive and have food and shelter.
For that they had to pay back, be good kids, and parents were very willing to beat them
to make that happen.
The kids on the other hand have their own expectations as to how they are treated.
Concepts of child-rearing started to change during the Age of Reason and Enlightenment
when great thinkers started saying that kids were the grown ups in the making and how you
treat them will affect how they become as adults.
English philosopher John Locke proposed that just mindless beating didn’t work, and that
kids had to learn from their mistakes.
This seems basic now, but back then it wasn’t.
It was progressive.
For hundreds of years it was said kids were little devils, and the devils inside them
needed beating out.
Now you know where the expression, “Beat the devil out of him” comes from, and that
expression had been used quite literally.
Kids were treated like disasters waiting to happen, born with badness, but then writers
such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau said wait on a minute, we are born pure, a blank slate,
and it is what happens to us that can create a demon.
“Everything degenerates in the hands of man,” he wrote, but still, it would be a
long time until parents hung up their rods and whips.
Ok, so there you have a simple explanation.
Some parents were brutal because life was hard, because they thought kids needed badness
beaten out of them, because little devils need time, money and effort invested in them
and parents were not going to take a risk and allow the child to become an unruly failure.
Then we thought, hmm, maybe we shouldn’t beat them so hard, torture them, but it wasn’t
until only recently that parents started to think mere spanking was bad.
Nowadays we even have critics telling us we are too nice to our kids.
But now let’s talk about some of those punishments.
So, first of all, we don’t need to explain to you what slapping and smacking are.
These forms of punishment can still be seen today, and prior to say the 90s it was quite
normal to see kids being smacked hard.
But what about when instruments of torture are used?
The Rod When we say the rod what we really mean is
a stick.
Hitting kids with a stick was quite the normal thing, and it’s not difficult to imagine
how it happened.
In later years you would find parents using household objects, such as when kids in the
UK would talk about “getting the shoe.”
This was also sometimes called “slippering.”
In schools caning and paddling was not abnormal until it was outlawed most places late in
the 20th century, but you can find news reports today that talk about people being caned in
public for ostensible wrongdoings.
Paddling caused less damage to the skin than a stick, but it still hurt like hell.
You can also find school punishments in the English Harrow Punishment Book, and you will
find whipping stools or ceremonial birching; this is when a kid is tied over something,
has his pants pulled down, and is hit with a bundle of birch twigs.
The cat o’nine tails This instrument to beat kids looked a bit
like a stick with a frayed rope at the end.
It was essentially a whipping device that could draw blood.
We rarely hear about it being used on kids, but according to the psychohistory writer
Lloyd DeMause children got the cat o’nine tails in the past.
In Scottish schools you might have found something called the tawse, which was very similar but
often used on the hands.
DeMause writes that kids were punished like this to beat the poison out of them, again
referring to little devils.
Parents he said thought the experience would be detoxifying for their children.
What’s crazy is that he writes that kids of the past would be prone to fits, outbursts,
and so they would get detoxified even more.
The bad parents didn’t realize it was likely their rough justice that was causing these
outbursts.
The goad This was something like a cobbler’s knife,
according to Steve Pinker.
It’s not a nice-looking thing, and it is said it was used to prick the child on the
hands or head when that kids got out of hand.
The flapper We’ll let the writer of a book about corporal
punishment through the ages describe to you what the flapper was: “There is historical
evidence for the frequent use of various sorts of instruments for beating by parents and
teachers, including special appliances for flogging children at school, such as the flapper,
which had a pear-shaped end and a round hole to raise blisters.”
Just to make that worse, we are told that these punishments would start in infancy,
and according to DeMause they often had an erotic element to them as the genitals were
often the target of the operation.
Hardening Again the writer DeMause is our source.
In his book, “German Parenting”, he wrote that to harden kids they would sometimes be
thrown into cold water or snow and left until it was unbearable.
Sometimes they were tied to bedposts for days, sat on top of hot stoves, and other times
just forced to kneel on hard logs for hours on end while their parents relaxed in the
background.
He even writes that during toilet training the kids might be given enemas to make them
learn faster.
And no, this wasn’t ancient history, it was the turn of the 20th century.
He writes that at the same time the Japanese were giving enemas to their young kids, but
it was constant and not just a punishment.
He also said Japanese parents would burn their kids with incense, strangle them, hang them
up by the feet, routinely beat and kick them, force them to shower in the freezing cold
and worst of all, drive needles into the body of their kids or cut off finger joints.
DeMause believes this kind of wickedness might explain some of the Japanese atrocities of
the second world war.
Japan’s prisons in the past were also well known to be places of regular torture.
In Aztec Mexico kids were hardened by holding them over fires where chili peppers were smoking
and so they would have no choice but to inhale the smoke.
We are told this might cause, “weeping, skin irritation, a strong burning sensation,
prolonged coughing, and difficulty breathing.”
If that didn’t harden them, they were sometimes tied up and stuck with thorns.
You are probably thinking now that this was quite a bit worse that being told to stay
in your room or having your smartphone taken away from you.
Terrorizing If torturing and beating kids didn’t work,
sometimes parents would hurt their children psychologically.
We might recall European folk tales that often included kids wandering off some place only
to be eaten and have their bones ground to dust.
But what about those awful nursery rhymes?
This is one such rhyme some English kids learned when they were just infants:
Baby, baby, baby, if he hears you As he gallops past your house
Limb from limb he’ll tear you Just as pussy tears a mouse
And he’ll beat you, beat you, beat you And he’ll beat you all to pap
And he’ll eat you, eat you, eat you Every morsel, snap, snap, snap
We can imagine that was less entertaining than Sponge Bob, but perhaps those kids were
quiet in bed at night…if not traumatized for life.
No doubt we have missed a few punishments, so we hope you can add something to this list.
Also, what do you think about corporal punishment, from the harshest to the least harsh we have
mentioned.
Do you think it works?
Have you experienced it?
Tell us what you think in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other video, WORST Punishments Kids Received From Their
Parents.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.