HOME DISCIPLINE

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 47, Issue 2669, 13 September 1937, Page 2

HOME DISCIPLINE

PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN. Home discipline and punishment were discussed by Lord Horder, Physician-in-Ordinary to the King, in an address to teachers. “Far too often,” he said, “the encouragement of self-expression in the very young animal is but a fawning on the inchoate and the anti-social element of its nature, the very things that need discipline and control. I do not believe that any young animal can be properly trained without discipline and control. I know nothing more pathetic than to see a child suffering from the result of being allowed to exercise its own egocentric tendencies, and I am not at all sure but that much of the boredom and fatigue of soul of many young men and women to-day is due to the slackening of home discipline during childhood. “Personally, I attach tremendous significance to the cultivation of good habits very early in life; the insistence upon the repetition of unpleasant actions which are useful to the body and mind until they become pleasant and automatic. And if such insistence demands some form of punishment or penalty in order to eliminate or —shall I say?—sublimate original sin, then I favour a system of penalties.”