Talk Back

[malabar]

subtitle: The Roots of Violence in Child-rearing

Dr Alice Miller was trained as a psychoanalyst, but in 1979, after twenty years of practicing psychoanalysis, she decided psychoanalysis was not the best way to help people. She came to believe that it would be better to write about the parent-child relationship, so that people could see how parents and teachers unintentionally damage children even when they believe they are acting in the best interests of the child. She wanted to show how the belief that hurting children is good for them has been perpetuated from one generation to the next.

In this book she coins the term "poisonous pedagogy" - the set of beliefs about child raising that include corporal punishment as well as mental and emotional cruelty. To Miller, the mistreatment of children is directly responsible for the creation of terrorists, dictators, and serial killers. Even so-called "spoiled" children are not, in fact, being given anything and everything they want; they are being given material objects in place of the attention and affection that they actually crave. This constitutes the spoilage.

It is not so much the actual fact of mistreatment, she asserts, but the lack of outlets for mistreated children to express their fear, pain, and anger that leads to trouble. Even the most brutalised adult, say in a concentration camp, is freer than a child in that the adult is not required or expected to love his or her tormentors and can therefore hate them or conspire against them much more easily. The experience of an adult's suffering alongside other adults is also much more easily validated than that of a child who is brutalised behind closed doors.

Schooling is often just a continuation of the humiliation and punishment experienced at home, says Miller, particularly in an atmosphere of smacking and bullying. A sensitive child who has already been made to doubt his or her own self-worth will fare even worse under these circumstances.

Some quotes:

[shaw]

There is a BIG Christian-led corporeal punishment backlash these days. It's all over the "parenting community" now, but I'm sure it will hit the mainstream media in the next few years.

[malabar]

Backlash as in "corporal punishment is a good thing because God says so"? Scary. When I was looking at other reviews, I found this book quoted on a "Christians should stop beating their kids" site.