I won't lie, I still believe strongly in the importance of physical punishment in raising kids because it worked very well during the olden days and during the time I was raised as a child. The only thing I now frown at is how it was done heavily and harshly in those days without proper understanding. Just imagine a situation in school where school fees were to be collected by teachers and they decided to flog the students mercilessly when they fully knew that these children did not have the capacity to pay the school fees by themselves. They chose to use physical beating to pass the message across to their parents. I passed through this myself, and I know how scary it was for us in those days. This is one of the wrong uses of physical punishment that was applauded back then.

But when it comes to the normal and casual physical punishment parents give their children at home, I think that a lot has really gone wrong since the world started implementing the “no punishment” approach in homes. Maybe I haven't moved around enough, but I have seen children of this age behave as if they have no parents controlling them, and it baffles me a lot.

I used to have a family as neighbours, though not direct neighbours. They only had a shop close to us, and they spent most of their day around us. The husband is somehow educated, a policeman, while the woman is a typical village-brought-up woman. She liked using physical punishment to correct her kids, but the dad was never in support of it. Because he was not always around due to his job, anytime she beat the children and he happened to find out, maybe through the children, he would call and rain fire and brimstone. The woman just had to stop because it had led to a lot of fights between them.

Guess what? The eldest child, a boy in his late teens, has dropped out of school and gone into the now very common yahoo(internet fraud). It is not like the money to cater for his education was not there. The money was available because the dad is a salary earner and the mum owns a shop that brings in money for them. He slipped completely out of their control, and the soft and calm warnings the mom later adapted to, did nothing to him. The worst part is that fraudulent activities are now becoming very common and somehow accepted in our society, so parents just let their children be and continue sleeping outside the house.

I am not wishing him or the family bad luck, but with the path he is following, there is a lot of doom ahead, and he needs the positive side of life to help him.

I am not saying that children of those days who were raised with physical punishment did not go astray; they did, but it was more limited. And before they could completely get out of hand, it was possible that the parents must have really tried their best with a note of 'panel beating'. Lol

Those beatings in those days had a way of resetting our "factory settings" and pushing us away from evil.

Is this affecting the world at large?

Of course it is!

It gives me a headache whenever I remember that we are really adopting the foreign culture not knowing that their lifestyle and environment are totally different from ours.

Imagine the situation where a boy of 14 years is already bringing his girlfriend home to pass the night and all the parents could do is just to sit the boy down and try to give him s3x education. And this continues until the girl gets pregnant and ...

Let me stop here.

Thanks for reading.

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