One of the major social plagues that came out of the socio-cultural paradigm shift that began in the 1960s was the pathological notion that one’s feelings represent a reality to which others should defer. It’s schizophrenic, actually, that YOU think YOUR feelings should be EVERYONE’S reality—a form of delusions of grandeur where “Do unto others…” becomes “Everyone should do unto the Almighty YOU as YOU would have them do, and AMEN to that!”
I was in graduate school (1969 – 1972) when the mental health professional community cut from whole cloth that communicating to a child he had done something wrong, bad, disgusting, rude, anti-social, et cetera—all of which young children can be counted on to do at times (some more than others) in one way, shape, or form—was harmful to the psychological health of the child, even abusive, blah blah blah. Being told he had behaved badly lowered self-esteem and caused him to believe HE was BAD, like, to the bone, and didn’t deserve to live, blah blah blah.
The new expert parenting class reserved its most powerful broadsides for punishment, especially spanking. According to the FUDDS (PhDs, phonetically), punishment was coercive and caused children to obey out of fear rather than a genuine desire to do the right thing. As a further consequence, punishment taught children to be secretive and deceptive—to develop, in other words, a criminal mentality.
One researcher, who was later accused, and quite rightly, by his former research assistant, of manipulating data to produce results that supported his anti-punishment thesis, claimed to have discovered that almost all incarcerated violent criminals had been spanked as children.
