They have to believe you will hurt them

By now, you have likely heard about the New York school monitored hassled by a sorry assemblage of today's youth.  The woman has decided against pressing charges and what do you want to be that none of the kids' parents are going to take action, either?  Maybe I will be wrong but I doubt it, and it is doubt based on simple observation - bad behavior, particularly involving youths, is hardly ever punished. 

Adults have willfully ceded not just control, but authority, over the young through well-intentioned (and aren't bad outcomes usually associated with good intentions?) but misguided attempts to police behavior through time-outs, talking, and other benign measures.  You want to make your kid, or someone else's, stays in line?  To quote a character from an episode of the "House" television series some time back, "They have to believe you will hurt them." 

Now, this does not imply that physical punishment should be used exclusively or even often as a means of discipline.  But either it or some similarly harsh measure has to be on the table and those in your charge have to know that this measure is most certainly an option.  My two boys, now 28 and 25, collectively got about five spankings while growing up.  However, and this is the key point, they knew that a spanking was a potential outcome if they acted stupidly.  I did not waste their time or mine with meaningless three-counts to convince them to stop whatever they were doing, we did not engage in corner-sitting or in losing television privileges. 

No, the consequences for the worst offenses were swift and they were unpleasant.  That is why they were effective.  You cannot spank a child for every silly thing that occurs; all that does is make spanking meaningless and, when really bad things occur and a parent has to escalate punishment, well, the next step up from spanking is abuse.  Not good.  Because harsh sanctions existed and because they were harsh, really bad behavior happened so seldom I cannot even recall why the boys ever got one of the few spankings either ever received. 

On a broader point, some have characterized the actions of the NY monsters as bullying, a term seen almost continuously in the news.  Want to know the best means of stopping a bully?  Smack him in the mouth.  Period.  The bully's target does not have to actually win a fight; he/she only has to show willingness to engage in one.  Ironically, bullies are generally cowards and the first sign of pushback is usually enough to make them go away.  Unfortunately, the people who many expect to know better actually do not know better. 

School officials usually respond to confrontations by treating instigation and retaliation as the same thing, which anyone with two working brain cells, let alone an advanced degree, knows is untrue.  When instigation draws no response and, more important, no sanction, what do you suppose happens?  A gold star if you said "more instigation."  If nothing of substance happens to the kids in the NY case - and by substance, I mean the system bans them from riding the bus, from extra-curriculars for a year, their parents do something like suspend the little darlings' cell phone service - then you can expect the same kids to harass someone else until they run across the proverbial wrong person. 

At that point, the response will be wholly disproportionate to its trigger and a lot of grownups will engage in ritual hand-wringing and navel-gazing about the need for expanding conflict-resolutions methods that are already ineffective.  Frankly, I am tremendously disappointed that the bus monitor is not filing charges.  That makes her an accomplice and an enabler in what will likely be more bad behavior from this group of miscreants.  

Look for a lot of editorials tut-tutting the state of youth and decorum, and a lot of television pundits bloviating about the same.  The one thing you will not see is someone suggesting that sometimes, an old-fashioned ass-whipping goes a long way toward sending a message that certain behavior is simply not going to be tolerated if we are to have a civil society.