PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19143, 28 October 1927, Page 9

PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN.

♦ PSYCHOLOGISTS' VIEWS. USEFULNESS OF SPANKING. (BX CABLE-PRJtSS ABPOCIATIOK—COriRIGBT.) (AUSTRALIAN A.VD N.Z CABL» ASSOCIATION.) LONDON, October 26. When the desirability and usefulness of spanking -was being discussed by leading psychologists, Mr Leonard Darwin recalled that children were spanked a million years ago. We had been saying "don't," and enforcing the command by making small boys tingle on a soft safe place since man became man. If each generation had become slightly more docile, what a little horror the primitive child must have been! Doctor Hadfield, lecturer on psychology at King's College, expressed the opinion that a child often welcomed a spanking as the only means of getting him out of a' condition of sulkincss. He did not advocate corporal punishment, but it was often a short and effective way of righting a moral wrong. It was not the smacking which mattered, but the way the child was smacked. Meanwhile a Willesden magistrate faced a concrete problem. He granted the application of a girl of 38 to take out a summons against her father for smacking her, saying: "With the new vote for girls in prospect, 18 is too old for slapping. You can summon* your father."