Proper child-raising requires firm rules

The world has probably never changed as quickly and drastically as it has in the last two generations. However, most developments have been limited to the so-called Western world. In South America, Africa and all of Asia, on the other hand, people still live by the same rules that their grandfathers knew. This also applies to the education of the next generation.

Tell a father in the Brazilian favela that his son would suffer mental damage from a well-deserved beating, and you will be met with amused shaking of the head. Try to stop an Indian from beating up his daughter for defying his orders, and he'll think there's something wrong with you. Parenting sometimes just has to hurt. In the vast majority of countries in the world, people know that and don't even think about changing it.

In the Western world, it was mainly the 60s that changed everything. This was the time when the youth rebelled. It was the years when the world was changing faster than ever before, and the young generation thought they knew everything better than the old people with their dusty views. And it was the time when scientific knowledge was the measure of all things, and the words of psychologists suddenly carried more weight than generations of experience.

It was also the time when the cane first disappeared from classrooms and a little later was hardly, if ever, used at home. Because beatings supposedly damaged a young person's psyche, and a spanking was suddenly considered an act of violence that did not fit into our supposedly so enlightened modern society. Since the 1960s, beating parents were primarily linked to the lower classes, and according to public opinion, the fathers were usually alcoholics.

Since then, the vast majority of children have grown up without ever having received more than an occasional slap or light spanking. If something like this happens in a TV movie, the scene usually ends with the father apologizing to his adolescent daughter for his inconceivable "assault" or the mother bursting into tears because she has let herself go like this. Two generations earlier, mother would have fetched the wooden spoon and really hit the misbehaving brat, or the girl would have rolled on the floor while father tanned her butt with the leather strap.

But they still exist, conservative parents who don't let their children ride roughshod over them, but who take stern action when the three-year-old refuses to parry or the thirteen-year-old has gone too far.

Most of the time, the parents in question look back on a strict upbringing themselves. Or they simply go through the world with their eyes wide open and see where the generally widespread abandonment of any kind of upbringing leads. They simply don't allow a teenager to tell them what cell phone to buy and what brands to wear. They want to decide when their daughter has to be home in the evening, and they insist on smacking her if she doesn't know how to behave.

In such families, there are also fixed rules that the children have to abide by. "Every pair of jeans the little girl wears, every T-shirt and every pair of underpants was paid for by my money," are the words of such a conservative father. "So it's also me who determines what she must do and what she should refrain from. And she knows that if she doesn't comply, it will hurt."

Another father has very specific ideas about the freedoms his daughter is entitled to: "If nothing else has been agreed, she has to be home by six at the latest. If something comes up, she needs to call us so that we know and can react accordingly. She has a cell phone for this purpose, the cost of which we pay."

There are also very clear rules in this house when it comes to the Internet: "She has her own laptop. She's also allowed to use social media, except that she's forbidden to make her own posts. And she knows that we have full access to the computer and cell phone and control that, too."

The daughter is 13 and knows exactly what she'll face if she doesn't follow the rules. So do her six-year-old sister and the three-year-old son of the house. They, too, know the rules, and they also know that every violation of the house's internal laws has consequences: "For every violation of a rule, there is a predetermined number of marks in the penalty book. Friday evening is the day of reckoning. Then the major and minor offenses add up and the dashes are totaled."

This sounds bureaucratically fastidious, but the father is convinced he is providing justice with this simple procedure. No offense goes unpunished, and each child knows exactly whether he or she should be afraid of the reckoning on Friday, or whether the evening will go off without a hitch. Whereby the attentive father makes sure that nothing goes unpunished: "The children then have the chance to confess to rule violations not entered in the punishment book. If they don't confess something and we know about it, then the number of strokes for the respective offense doubles."

So Friday is the day of reckoning in this family and one can assume that there are hundreds of other families where things are similar. Contrary to general opinion, especially in educated circles, people still attach great importance to a consistent upbringing that gives children structure and support. The result are teenagers who know how to behave and have internalized certain values, because: "Children need clear rules and structures. That's the only way they can learn what's important in life. Without rules, a society eventually disintegrates, which has never been more evident than in our time."

Sometimes teachers, who nowadays mainly have to deal with children to whom something like training is absolutely foreign, wonder why there are always individual students who still have good old-fashioned politeness. But parents with seemingly old-fashioned values rarely talk about their recipe for success. And they are especially wary of talking about it with a teacher for whom a non-violent upbringing is the measure of all things, and who probably will even conclude that well-behaved children are actually traumatized children who have never been able to live out their personality. After all, what all the egalitarian educators think must be right. Even if the vast majority of the world sees it completely differently.

"Our Three know that there are painful consequences to not following the rules. Most of the time, a Friday night of reckoning goes by without them having to face the consequences for any misbehavior. Sometimes a few slaps on the butt are necessary. Only relatively rarely is a real spanking called for. Then it's free yourself up to the belly button and lay over the sofa tendon, because a real offense deserves real welts."