khaosworks | (Reply)

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Discipline (corporal or otherwise) worked on us because we gave a damn what people thought. Kids today, and even adults today, don't - at least not to the extent they did in the past.

There's a difference between instilling fear and instilling respect.

Any punishment--the idea of which is generally to instill respect for rules and/or the person(s) making the rules--can be taken too far, at which point it instills fear rather than respect. Fear makes people want not to earn punishment. Respect makes people want to earn appreciation. It's a hard line to walk, sometimes, but it does need to be walked, or neither fear nor respect is instilled.

What really bothers me, these days, is that kids aren't taught to respect themselves. I suspect that the sort of thing Terence is talking about "in his day" very much had overtones of "You should have known better, and in fact, we know you know better": disappointment in a failure of judgement, because that judgement--the child's judgement--was respected in the first place. When those in authority don't have that respect for those they have authority over, eventually people lose their self-respect, their sense of personal honor and pride. I think even more problems come from that loss than from a lack of respect for authority.