Originally published in the Women's Column in the Weekly Herald (Adelaide), 21st December 1894.
The matter of punishing children in the past has surely been carried to the extreme of barbarism. That saying of Solomon's (he could not have been as wise as he was reputed if he did say it) " Spare the rod and spoil the child," has, I am sure, been the cause of no end of child abuse. I believe you should rather reverse the saying. Many more children have been spoiled and ruined by the rod than have ever been ruined by the lack of it.
Some parents punish children just because they feel like it—out of personal spite, perhaps, or under the impulse of anger. The answer of the boy to his father is pertinent here, and the solemnity of the meaning will be not the less even if you smile. "Johnny," said the father, "do you know why I am going to whip you?" expecting of course, a confession on the part of the child of the particular fault he had been guilty of. " Yes, father, I know; 'tis because you're bigger than I am." That is generally the reason.
Fathers and mothers have no rights of this sort—only the right to train the child by love, by force if must be, into the highest, into the noblest ideals of right; to let the child feel that its parents are the servants of that which is highest and noblest in themselves, and the one thing they have to do is to cultivate and develop that in him.
Source: Women's Column. (1894, December 21). Weekly Herald (Adelaide, SA : 1894 - 1898), p. 3.
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