Quarry Hill, Vermont's Legendary Hip Refuge!

                    
AGAINST PUNISHMENT

We hope to keep the very concept of punishment alien to our children. --Irving Fiske, 1950s.

This is the core-premise of Quarry Hill. 

It is to us as self-evident as it was to Thomas Jefferson that "all men are created equal." 

All children are created aware, awake, filled with enthusiasm and joy-- and so immensely open that our actions toward them can help each to fulfill and retain her or his original delight. For while it may be true, as William Blake says, that the "soul of sweet delight can never be defil'd,"

it can be attacked, stunned, disenchanted, driven underground in a person's psyche, and at the worst, it can be hidden behind impenetrable curtains of hatred, sadism or masochism, and rage. Blake again: "The child that weeps the Rod Beneath writes Revenge in realms of Death."

It does not even have to be corporal punishment, though my parents thought, and we tried to act in the awareness that it was the very worst thing one can do to a child. While verbal insults, the calling of names, and the deprivation of freedom can be horrible too, nothing matches the trauma and shock of having pain inflicted on one's small body by a much larger person. Not only the pain but the loss of control over one's own inner dignity and wholeness, the humiliation, and so many other things-- but the worst is the pain, burning into a child that they are at the mercy of an insane giant, as Irving put it.

However, even depriving a kid of freedom or ordering her or him to spend time alone in a bedroom is a horrible thing to do. It makes the room seem a place of imprisonment, not a cozy place to rest. It makes the child feel an outcast when the best thing to do is to let the child have its own inner freedom. There are other ways of handling difficult behaviors  than punishment. 

It diminishes a child’s joy and inner liberty. to demonstrate one’s power over them.  It diminishes his or her sense of self and freedom. The person who did this ought to know better, having spent time at QH when a child.

With a small child, we can offer a distraction from any activity we would prefer they not engage in. With a slightly older child, we may say "We can't do that," and explain why. We can stand our ground that it can't happen that way. But we should not punish the child.

 They will only remember that they were deprived of something, and be angry and hurt-- and often turn this anger and hurt in upon themselves.

I am holding parents and caregivers to a VERY high standard, and I believe we all must do so, hold ourselves to a high standard. And of course, I was not, as a parent, always perfect. 

But I knew it was wrong-- I never used punishment, and I always apologized for any action of mine that was harsh or unpleasant. My husband and I did not always manage to control our annoyance with one another around the children and we did yell at one another sometimes in their presence. But I did not try to tell the kids that I was right and they were wrong... I told them it was a big mistake on my part when I was not as kind as I ought to be.

Why not try it? Humanity has tried so many things, but except in small pockets, it has never tried absolute openness to kids, utter acceptance, and the refusal to tell them they are bad (they aren't,) to to punish them. What right do we have to do that anyway? Who died and made us God?

If we knew that we already come here as God, or the Life Force, or the core of all things, the Light Within, we might not be so hasty to take out our nastiness on our kids. 

Of course, we have to keep them from hurting one another, or being too unkind, or destroying things, or harming animals. But teaching them patiently why these things are not good is so much better than a blind angry attack on them in the assumption that they are WRONG in some way.

I was a very jealous sister. I hated my younger brother (I was 3 1/2 when he was born, and there had been a lot of upheaval in the family beforehand), and I tried to hurt him, told him I hated him and so on. Now, of course, I wish I hadn't. But I think my mother, my parents, could have found better ways to keep the tensions from becoming so intense between us. For one thing, neither of us knew many other kids. We were always traveling. If we had been able to each have more companions of our own age, and had not been thrown together so much, I think we would have been less involved with one another and less inclined to attack (my brother once dug a pit with sharp stakes at the bottom and leaves over the top for me to fall into). 

We can do better, and we must. Give up the traditional weaponry of parenthood, and open the gate to a more loving and peaceful life--even if at times it isn't as simple a solution as punishment, which after all ends up far less simple in the long run. 

Phoro--BRANDON KITCHEN of his twins, Castiel and Christian.