THE WOODEN SPOON, OR, THE EVOLUTION OF CORRECTIVE MEASURES

 I’m listening to some parenting going on outside.

“You’re being emotional,” says a grown-up voice. “In a minute you’ll be heading for a time-out.” This person is talking like a dam holding herself against a screaming tide. I think it’s working.

Is the ‘time-out’ effective? It’s not my field; I came from the age of the wooden spoon, whose mere threat loomed over contraventions far more often than it was ever applied. The time-out here seems a lot less persuasive.

But in this case, I have to admit, it does seem to be working.

I think the TO must have evolved from the ‘naughty-step’. At some point, smacking became unacceptable (and virtually illegal - I’m not sure what the latest guidance is) and children, Millennial children as it turns out, were subsequently dispatched to sit on the lowest step of the stairs, where they could ‘think about what they’d done’. It wasn’t exactly Tom Sawyer - but for some kids the loneliness of that single rung of the naughty staircase must have been somehow effective.

Sammy tells me that you’re not really supposed to use the N word any more. ’Naughty’ is far too negative - you’re supposed to focus on the behaviour rather than the child, and so ‘naughty’ has been replaced with the word ‘challenging’ - which in effect means the same thing, but also invokes a sort of process, an understanding by which everyone involved knows things can, and should be, still redeemed.

I’d have thought about that if I had ever been sent to the ‘challenging step’. I’d have sulked about it too, but I wouldn’t have dreamed of moving from that well-worn carpeted stair, and I’d hope I’d be able to calculate what I could do to avoid that nauseous ten minutes from ever recurring. 

But I am naive, even now about such things. I’ve no idea whether I’d apply the same frame of mind to prison (which is after all, designed to do the same thing) - and I have no desire to test it.

Actually, if you extend the parallels it is interesting how corporal punishment has mirrored capital, isn’t it? Victorian culture focused on punishment for wrong-doing, even to the point of execution. Meanwhile in schools, masters would punish young transgressors with the cane. It wasn’t until much later that correction shifted focus to rehabilitation in both arenas.

The wooden spoon I knew was an overhang from that world - a descendant of the cane or the slipper or the belt. It’s gone now thankfully, and as education and correction have swung away from punitive where possible, so parenting has swung quite naturally towards the ‘time-out’ to rehab, and perhaps to even cleverer ways of developing better, more rounded young people.

It still seems exhausting out there. There’s a lot of boisterous fun and tears and emotion bouncing between the children. I always get the feeling that we’re living two decisions away from a nuclear meltdown. Someone’s being tickled, the tickler doesn’t know when to stop. Someone’s seeing how high they can jump on the trampoline, not realising that their kinetic energy is making their trajectory less controllable on the descent. It’s certainly lively, and there do seem to be some good boundaries in place.

As I say, it’s not my field. It is interesting to think about though.