How to punish your children
Walking back from the shops just now, I passed what looked like a kid’s birthday party: balloons, noise, wailing, blood, the usual. A mother was chastising her son: “No! You’re going to be in BIG TROUBLE!” It’s clear that children need to be disciplined but I don’t find these off-the-peg chidings very effective. What we need are the right kind of punishments. I am uniquely qualified to offer advice to parents: I know nothing about children, so I see the matter with a proper detachment. My conclusions are wholly scientific.
If children are not punished they will fall into bad habits and bad habits lead to drug addiction, petty crime, and — eventually — prostitution and murder. On the other hand, if children are punished too much they will grow up to hate authority and will eventually become Communists. How can the modern parent choose the right punishment? The answer is simple: the punishment must be both firm and comical. It must be administered with scowling severity; and it must (retrospectively) induce mirth. Here are some examples:
1. The offender must play tedious 80s computer games for 36 hours without sleep, food, or drink. It’s worth investing in an old Amstrad CPC 464 and shopping around for the worst 80s computer games.
2. The offender is set to memorise poetry, measured out according to the severity of the offence. For example, failing to salute either parent merits 20 lines, but murder or swearing would obviously call for a good 100 lines, at least. Poetry should be in an unfamiliar language, so for the typical American monoglot Rilke or Dante would work well. Obviously, memorising bad poetry would be a grave affliction, but Science has shown that bad poetry corrupts the mind so we must stick to the good stuff. However, the offender may come to enjoy good poetry, if he understands it, hence Dante, Rilke, etc. Remember to award extra punishments for bad pronunciation.
3. A good follow-up to Punishment 2: set the offender to read and summarise parts of Derrida’s Of Grammatology. Remember, Derrida is your friend — but your child’s natural adversary.
4. The offender must invent new punishments for himself.
5. The offender must watch Tarkovsky’s Mirror every night for a week, and then act out the entire film in front of his entire school. His young friends are encouraged to pelt him with rotten fruit if he fails to really communicate the genius of Tarkovsky.
I think that’s enough to be getting on with. Remember: the children are our future.
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Do you suggest any kind of age guidelines, or do you feel these sample punishments would be equally effective for children of all ages, from 0 to 18? And do you feel a week of watching, and subsequent reenactment, of Mirror should fit any crime, or might Nostalgia and Sacrifice be more appropriate in more severe cases, such as forgetting to do chores or murdering a member of any segment of population that is not white male, i.e., hate crime? Please advise. Since I have no children either, I find this to be a matter of vital importance and urgency.
Oh, these are just guidelines – feel free to adapt them as seems best. Perhaps Kieslowski’s Decalogue films – without subtitles, of course – would also be useful. And of course there is also just plain old military discipline – head-shaving etc.
I am particularly fond of punishment number 4. I would like to see more physicality involved in the punishments as they seem to be mostly mind-numbing tediousities. May I suggest a thousand hopscotches on the left leg, or one two hundred spins on the merry-go-round.