Do You Hit Your Employees? And The Children?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

I accidentally turn on the radio and bump into: "Do you hit your business partner or work colleague if he did not do what he promised?" And there are many calls. One says that in general he is against violence in the service, but recently there was a case: he could not restrain himself, left one for his own benefit: he did not want to start a new project, a rascal, but how talented … Another says that his boss beat - and nothing, but became a good specialist …

Say: "It can't be!"

But insert “children” instead of “subordinates” and “colleagues”, and such a discussion, alas, is quite possible.

The other day I had the misfortune to hear this on popular radio. The presenters, listeners and experts seriously discussed the legality of physical punishment.

They didn’t speak for flogging on Saturdays, but they fully admitted that … there are cases … nothing remains. And the expert (director of one of the centers of the Moscow Psychological Aid Service) did not give an categorical answer to the presenter's question: "How, from the point of view of scientific psychology, is it possible to use physical punishment?" Was crumpled.

I do not know how they think in the city center, but the fact is:: Russia has ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Article 19: “States Parties shall take all necessary legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to protect the child from all forms of physical or psychological violence, abuse or abuse, neglect or neglect, abuse or exploitation, including sexual abuse by parents, legal guardians or any other person caring for the child."

And in scientific psychology, physical punishment has not been discussed for a long time as a possible way of influencing a child - at least 70 years old - this is not a field for scientific discussion. Everything is clear: physical punishment of children is unacceptable. You cannot beat for educational purposes. Spanking, whipping, slapping and any other means of inflicting pain are prohibited. And no variations of the type: "To push for the cause", "To spank once."

Lloyd De Mose, psychoanalyst and director of the Institute of Psychohistory in New York, author of the psychogenic theory of history, views the entire history of mankind as a consistent change in the styles of parenting. His idea is that economic and political changes in society follow changes in educational approaches, and war, like other types of political violence, reflects the way children are raised. The scientist believes that the time has come for a “helping” style, which is characterized by attention to the needs of the child and the absence of domestic violence. But he notes that Eastern Europe, including Russia, lags far behind the West in this regard: "To this day, tight swaddling, regular beatings and child abuse are common in many former Soviet republics and Eastern European countries." The scientist writes: “The more I study war from the point of view of psychohistory, the more I become convinced that all wars are perverse … rituals, the purpose of which is to get rid of the intolerable feeling that they do not love you, the result of previous traditions of raising children … I suspect that economic goals war is just a rational excuse … If the nightmare of war begins in a childhood nightmare, then a new spirit of love and freedom in the family may turn Europe from an eternal battlefield into a quarreling but peaceful continent."

Lyudmila Petranovskaya, family psychologist, specialist in family placement of orphans, author of books on the psychology of family and children: “If in the process of learning a child is obliged to constantly overcome excruciating stress, if he can be humiliated, offend, then he does not study. He's tense all the time. This is how our brain works: if it perceives a situation as dangerous, the rescue mode turns on, stress hormones are released. All energy is for salvation from danger. And the cerebral cortex, which consumes the most energy in the body, is on a starvation diet and stops functioning. The part of the brain, which is responsible for sorting information and putting it on the shelves, begins to work as a panic button and turn on the siren. The student must feel safe, then he will study well. And if he spends all his mental energy on tracking threats from parents who are waiting at home with a belt, then no training will follow for purely physiological reasons. And it’s not the point that he was poorly explained, he didn’t understand something, or didn’t want to get an education. It's just physiology."

Maria Shapiro, neuropsychologist, director of the psychological service of the speech therapy center “Territory of Speech”, clarifies: “If a child constantly lives in stress, in fear, this almost inevitably leads to the formation of neurotic mechanisms. With their help, the psyche is protected from overload. This, in turn, leads to the depletion of all functions. The child cannot concentrate, cannot build a plan of activity, he begins to avoid everything new as dangerous. One of the most common stories in psychological counseling: parents complain that the child has learning problems or is uncontrollable. It turns out that he has no problems in the cognitive, cognitive sphere. But his psyche is in a depleted state. And, as a rule, it turns out that at home they either yell at such a child all the time, or are severely punished, or both.

Sometimes you can hear from adults: they say, nothing - they beat me, and I studied to be an A, and I don't remember any exhaustion, and in general I was the first in everything. But if you dig deeper, it often turns out that, despite their success, such people do not feel happy, experience constant stress and often, even having achieved success, do not feel it as their own, because they are used to embodying other people's desires, not paying attention to their own..

“Physically punishing a child is despicable, because the child is small, he loves his parents, he depends on them. Already this should be enough not to practice this method of influence and to keep oneself from it even in a state of passion, - considers Natalia Kedrova, a child psychotherapist, the largest representative of Russian gestalt psychology and a mother of five children. - But if we talk about the consequences for the psychological status of the child of physical punishment, they are horrendous. The experience of fear, pain, experience of humiliation inhibits development, a person loses the ability to defend himself and more and more often chooses freezing out of three possible reactions to stress - to defend himself, run or freeze. It is difficult for such a person to learn, difficult to choose. The person who has been humiliated feels the need to regain self-esteem, and often children who are beaten are aggressive towards other children, especially those who are younger. And it doesn't end in childhood. The experience of facing rage hurts. A person who was abused in childhood lives his whole life with the feeling that there is something inside him that needs to be killed, he feels very bad. In adulthood, such people either become very insecure parents, afraid of their feelings towards the child, or go the usual way and become parents-rapists."