Children are supposed to question authority and occasionally disobey. It is how they learn who they are separate from their parents and how they learn to think for themselves.

No amount of mindless obedience is worth sacrificing that.

Teaching a child obedience does nothing to “train” him for life when he DOESN’T have an authority figure lurking over his shoulder dishing out the orders and guidance. They need to know why certain things are silly and unwise and why not to do them beyond “dad said so.”

My parents never had to “train” me. Because I DO have reason. And as a reasonable being, like any child, we have the capacity to be reasoned with, to learn respect.

Ultimately, his training is about fear. The kids obey him because he causes them pain when they don’t. If they were adults we wouldn’t even come close to finding this acceptable. Violence as coersion is barbaric – how is it less so when applied to children

His household is about tyranny – he is deliberately setting up situations to tempt his kids into disobedience to prove his dominance over them. He calls them just to make them come to him, to acknowledge his power over them.

He doesn’t see children, he sees chattal.

I have a much-younger brother, and when I was home for the holidays last December, my dad was trying to get my brother to go to bed. My brother put up a fight, they yelled at each other for a while, and my dad said, “You need to learn obedience,” as if obedience were an essential character trait for people to have, like honesty or generosity. I was like, “Dad, he’s thirteen. He’s past the point of mindless obedience. He needs to start learning how to make his own decisions for the right reasons.” Then I just got a lecture about being a know-it-all. I know I don’t have kids and don’t fully understand the frustration of them behaving badly (though I have done my fair share of babysitting, so I have some idea), but I’m pretty sure raising a kid isn’t about making them do whatever you want them to do. It’s about preparing your kid to be a responsible adult living independently. Spanking them into submission seems to betray a lack of understanding of your kid as anything other than a possession or extension of yourself.

I agree fully that pain as discipline teaches lying. People will go to great lengths to avoid pain. Children lie to avoid pain because by inflicting pain we violate their trust. It only gives them more reason to lie.

Fucked me up for years, that one did. I learned fear and how to lie very well indeed.

And the quoted writer is wrong on several counts. Close-order marching drill doesn’t have much military value now, but it sure did when trying to move hundreds of soldiers armed with twenty-foot pikes across a battlefield without them stabbing each other with them. These days it’s purely for show and for tradition’s sake, but it really did have a purpose once. Not to mention that instant unquestioning obedience in modern war gets you and the people around you killed. Though the military does like to break down any existing value system and install its own.