tough love

A humiliated child grows up emotionally crippled, confusing cruelty with love, and sadism with intimacy.

They are the attitudes toward life and self which are likely to induce angry behavior in childhood and lead to a life of impoverished, self-centered, and ultimately futile attempts to meet critical emotional needs - needs that should have been met long ago in childhood.

Tough love was originally intended for adult drug addicts, not for young children still learning about life.

Tough love as used by the parents at the mall only teaches a child the harmful and illogical lesson that deliberately hurting another human being is supposedly "an act of love".

And so it goes through the generations – until schools teach enlightened parenting skills, and new child abuse laws are written that clearly promote the respectful treatment of children, rather than merely offer vaguely defined minimum standards below which a child is deemed to have been abused.

This child learned many things that day at the mall, by the example set by his parents and by those bystanders who did not intervene on his behalf.

As a child, Adolf Hitler was often humiliated and harshly disciplined, while the young Albert Einstein was consistently treated with gentleness, kindness, and patience.

They are the attitudes toward life and self which are likely to induce angry behavior in childhood and lead to a life of impoverished, self-centered, and ultimately futile attempts to meet critical emotional needs - needs that should have been met long ago in childhood.

This confusion of love and pain is surely the origin of the curious "spanking wanted" ads in many alternative newspapers.

Ironically, their behavior is very likely to accomplish just the opposite: a U.S.