The more I think about this, the more I think kids need to be indoctrinated with small and planned amounts of shame to build basic socially desirable habits, like refusing to lie, refusing to steal, refusing to cheat, standing their ground when society for some reason needs them to, etc.
We are experimenting with children with no shame, and it is ugly.
But what I would suggest is that this shame should also have an end. The brain is a pattern building organism, and ingrained patterns become habitual. Once socially positive patterns become habitual–genuine tolerance would be another desirable end–then that person needs to have explained to them that all moral rules are relative, and they should, by some process, have their innate shame removed from them, as a sort of mark of full membership in society.
In other words, when you are a child, you should be taught habits, as reinforced by rewards and punishments.
When you become an adult, you should be taught to think and feel clearly, and your training wheels should be taken off.
Here is the thing: we have done it both ways. Obviously, the more important of the two for the survival of society is bringing up kids who are not little psychopathic narcissistic, dishonest, cheating monsters. I would hope the need for this is obvious. And it seems obvious that this is what we–in far too many cases–are IN FACT DOING in the United States and elsewhere right now. These kids have not only not been spanked, they haven’t even been yelled at or disciplined in any way. In far too many cases, their parents have even kowtowed to them. Let’s call these little shits Ryan’s.
Most traditional societies, as Peters points out, do not fail to socialize their children.
But at the same time, this shame also bleeds out in all sorts of bad ways. It is not best in the LONG run. And perhaps in important respects a large part of many spiritual traditions is undoing the socializing of the kids. You beat them to prevent a societal train wreck, then they spend the rest of their lives trying to get unstuck. Not an optimal system.
To my mind, trauma is really THE psychological topic. Everything relates to it. Everything returns to it. It affects all aspects of “society” (a non-existent entity it still makes sense to talk about). It informs our politics. It informs our science. It informs our universities.
And I will actually comment too that parents who beat their kids are still connected to them. They are showing them a way forward. Do this, and you will be fine; do that, and you will regret it. But in traditional societies, if you perform your role, all is well and in relative balance.
So many kids in the computerized West spend ages maybe as young as five through their teenage years locked in their rooms, being socialized by images on flickering electric screens. The parents are locked out, emotionally and almost physically. This breeds, in my view, the trauma of inattention. We all need emotional attunement. We need people in our lives to recognize and react to what we are feeling. Without that mirroring some part of the psyche fails to develop. And we see this with these psychopathic kids, who, in any image that occurs to me over and over, are like bread that was baked before it had fully risen. It is a doughy mess in the middle. There is density where there should be light and air.
This makes them angry, frustrated, and searching, without knowing they are searching. And it makes it VERY easy for them to form and find enemies, especially those given to them by people not as different from Emperor Palatine as they should be, in an open and formerly broadminded democracy.
Think about this phrase “molding character”. You optimally put a kid into a certain shape, to begin with; and what they do with it after that is what makes it interesting watching their life unfold. You give them a basic shape, then permission to alter it as they see fit.
It can’t be said too often that all our problems have solutions, but we need to be open in our discussions of them.
And all large problems start as small problems. Global problems of consumption and greed and pollution all started in homes somewhere, with specific parents and care-givers, or care-withholders, as the case may be. We all start as a sperm and an egg. We are all helpless for the first 5-10 years of our lives. All complexity begins as simplicity. If you want to fix the complexity, then fix the simplicity.