When a good word and example do not suffice

When I read the article on children's rights and smacking I was dumbfounded. I asked myself, now who is this lawyer Caillin Mackenzie who wants to dictate to us Maltese what to include and not to include in our statute book? The removal from our laws that allows "reasonable chastisement" would render the parents in a helpless situation.

Children need to be guided. Sometimes a good word and example do not suffice.

They have to be taught that if they persist in error, harm would come their way. So they must be made to feel the parents control harm by way of a slap on their buttocks so that they realise you mean business and the pranks they have indulged in should not be repeated. This is the only way certain children learn.

By the time they grow older they realise that they must behave in order to be accepted in civilised society. If the parents do not have the full trust of their children, the latter will succumb to peer pressures that would ruin them.

I speak from 24 years of teaching in the Primaries. I used the ferula. The use of this blessed tool was indulged in but never in anger nor deferred. Sometimes it was used just as soft mimicry as a reminder so that the pupil would desist from a stupid and silly repetition. I meet my former pupils often. They still affectionately call me "sir" and my heart glows with pride that I am still loved. No one mentions the ferula. There were pupils who never had the need of it.

Please Dr Mackenzie do not threaten us with the United Nations on this. We can believe the United Nations interest in the welfare of children when this organisation calls for immediate international outlawing of abortion. I do not speak from a religious point of view but from the love of children. Every human has had to have a period of nine months gestation. He/she had to undergo this development in the womb as a part of the process of developing into a human being.

Such is nature. Killing a person in his mother's womb or when 40 years old is murder. Thankfully our law still considers that as murder. If humanity had to indulge in murders like abortion, economically it is better to kill humans just when they reach the pensionable age when they become unsustainable. At my age I would not vote for it. But no, no one dares introduce a law of this type yet many consider it lawful to kill humans when about to be productive for scores of years.

As a last remark, I beg the authorities to consider what has happened to countries who have removed the reasonable chastisement law. Many of their youths in big cities are all armed with knives and sometimes guns too. Do we want to reach that situation?