‘The Basic Stuff of Our Memories’: Embodying and Embedding Discipline

Introduction

1.1 In recent political debates about physical chastisement, children have been positioned as future selves and have had their bodies ‘zoned’ in particular ways. Comparing these discourses with findings from a research study of parental accounts of disciplinary practices, this article explores how these dominant temporal and physical mappings fit with parents’ understandings of their children and their accounts of disciplining them. It is argued that parents’ talk about physical discipline is temporal not only because it is concerned with the nature of the child's body/self at the time of punishment but because parents engage with memories from their own childhood and, therefore, with how childhood selves have been disciplined across social and biographical time. Drawing on sociological work on the body, memory and childhood to understand how disciplinary practices are constructed allows for two under researched aspects of these practices - their embodied and embedded nature - to be investigated. In what follows, I do this by exploring how children's bodies have been constructed in political debates about physical chastisement in the UK and, through drawing on a research study which looked at how parents themselves think about discipline. I begin by outlining the methodology of this study in more detail.

Project methodology

2.1 In September 2002, just after a proposed age-related ban on physical chastisement had failed to become legislation in Scotland, the Scottish Executive – devolved government in Scotland - published research it had commissioned on parental practices and beliefs about physical chastisement. The data from this research form the basis for the present article ^[1] . The first stage of the research, which preceded the survey element, consisted of a series of 20 qualitative interviews (involving 85 parents) across Scotland (see table 1).

2.2 These interviews were equally divided between individual depth interviews; interviews with couples; conventional focus groups; and ‘peer’ focus groups ^[2] . The focus groups consisted of 6 to 8 individuals and all interviews lasted approximately 1 hour. The moderators for the focus groups introduced a series of topics which offered a rough structure for the discussion. These included general orientation towards issues of discipline; parents’ own experience of physical discipline as children; assessment of effectiveness - and impact - of disciplinary practices; and perception of prevalence of use of different forms of physical chastisement among peers and society at large. Qualitative methods are based on particular forms of interaction and data arising from such approaches are, therefore, likely to be shaped by these interactions (Kitzinger, 1994). The methodological implications of this might usefully be explored in more detail elsewhere; in this article the focus, in order to highlight previously neglected embodied aspects of disciplining, is on those themes which emerged strongly across interview context.

2.3 The aim of the sampling for the qualitative part of the study was not to generate a sample that was representative in a statistical sense but to ensure as wide a range of characteristics as possible were represented. Consequently, the sample was purposive in nature. A short screening questionnaire was used to recruit participants with particular characteristics, door to door. Key sampling variables included sex and socio-economic group and the sample was deliberately structured to include interviews with single parents. In terms of geographic focus, interviews of each type were carried out in different parts of Scotland. This ensured not only that rural and urban areas were included but that a wide geographical area was covered.

2.4 As the proposed ban on smacking was aimed at children aged under three, the qualitative sample was also segmented by age of child: parents with children aged under three and those with children aged three to 11 years. However, in practice, it was not possible to ensure that participants in the former group only had children aged under three. Further analysis on the basis of age, gender and class might be worthwhile though, as noted, this sample has limited scope in this respect. ^[3] All of the interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed and the software package QSR-N6 was then used to categorise, search and retrieve text. Data were analysed within and across cases in relation to emergent themes.

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Table 1.

Characteristics of the qualitative sample

Type of Interview	Age of child	Area	Socioeconomic group	Gender	Other
Conventional Focus Group	1-under 3	Edinburgh	ABC1	Female
Conventional Focus Group	1- under 3	Glasgow	C2DE	Male
Conventional Focus Group	3- under 11	Argyll	Any	Male
Conventional Focus Group	1- under 3	Inverness	Any	Female
Conventional Focus Group	3 under 11	Dundee	C2DE	Male
Peer Group	1-under3	Glasgow	ABC1	Mixed
Peer Group	3- under 11	Edinburgh	C2DE	Female	Single parents *
Peer Group	1- under 3	Argyll	Any	Female
Pew Group	3- under 11	Borders	Any	Mixed
Peer Group-	3- under 11	Dundee	ABC1	Female
Couple	1- under3	Edinburgh	ABC1
Couple	3- under 11	Edinburgh	C2DE
Couple	1- under 3	Glasgow	C2DE
Couple	1 - under 3	Inverness	Any
Couple	3- under 11	Argyll	Any
Individual	3- under 11	Inverness	ABC1	Male
Individual	1 - under 3	Edinburgh	C2DE	Male
Individual	1 -under 3	Borders	Any	Female
Individual	3- under 11	Edinburgh	ABC1	Female
Individual	3- under 11	Glasgow	C2DE	Female	Single Parent *

*

Other than for the interviews with couples, there was no restriction on whether parents were single parents or not. However, to ensure that single parents were included, we selected a single parent as the “lead” member of one of the peer groups and for one of the individual interviews.

2.5 The second stage of the research was quantitative in nature and took the form of a nationally-representative survey of 692 parents carried out in respondents’ homes using Computer Aided Personal Interviewing (CAPI). The sampling for the survey was based on probability techniques involving the random selection of sampling points, of addresses within those points and of individuals for interview at those addresses. A response rate of 55% was achieved. As such, the achieved sample affords a reasonable basis for generalising to the views of parents in Scotland as a whole, though a number of caveats should be noted. First, the achieved sample was relatively small and is not large enough to support detailed sub group analysis. Second, there was a significant under-representation of fathers in the final sample (an indication perhaps that issues to do with parenting and discipline continue to be seen primarily as the responsibility of mothers) and, as a result, the data were weighted to correct for gender imbalance (using information about composition of Scottish households from the Scottish Household Survey). While there was a problem recruiting fathers for the quantitative part of the study, fathers were represented, in roughly similar numbers to mothers, across the qualitative study in individual, couple interviews and peer and conventional focus groups. Finally, the overall response rate among participating households is lower than for some household surveys but reflects the difficulties of identifying eligible households and of persuading fathers to take part.

2.6 The focus of the survey was wide ranging and included use of different forms of physical chastisement with own child in last week; perception of appropriateness of smacking in different situations for different age of children. While this article mainly draws on the qualitative data, where useful, reference is also made to the quantitative data. For example, in exploring parental beliefs about how to discipline children of different ages.

2.7 Before going on to explore what these data can tell us about how parents understand their disciplinary practices, I first engage with the question of how children's bodies have been discursively constructed through political debates about physical chastisement legislation.

Mapping the child's body

3.1 De Certeau (1984) suggests that the law inscribes all bodies, yet some bodies clearly find themselves more inscribed than others. Feminist legal theory has identified how the construction of the legal subject as a ‘rational, autonomous, isolated, disembodied individual’ (Bridgeman, 2002:100) allows the law not only to regulate, but to produce, particular female bodies. These are bodies which the law conflates with ‘emotionality, irrationality, the material and natural’ (Keywood, 2000: 499) and then fragments, reducing women to ‘bits of their bodies’ (Smart, 1989; 95).

3.2 Theorists have also begun to consider how legal discourses produce particular constructions of childhood and, relatedly, of children's bodies (McGillivray, 1997). Some constructions, for example most obviously in relation to child protection, position children as potential or actual victims, while others situate children as citizens, focusing either on their responsibilities (for example, the age of criminal responsibility, see Freeman, 1997) or, more rarely, on their rights, for example, in recent debates about the rights of the child to confidential contraception ^[4] . Therefore, while not applying uniformly to the law, in relation to some areas, the law, influenced by developmental psychology, can be thought of as positioning the child's body as a ‘body with potential’ (Bridgeman, 2002). The child, then becomes understood in terms of ‘lack’ - not yet physically mature and not yet competent - with the result that the law concerns itself with ‘the future embodied by the child and without reference to his or her present experience’ (Bridgeman, 2002: 100). In this context, Alderson (1994) points out, if children are understood to not yet be ‘real selves’, then it becomes possible to argue that ‘there cannot be any real invasion, or integrity to violate’ (1994: 47).

3.3 This focus on the productive nature of discourse draws on Foucault's understanding of the subject as constituted through the particular relationship between power and knowledge. Political and legal discourses are one means through which child subjects have become constituted and then monitored (Brownlie, 2001). To this extent, the body of the child can be ‘disciplined’ both in the sense that it becomes subject to surveillance as a result of knowledges emanating from sites such as parliaments or courts but also in the sense that it can become subject to the hierarchical and coercive power of adults. To some extent, the Foucauldian focus on disciplinary power in relation to children has led to an under estimation of the degree to which children remain subject to more traditional or - to use Foucault's term - sovereign forms of power. This reluctance to acknowledge the physical power adults and, in particular, parents, continue to have over children is not, however, restricted to Foucault's analysis: it is also apparent in other theoretical perspectives which focus on the democratisation of family life (Giddens, 1991). In this article, by looking at political discourses and parental accounts about chastising children, the interplay between disciplinary power and sovereign power in relation to physical chastisement is explored. ^[5]

3.4 What then do discourses about physical chastisement tell us about the disciplining of the child's body? While, as can be seen from the references above, the literature in this area often refers broadly to legal discourses, in fact, such discourses cover a range of practices, including both domestic and international legislation and case law. In what follows, therefore, while I make references to some of these practices, I focus on one particular aspect of legal discourses about physical chastisement in the UK – specifically, political debate about proposed legislation in this area.

Parental accounts: embodying discipline, remembering discipline

4.1 This section engages further with the temporal and embodied themes that were identified above as infusing recent political discourses about physical chastisement in the UK. In the first part, drawing on the Scottish 2002 data, I explore parents’ zoning work in relation to their children's bodies; and, in the second, I discuss how parents describe themselves as ‘punishing adults’ on the one hand, and as ‘punished children’ on the other. Here, as well as drawing on the Scottish data, I also draw on findings from other research studies. This allows for the voices of children who have experienced physical chastisement in the present and the voices of parents from the 1960s and 1970s - when many of the parents in our Scottish study would have been children – to be heard alongside the accounts of the Scottish parents. Finally, in the third part of this section, I draw on sociological work on memory as a further aid in reading parents’ talk about parenting and disciplining

Voices from other generations: parents’ and children's accounts from other research studies

5.1 Newson and Newson's Nottingham studies of parents of four-year olds and seven- year olds, in 1968 and 1976 ^[20] respectively, lend support to what the parents in our Scottish study remember of their childhood. Parents in these older studies, for example, describe using implements (canes, belts, spoons) on a frequent basis; smacking very young children; smacking so as to leave a mark; and smacking around children's faces and on their bare skin. In terms of the shifting social context, it is as significant to note the open way in which parents in these other studies describe these behaviours in research interviews, as it is to read that they took place.

5.2 Willow and Hyder's 1998 study ^[21] of physical chastisement, on the other hand, allows for the perspective of those children on the receiving end of physical chastisement today. These, like the Scottish parents’ accounts of being punished as children, are embodied stories where children clearly describe smacking as ‘hitting’ which ‘hurts’:

5.3 Willow and Hyder found that when children talked about their experience of physical chastisement, they described pain that is not related to a part of the body but to the whole experience of being hit: to return to Christensen's (2000) distinctions, they describe the body incarnate. The physical descriptions above, from Willow and Hyder's study, therefore, may tell us as much about children's emotional pain as their physical pain: the physical pain of chastisement for these children causes emotional hurt, and the emotional pain is experienced physically (Leder, 1984). Children's accounts, therefore, are stories where dualisms are overcome and ‘mindful bodies’ are to the fore (Scheper-Hughes and Lock, 1987). This is encapsulated in the title of Willow and Hyder's research report taken from the description of the experience of physical chastisement by one five-year-old girl from their study– ‘it hurts you inside’. In contrast to recent legislation in England and Wales, children's descriptions of feeling angry and upset ‘inside’ point to pain not as something that can be measured by the redness of skin but as ‘rooted in the lived body’ (Williams and Bendelow, 1998: 210).

5.4 Mayall argues that mothers, through their everyday caring work, are well aware of the links between the physical, emotional and the cognitive (1998: 141) but makes no mention of physical discipline in the home. Yet, in their relatively unembodied accounts of disciplining children, mothers and fathers in our Scottish study appear to rupture the holistic approach to civilising and regulating children described by Mayall. It could be, however, that the emotional intensity of parents’ responses to using smacking, discussed earlier, is in part rooted in an awareness at some level – perhaps grounded in their own memories of childhood - of children as physical, emotional and cognitive beings. In other words, in a recognition that children do experience physical chastisement as ‘mindful bodies’.

5.5 There are, then, at least three ways of understanding the differences in the accounts given by the children in Willow and Hyder's study and the parents in our Scottish study. First, as argued above, children who experience physical chastisement, unlike the adults who administer it, are adopting a holistic approach to what constitutes pain/ harm. Second, we may be picking up again on the significance of age. One of the main differences between our Scottish study and Willow and Hyder's study is the age of the children: while Willow and Hyder (1998) are referring to 5 to 7 year olds, when the parents in the Scottish study are talking about the impact of physical discipline on their children, they are often referring to under-threes – an age group regarded by these parents as pre-rational. By contrast, as noted, when the Scottish parents offer embodied accounts of being disciplined as children, they are often drawing on memories of themselves as older children. Third, parents in Scotland, as we have seen, may be denying to themselves or the researcher how painful (emotionally and/or physically) their use of discipline actually is. In part, this may be because of an awareness, identified earlier, of the moral imperatives acting on parents (Ribbens McCarthy et al, 2000) and, relatedly, because of the changing social acceptability of sharing accounts of using harsh physical chastisement.

5.6 The above analysis points to the significance for parents of memories of being disciplined and the embodied nature of these memories. At the same time, it also highlights the complexity of understanding such memories and their impact on beliefs and behaviours. Through exploring these themes and drawing on voices from other research studies in the past and in the present, the significance of social time - that is, the social context of parenting (and disciplining) now and in the past - begins to emerge. By way of conclusion, then, we ask what sociological work on memory can add to our understanding of the temporal dimensions of discipline?

Embedding physical chastisement

5.7 Oakley (1994), referring to Schachter's (1947) work, suggests that our memories of childhood are shaped by how we learn as adults to think of childhood. Schachter's point is that an adult's ‘way of experiencing’ is different from that of a child: ‘the person who remembers is the present person, a person who has changed considerably, whose interests, needs, fears, capacity for experience and emotion have changed’ (1947: 4). It is also the case, however, that we understand the present, both individually and collectively, in terms of the past (Connerton, 1989:2). Parental selves, like all other selves, are ‘temporal processes’ (Flaherty and Fine, 2001): moving backwards and forwards between past, present and future (Mead, 1932). This is reflected in the parents’ beliefs from the 2002 Scottish study that parenting is something you learn through doing and from having been parented:

It is also reflected in the sense parents from the Scotland study have that parenting impacts on the ‘time future’ of their children- on how their children ‘turn out’.

5.8 How and what parents remember, however, is not just about individual fears and emotions. It is also shaped by social context, both in terms of the social networks we belong to, and in so far as individual memories are ‘ruled and ordered by socially structured norms and patterns’ (Misztal, 2003: 5). Families are a part of the social context in which memories are embedded: it is through them that memories are passed on/down. It is likely, therefore, that some of what parents in the Scotland study remember is shaped by their own parents’ recollections. At the same time, research interactions with others from their generation also shaped the memories these parents shared. While there is not space to explore the idea of generation in detail, I use the term here to imply something more than an age cohort: the idea that through collective memory a group of people can come to have a ‘cultural identity’ (Edmunds and Turner, 2002). This can lead to individuals identifying with a generational culture to which they are not chronologically connected. Parents in this study may share a sense of cultural identity through having experienced the same events – for example, the banning of physical chastisement in Scottish schools in the 1980s - but at the same time they may also identify with their parents’ generation, in part because they have memories from their childhood but also because they share other experiences with this generation including, for example, a sense of an era before children's rights.

5.9 In terms of social norms and patterns, parents in the Scotland study believe that, for their generation, the social context of parenting has changed and, with it, the nature of parent-child relations (Anderson et al, 2002). In particular, as suggested earlier, parents believe that children now have more rights than they had as children; and that this generation of parents has less authority, yet more responsibilities, than their parents’ generation had. They describe a past that was more ordered, compared to the lack of respect in the present.

5.10 This belief in the loss of a more respectful, ordered past is part of a shared cultural understanding in post-traditional societies (Giddens, 1994; Scott, 2000). It is a worldview which, as Loader and Mulcahy (2003) describe it, ‘looks forward to a past’ (p.312). The experience of parents in the Scottish study of the present social context – one where they understand themselves not to have the authority/control/respect that their parents enjoyed - is mediated through the social memory of a more respectful time. This can be heard in those parental accounts where parents compare the fear they felt towards their own parents with the lack of attention their children pay to them. The following extract from a focus group also illustrates how memories come to be jointly constructed between people of the same generation and emphasises again the gendered nature of these: they are, for the most part recalling lost paternal authority. While there is not the space to explore this here, the gendered nature of parental memories of discipline is an area that could be fruitfully explored further

5.11 The Scottish study suggests the current generation of parents have invested in this particular social memory of the past being a more respectful time but it is not clear if this investment will continue indefinitely and if it does not, what will take its place for the next generation of parents. At the same time, it is worth noting that what parents in the Scottish study are also remembering here is not just a particular historical time but the time of childhood: typically for all generations, a more structured, regulated time of life than adulthood.

5.12 The relationship between individual and social memories of discipline can be heard in these Scottish data through parents’ talk about the banning of physical chastisement in schools. Memories of this are prominent in the research accounts - ‘It was the belt in my day’ [Inverness couple, C2DE] - and form part of the construction of a more respectful past – ‘the respect went when they took the belt away’ [Edinburgh female, ABC1].

5.13 As Loader and Mulcahy's found, however, the parents in the Scottish study who mourn the loss of authority, at the same time ‘embody’ the ‘altered world’ (2003:93) brought about by this loss. These parents recognise, for example, that their own parents’ disciplinary practices do not quite ‘fit’ with the current social context, hence their uncertainty – ‘It certainly worked for us but, whether you'd want it for your own kids’ [Dundee male, C2DE] - and the references in their accounts to a ‘modern approach’ to disciplining:

5.14 For a few parents this is a way of managing a tension between, on the one hand – perhaps out of loyalty to own parents– the suggestion that smacking did them no harm, and, on the other hand, their wish not to use similar techniques with their own children. Quantitative data from the Scottish study, however, also points to considerable parental ambivalence – the construction of smacking as last resort – rather than any positive commitment to smacking. This may explain why the more unapologetic construction of smacking as never having done me any harm is largely absent from the qualitative data.

5.15 As much as parents’ memories are embedded in particular social contexts, what this article also argues is that theirs are also embodied memories. For the parents in this study, the importance of bodies for remembering is highlighted by the relevance emotions have for remembering: it is through emotions that the past is felt in the lived body. This was evidenced earlier in the article, in parents’ emotive memories of disciplinary incidents that stood out from their past. Remembering the past is an interpretive process, therefore, and one which involves drawing on meanings in the current social context but also our individual embodied experiences (Misztal, 2003: 77). It is these latter experiences that guarantee that, even though memories are socially mediated, they are, as Misztal argues, and as we have seen in these parents’ accounts, never completely standardised.

Concluding thoughts

6.1 Through an analysis of political discourses and of parental accounts, this article brings together two previously neglected – and interconnected – themes: the embodied and temporal nature of physical chastisement. These themes were apparent across political discourses and parental accounts but with slightly different emphases. Specifically, while both highlighted the physical ‘zoning’ of children's bodies, political discourses about physical chastisement, drew on the notion of the child as a potential self, while parents have a more nuanced concern about the evolving capabilities of the children they are disciplining. In Scotland, as we have seen, there was a brief attempt - albeit through the planned introduction of a crude age cut-off point - to try to incorporate into the law on physical chastisement a more differentiated understanding of children. This was subsequently abandoned – notably not because of a belief that all children, whatever their age, have a right not to be physically disciplined but because of the fear of a parental backlash in relation to ‘criminalisation’ (Brownlie, 2006) - and politicians and legislators once more retreated to concerns about ‘instruments of punishment’ and ‘body parts’.

6.2 Parents also engaged with these temporal and embodied themes through talk about how they were disciplined as children. Given that identities – including our identities as parents – are, in part, made up of memories (Jedlowski, 2001), this is, perhaps, not too surprising. While acknowledging the methodological and epistemological problems of ‘recalling the past’, sociological approaches to memory were drawn on to argue that the current social context – including ideas about parenting and the use of physical discipline – shape how the past is read; yet, at the same time, the past continues to shape the present. It is parents’ engagement with this ‘paradox of memory’ (Jedlowski, 2001) which means that subtler processes are probably at work here than McGillivray's suggestion that the punished child and the punishing adult ‘replace’ one another in other generations (1997: 195). In particular, when talking about physical chastisement, individual parents are describing not only their own practices within particular families and in relation to children of specific ages, but also how they engage with understandings of what it means to belong to the social category ‘parent’ or ‘child’ both now and in the past. To paraphrase Mayall (2002): to understand disciplinary practices is to understand generational processes happening at a number of levels: between individual parents and children; between parents and children as social groups; between people born at different points in history; and in relation to laws handed down (Mayall, 2002: 35). While it adds to the already difficult task of recalling the past, the focus in this article on the embodied nature of physical discipline reminds us that although in legal and political discourses it is the mindful body of the ‘reasonable parent’ rather than the child that is often to the fore, across these different levels, ‘mindful bodies’ are both doing the disciplining and being disciplined.