There are several answers to this searching question, which is by no means so simple and direct as it sounds. The most obvious one is the retort brutal, i.e., that a great many generations have experimented with that simple method of training children, with the result that family life has been considerably embittered and the children very poorly trained. In other words, that practical experience has shown it to be a very bad method indeed and in use only because we know no better one.
One of the reasons why it is bad is because it confuses two radically different activities in the child’s life, including both under one far too-sweeping command. The child’s ability to handle a glass of water is an entirely different function from its willingness to obey orders. To require of its nascent capacities at the same instant a new muscular skill and the moral effort necessary to obey a command is to invite almost certain failure. Worse than this, and in fact as bad as anything can be, the result of this impossibly compendious command is to bring about a hopeless confusion in the child’s mind which means unnecessary nervous tension and friction and the beginning of an utterly deplorable mental habit of nervous tension and irritated resistance in the child’s mind, whenever a command is given. That this instinct of irritated resistance is not a natural one is proved by the happily obedient older children in the Casa dei Bambini in Rome. Furthermore, anyone who will, under ordinary circumstances, try the simple experiment of asking a little child (too young to have acquired this bad mental habit) to perform some operation which he has thoroughly mastered, will be convinced that obedience in itself involves no pain to a child.
As to the second demand of my Puritan ancestor, which runs, “And force her to use her will-power by punishment,” the same flat denial must be given that proposition. Experience proves that you can prevent a child from performing some single special action by means of external punishment, but that stimulating the proper use of the will-power is something entirely different. Apparently the will-power is more apt to be perverted into grotesque and unprofitable shapes by the use of punishment than to be encouraged into upright, useful, and vigorous growth.