December 22, 2009

Dear Sir,

Your columnist, Sheelagh Cooper, has missed a number of important points in her "Opinion" today.

However prior to making my point, let me tell a story about a family. On the day their first child was born, the father lost his job and was out of work for 18 months. The father managed to scrape by, growing vegetables and raising chickens, both for the eggs and also for meat. He finally got a job with local government and stayed in that position for 25 years. Eighteen months after getting this job, they had a second child. They rented accommodation and did not have a car or a refrigerator.

If anything was required for the household, it was not purchased unless it could be paid for in cash. Without a refrigerator, food was purchased on a daily basis. To get to the stores, they would walk and to get to work, ride a bicycle or catch the bus. No washing machine or drier was in the house so clothes were washed by hand and hung out to dry on a line. Obesity was not a problem because walking was an exercise practiced every day without the children realising it. The children did not sit around watching television and were kept occupied playing football, cricket, taking the dog for a walk.

Youth programmes did not exist in those days and the reason for that was there happened to be a war on, the Second World War. People were bombed out of their houses, children going to school were fired at by German planes, however many survived although a lot of them were killed. School in those days for the children was only for half a day, because a lot of evacuees flooded the area and they had to be educated too.

These children were given three things in life, love, and education and discipline.

Now I am not a criminologist, however, I do have something which is missing with a lot of people these days, and that is what is old fashioned common sense.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of so called do gooders in this world who call discipline abuse. There is a very big difference between the two. Children who are told "No!" and given discipline from an early age, and I mean two years of age, will grow into responsible citizens.

The time has come when discipline needs to be exercised in the home and then later in the school. When we get back to good old common sense, we will eliminate a lot of the problems we have today. This will not occur overnight and it will take some 20 years before we will see the benefits of exercising discipline with love.

The first step is to remove the wimps from this world, second restore discipline and three make sure the children are given an education.

By the way, the family I talked about, was mine.

ANTONY SIESE

City of Hamilton