In this country, there’s an unfortunate trend towards leniency. Not in foreign policy, not in the courts, but in the homes across the nation where small children are growing up and quietly learning the lesson that they don’t really have to follow the rules at all. Parents everywhere have stopped undertaking their fundamental duty to their children, which is to instill the fear of a merciless God, and instead have become dangerously lax towards these toddler terrorists. See, this is the problem. Children are naturally, and I say this as one who has baby-sat countless times and remains essentially childish in nature, evil. They have no respect for law or common decency or danger. You leave your child alone for ten minutes, and they’ll set your house on fire and poke the dog in the eye. (Maybe that was just me.)

My point is that kids are inherently criminal. And it’s the parents’ job to teach them what law is and drive them ever closer to being real human beings. It’s a tough trick to pull, but then, you chose to have a kid, or not – maybe you’re from South Dakota. You have a responsibility to the human race to not raise your kids to be annoying or failures.

But this brings us to a question: What is the difference between abuse and discipline? Is the line blurry?

The answer is no.

Discipline is reasoned, deliberate and preexisting. If you tell a kid, “if you eat those cookies, you’re going to get a spanking,” and then the kid eats them, you should spank them. You told them the rules, they broke them.

Abuse is angry, uncontrolled and random. It’s what happens when discipline stops being about improving the child’s behavior and starts being about power, control or violence. It’s representative of a severe malfunction of basic instincts, and people who willingly engage in it are subhuman.

I intend to have a great many kids someday. I would guess that, given my genes and those of the people I intend to procreate with, they will have temperaments like a rabid goldfish. And I’m going to have to raise them up to be real people – at the very least, teach them not to bite.

But I know what discipline is, and I know what abuse is. Hell, I was spanked as a child; it made me understand what rules were and that they were meant for my protection. Like the house-on-fire thing (and poking the dog in the eye, for that matter). If I make a habit out of such a thing, I’ll be a very bad insurance risk, not to mention unpopular with dogs.

The difference, in the end, boils down to intent. My parents wanted to teach me the basic skills required to be a human being, and I learned them. That’s discipline, and it’s good. Granted, I now address people in positions of power in my life as “Captain,” and tend to salute at the slightest provocation, but there’s no provable connection.

But abuse teaches no lesson, except that adults are dangerous and that the world is terrifying.

There are many divergent theories of child rearing, and I know that people believe they all have something going for them. (I don’t believe that, myself.) Never forget that the point of parenting is to raise a quality human being, with the strength and self-respect to make it in today’s acid-soaked asylum of a world. Children are our best chance for immortality, our vote for the future. Let’s raise them the way we wish we’d been raised.