According to popular works on child rearing, 'time out' is supposed to be limited to one minute for each year of life.

Therefore, a young child misses little more than a commercial break in life and those lucky enough to get to be my age have to sit out most of a football game.

Not that I haven't ever sit out most of a football game before, but those were quite different circumstances.

I was raised to be a believer in corner time, circle time and sometimes 'stand on one foot and put your face against anything time.' For a particularly antsy or excited person, this kind of punishment often offers time to calm down. Of course, the circle I'm referring to was often drawn on a blackboard in a classroom and custom height adjusted for little people's noses. You could always tell the bad kids, they had chalky snoots.

We also had paddling and prayer in schools, both of which were sometimes connected.

I'm sure the stockades of the days of yore, which I think might could brought back into practice with good effect, had a similar effect on miscreants in the community. Imagine sentencing petty criminals to spending a few days in the stockade outside the Courthouse. I'd say that would be much better punishment than sentencing folks to watch cable television and smoke cigarettes and play cards at the local lockup.

Anyway, corner time is still a valid punishment, although some of my earlier mentioned experts say that such punishment can lead to undue angst, especially in the form of seperation anxiety.

I'd say the people who write those books are the same ones whose children drive every else crazy in the supermarket. I'll never forget being told by a lady that her son was 'finding his voice' as he ran around screaming at the top of his lungs. And I just thought he was finding a way to irritate everyone around him. How foolish of me. Even so, appreciating the artsy side of his screaming failed to make it more appealing for me.

There's always a child whose parents (or parent) doesn't seem to have effective control. I've come into contact with several such children recently. One of them was running wild in a public office, with the parent in tow, just watching him go.

I suppose he was "exploring his surroundings in order to discover his place in the world."

What I saw was a child whose mother didn't care enough to teach him proper behavior. Impotent parents are as worthless as wet pokes. Neither one's worth filling with air. These children likely will continue to be a problem in society for years to come. Instead of picking up the child and enforcing the will of the adult, the child was enforcing his own will and was doing pretty well as he pleased.

When the adult attempted to pick him up, he promptly started kicking and screaming and was immediately put back on the floor to take off again like a windup toy gone haywire.

In another case, I had to opportunity to work with a child who was ‘running wild' and with little more than personal attention and a firm voice, saw immediate behavior improvement.

It's really simple. Children will do whatever they are allowed to do. It's a test of wills, more or less. If the children have stronger wills, chaos ensues.

I was no angel growing up either. I spent more than a few hours in the corner of the family kitchen. Corner time is designed to give a child time to think about his or her infraction of household law. However, it never was all that effective for me. I had a vivid imagination, so standing in the corner in the kitchen could easily be seen as time spent peering through the periscope of a nuclear submarine or looking out the front screen of the Starship Enterprise as enemy battlecruisers approached.

Luckily for my parents, the 'keen hickory' was always available to address repeat offenders like myself. I was a frequent recipient of such correction, with much better results.

Yes, my parents knew about 'behavior modification,' but it came at the end of a thin branch. I can assure you that it was a most effective means of garnering the attention of this young miscreant.

It definitely is hard to forget when a limber switch wraps around a leg with a sting that never ceases to be suprisingly painful, even in memory. The lines caused by such treatment often left marks like candy cane stripes.

I can recall when the mere sight of a switch was enough to bring fear to bear. An unruly child would immediately turn into something right out of a Norman Rockwell painting. It could be used to conduct the family, much like a symphony conductor would use a baton to control an orchestra. The switch became a separate entity once enough focus was shifted to it. It could point at objects, offer movement direction or order a sudden halt, all the while serving as the single focus for the eyes of the child captured by its power.

Yes, its very presence was an implied threat. And at times, I did have to fetch the instrument of my punishment. That lesson likely could have prepared me for the career of ‘switch selector,' but that teacher of the youths of yore has been shelved for the most part.

These days, some will say that those kinds of punishments were 'barbaric' and cruel. At the time, I would have readily agreed. Of course, I'd have gone along with nearly anything to prevent whippings, so long as it didn't entail behavior modification, admitting wrongdoing or generally repenting and behaving properly. I was generally a difficult child, or so I've been told. The stories of jumping in mudholes while wearing clean clothes, coming up with fantastic stories that were used as explanations for circumstances and even running away from home at the ripe old age of four all come to mind.

But I would never have imagined acting the way some of these children do now. To blantantly question the authority of my parents, or to assault them, would have seemed beyond belief. It's not uncommon to see even young children strike and kick their parents today.

When I look around me, I think that perhaps the one thing the earlier generation wasn't successful at was teaching the current one how to properly care for (and about) children. To me, not correcting or teaching your skills to the next generation is an inexcusable failure. It is the most basic of requirements for the future of any society. Somehow our parents failed to raise the next generation of parents, leaders of the future society of which we are all a part— like it or not.

People definitely seem to care less about how their children behave in public. My parents wanted me to exhibit appropriate behavior and respect myself and my parents as adults. I wonder how many will say the same of their rearing in later years.