GREENVILLE - There once was a wonderful time in America when nurturing children was a family enterprise. It was a period when caring adults spoke and young people listened.
I have fond memories of those days with my parents providing that bedrock of inspiration and virtue.
Perhaps it was a different time in America, where our motivation wasn't driven solely by the dollar and instant gratification.
Now as adults, we appear to be marching to the intoxicating cadence of clanking coins - insanely driven to get paid at all costs. And who do you think is being affected by this absurdity? Our children, that's who.
In my day - which is not that long away - my parents' word was absolute law in the Adderton household. In our New Jersey neighborhood, a village raising a child was not a cliché, but a human practice. We looked out for each other, because that nurturing spirit was omnipresent in the community.
Along with the nourishing atmosphere was a philosophy of tough love. Discipline and obedience was the rule, and never the exception.
In our household, Sunday school and attending church were expected spiritual requisites. My parents believed that if a child had strong biblical training, supported with parental responsibility, the youngster would never stray from a virtuous path.
My parents never hesitated to dispense discipline - and gave neighbors the same latitude - when their baby boy was misbehaving.
In fact, neighbors, you know the ones, would often sit on the their front porch casting a watchful eye out for the shenanigans children get involved in.
I can recall many instances when adults in the community would inform my parents of their son's youthful indiscretions. When it would happen, I rarely protested my innocence because "grown people don't lie about children" was the canon of conduct in our household.
And every spanking that I received was richly deserved, although I never admitted at the time. It is my parents' tough love which probably saved me from becoming a statistic, a fate that befell some of my childhood friends.
That is why I am so dismayed at the disregard of adult authority by our youth. Much of it has to do with parents abdicating their role as mentors - leaving it up to the public schools, media, the mean streets and gangsta rap music.
Today's so-called modern parent holds an attitude that little Suzie and Willie never misbehave, and adults greatly embellish their concern for adolescent behavioral dysfunction.
We have also had to contend with liberal behavioral scientists who believe that corporal punishment is damaging to a child's fragile psyche - breeding long-term low self-esteem and stunted emotional development.
So it was quite refreshing to read a recent behavioral study that indicates moderate spanking - as a disciplining tool - shows little signs of having harmful psychological effects.
"We are not advocating (spanking) is a strategy that should be used with kids, but we do object to people wanting to ban it when we have no evidence that (the practice) is harmful," said Elizabeth Owens, one of the authors of a study conducted by the Institute of Human Development at the University of California at Berkeley.
The study employed two teams of psychologists who interviewed parents and children from 100 middle-class white families over a 12-year period from 1968 to 1980.
As with the New Age "I'm OK, you're OK" philosophy of child-rearing, youngsters are often cajoled into behaving, when it is strong guidance they crave. It's a pabulum practice that does not promote a sense of responsibility.
As I see it, the approach is simply nothing more than discipline in a vacuum - devoid of accountability by parent or child.
We need to return to the era of parental tough love, which provided children with spiritual nourishment, common sense and the ability to maintain the moral compass in differentiating right from wrong.
