Persistent, unjust, or excessive punishments, either of body or mind, furnish a powerful incentive for the boy to invoke his chief means of defense against superior force--evasion and prevarication. Such conduct is guaranteed to produce a youthful Munchausen. What are a boy’s means of defense against a beating which he regards, either rightly or wrongly, as excessive or brutal? He has only two--flight and falsehood. He knows that he is incapable of matching physical strength with his parent. This knowledge, combined with whatever love for the parent has not been extinguished, prevents a contest of strength which the child realizes would be futile. Flight is frequently out of the question because of the boy’s dependency and his inability to earn his own living. His last means of defense is falsehood, the use of which he justifies as his only method of escape from unwarranted or excessive punishment. Fully conscious of the wrong of lying he considers it the lesser of the two evils. Similar in its effect is the nagging of children, in which mothers are more prone to indulge than fathers. Exhibitions of constant scolding, faultfinding, and querulous temper, interspersed with boxing of ears, smacking of cheeks, and slapping of hands, all tend to thwart the child’s mental and moral growth and contribute to the making of a wayward son. Such punishment is largely mental but none the less reprehensible because it lacks the element of physical pain. To slap a child’s hand as a correctional measure, with the sharp word of reproof which accompanies it, gives the child a mental instead of a physical shock; a slap of the same degree given in a playful mood will cause him to laugh. When a boy, especially in the adolescent period, begins to complain of the injustice of constant nagging, scolding, and corporal punishment, it is a danger signal which should cause the parent to stop, look, and listen. Such conduct on the part of the parent alienates the love and sympathy of the child, conduces to lying, secretiveness and evasion, and is productive of truancy and the development of the wanderlust. Its psychological effect on the parent is the loss of self-respect which is the inevitable accompaniment of punitive injustice. The punitive theory of the correction of youthful offenses is archaic and should be relegated to the Paleolithic era from whence it sprang. To mete out punishment as such is vengeance pure and simple; an eye-for-an-eye-and-a-tooth-for-a-tooth policy which has no place in modern child-culture.