Collective Punishment: Parenting via War Crime
I’ve recently started using collective punishment as a parenting technique. For example, if the two kids are fighting over a toy, I say “You two need to learn how to share and play nice. If you keep fighting over the toy, I will take it away from both of you.” When I hear complaints of “She hit me!” and “She hit me first!” I demand that they resolve their conflict with each other, or they will both go to time-out.
This collective punishment method has some key advantages. First, I don’t need to ascertain guilt. Oftentimes in a “who hit whom?” conflict, there are disputes over the order and severity of the hitting. Maybe Celeste made the first strike, but Aero hit back harder. It’s difficult to adjudicate these trifling conflicts, especially if you didn’t see what happened. Often what happens is the younger child gets the benefit of the doubt, perhaps unfairly. Instead of attempting to adjudicate a case with no evidence, collective punishment encourages kids to resolve conflict on their own.
Traditional individual punishment encourages frequent appeals to authority. Children will call on a parent or teacher and accuse others of taking their toys, hitting them, etc. If they win the appeal, they get a toy. If they lose the appeal, there’s no real negative consequence. Some kids take advantage of this by appealing to authority over the smallest trifles. Collective punishment avoids this perverse incentive by encouraging kids to resolve their own conflicts.
This collective punishment method is quite similar to the ultimatum game. Suppose there is a toy that Aero and Celeste want to play with. Aero can propose that they timeshare the toy 70-30, and Celeste can choose to accept the 30% timeshare or reject so that nobody gets the toy. The hope is that they land in some fair equilibrium in the middle, but from a game theory perspective, it’s possible to end in some lopsided state where a bully insists “I get the toy, or nobody gets it!” Fortunately we’re flexible and human. If I saw that sort of brinksmanship happening, I would likely intervene and individually punish the bad-faith negotiator.
These collective punishment techniques were famously used by the Roman legions. Soldiers were grouped into units of 10, a contubernium, and they were grouped into a larger unit of 100, a century. If one member missed guard duty or deserted, the whole unit would be punished. The severity of the offense would dictate the severity of the punishment, as well as how many others were punished. Inversely, glory and honor was considered shared among the unit as well. These collective punishment and reward mechanisms were successful at enforcing order and self-policing within the Roman army, especially when monitoring ability was limited.
Article 33 of the Geneva Convention explicitly bans collective punishment as a war crime, presumably because it was often used as a pretext for genocide:
No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.
More generally, collective punishment runs against our enlightenment ideals of liberalism and individualism. We don’t inherit the debts of our parents and we aren’t punished for the crimes of our siblings. This kind of thinking seems to permeate American parenting. Children are taught early on the notion of private property. “This is your toy. That is her toy.” Sharing is often framed as an exchange: “If you want to play with her toy, you should offer to share your toy.”
Maybe I’m crazy, but I feel like that level of individualism isn’t quite appropriate at this young age. While we may be individuals under the law as adults, my kids will be legally part of a collective for the first 18 years of their lives. Family, classrooms, sports teams, dorms; they will be sharing resources and forced to work together more often than not. Rather than teaching that individuals come first, and cooperation is the result of mutual self-interest, I would rather start with the axiom of collective cooperation. They can learn about liberalism in high school.