Reflection for "The Lost Children" by Margaret Talbot

Getting punished for something that you did is a good why to learn. If someone does something wrong, like a child, they need to learn how to do it the right way. A method that parents use on their children is by punishing them by sending them to their room. This is a method that many people around the world are using and have been using for a long time. Choosing what punishment to give however is the hard part of it. You have to choose what they right punishment is for each ‘crime’.

Since this way of learning and teaching has been used for a long time, I think that it is a good one. What I do not agree with about this is how people choose the right punishment to give. A long time ago people used slavery and beating people as the right punishment for almost everything. They thought that beating people, hitting them and threatening them was teaching them how act right. After a while people realized that this was not the right way to punish and people started to use different ways, jail. Jail was what taught them to behave for a while and then it let people out. As I grew up, I learned what I was not allowed to do and what I was a allowed to do by punishments. The usual punishment for my family was getting sent to their room. This is what would be called a good punishment for what they did. A bad punishment would be hitting the child. This is a crime now but people still do it. In very few families parents get very mad at their children and hit them. This is a very bad punishment and people should know this by common sense.

In the story I thought that it was good that Hutto’s environment was changed. I did not think that it was a good place for children to grow up in and live in. Children are meant to be free and be able to run around. In this place they were not allowed to do this. Also I felt that children are innocent, they still don’t know about the troubles in the world. In Hutto they were experiencing how cruel the world is. They are learning about the bad things that happen to people in the world and they shouldn’t have to go through that when they are so small. When they made the changes in Hutto, it was good that they were putting the effort of making it a better place but I do not think that they should have closed it at the end. I do agree that it was not a good place for children but the parents should have been kept their as ‘punishment’. The place had three meals a day, clean beds, open doors to their cells and more. It was a much better place then the other prisons. I disagree with the story when it says at the end “sometimes children have to suffer for their parents sins.” I think that the children shouldn’t have to suffer. The children follow were their parents go but have no say in what is happening. They should be able to be with their parents if they wanted to but they shouldn’t have to suffer because of them.