Authoritarian attitude as an intentional part of pediatric exams

Certainly the group sports exams at school were run in an authoritarian way since there were a lot of boys to be examined in a short time by limited staff and coaches from our school. It was no different than PE class or being on a sports team. We did as we were told.

I don't ever remember any kind of authoritarian attitude from my private pediatrician. However, your comments about group sports exams at school are 100% spot on with my experiences. In those situations, they've got to process a whole bunch of kids in a relatively short span of time. So they obviously have to work fast, and they don't want get bogged down with the kids either intentionally fooling around or just being slow.

In my experience, they solved that problem by doing two things: First, they took a very firm attitude toward the boys, barking out orders in a tone that we took to mean "you better do what they say or else". They didn't ask us to do something -- we were given explicit orders that were expected to be followed. It seemed like we had suddenly been drafted into the army instead of wanting to play H.S. basketball! Second, as I've posted before, we were immediately sent to the locker room and ordered to strip to just our jockstrap. The entire multi-station exam was then done out in the gym in front of all of the other boys, who were also wearing just a jockstrap. At the time, I thought that they did this to help speed up the exam, since the minimal amount of clothing would provide access to almost every bit of our bodies. And they did have us do some running in place or jumping jacks to raise our heart rate, so I figured wearing a jock was appropriate for that to keep everything from bouncing around. But looking back now, I think it was just to help keep us under control. After all, if you're standing in line wearing just a jockstrap, you're probably less inclined to do anything that would draw more attention to yourself, like fooling around or horseplay with the other boys. Dressed like that you tend to keep to yourself and try to just stay out of trouble. In a word, it makes you submissive! And I honestly think that's what they were after.

I have to say for me growing up at my pediatrician, I really don’t remember him being that authoritarian but his nurses absolutely. But they did it in a way where it really didn’t feel like it. I just did what I was told.