When I was four, for some reason, I can’t remember, my mother whacked my backside with a cutting board, cracking it in half, and giving me fodder for my future tales of childhood torture.
To be fair to my mother, and to the wood’s tensile strength, it was one of those long cheese-type cutting boards, and it was already cracked, but still. Ass. Cutting board. Broken.
My mum liked to swat me. I was probably ornery as sh*t, and maybe that was all she could think of to do with me. But because of the ornery thing, and my sassy mouth, and my mother’s chronic lack of patience, I got hit a fair amount. I don’t know what a normal amount of hitting was in 1980ish, but I got hit what I believe to be a greater than normal amount.
If I wouldn’t sit still for hair-combing, she’d hit me with the brush. She loved to take a wooden spoon to my ass. She’d periodically just smack me upside the head. She had a husband that hit me with a 2X4.
I don’t think I can say I learned anything from being hit, except for fear.
I learned to be afraid of her.
So when I had my first child in 1995, I wasn’t going to hit. Ever. There wasn’t any real mainstream discussion of “gentle” discipline then, but I knew what being hit felt like. I knew I did not like it. I knew I didn’t want my kids to feel it.
Until one day I got mad.
Until they were fighting and wouldn’t listen.
Top Comments
Smack them if it is required, otherwise they will think they can do what they like when they're older and expect no consequence of the wrong they've done. I speak to my boy, but when he was younger he copped a smack here and there for extreme disobedience/behaviour but never for minor things that I could talk to him about, and we have a great relationship and he is now 15yrs old, and shows me the respect I deserve from him and he gets that respect back from me. Doesn't mean we don't have arguments about things still but it calms down a lot quicker and doesn't escalate into a violent situation.....which is what I see from a lot of my friends kids they are so nasty and violent to their parents because they can't get their own way. So spanking doesn't do damage as much as people make out it does.
My mum was a hardcore spanker, and we had a "rattan" for when I was naughty.
I have to say it did not work for me at all. It made me just hide things from my mum, and become stubborn and to make matters worse, I was once of those kids who didn't even care about the pain. To the point where I was so mad once that I took the rattan stick and broke it in half! My dad was really gentle and we still have a relationship where I feel I can tell him anything.