The "good old days," when you could beat the $#!+ out of

[OkToBeTakei]

did you guys see the article about Kate from Jon & Kate + 8 hitting her kids with a wooden spoon? I think it was in Star (so you know, take it with a grain of salt) but the tone was so SHOCKED! and SURPRISED! - when I was a kid my mom and everybody else's mom hit with a wooden spoon. Kept it in her purse to scare us with when we were out and about. That was in the '70s and early '80s.

I can't believe most of Star's readership would think that was a bad thing at all, truthfully. It's unfortunately really common to end up in the middle of these pro-hitting discussions.

My Mother used to wield her tea-towel for a flick, we ran before she connected. She used to come in with a broom when we argued over the TV etc. We never actually got hit. It was always an implied threat. When I talk to her now she says that was always what she intended it to be, in her culture and time it was just 'normal' but neither her or my Father wanted to do this. She is supportive of mine and my siblings way of bringing up our children with not even threats of a smack. In fact at times she has told me off for being too disciplinarian.

My partner on the other hand recalls being whacked for just about everything. This carried on until he grew bigger than his Dad aged 15. His Dad went to hit him, he held his Dad up against the wall by the throat and told him you do not get to do that anymore. Are we clear? They actually got on well until his Dad died recently. His Mother I think wants to hit ME all the time :lol: It is just screaming out of her. :D

[Defrauding Errday]

I've noticed that some people who had the shit beat out of them in the "good old days" - and even in the not too distant past - use it as a point of pride and recall their various beatings with relish, in a twisted way. As in, "yeah, when I was bad, my parents whacked me several times with a cast iron skillet and I turned out to be an upstanding member of the community." Or, "yeah, I had to go out and cut my own switch, it was awesome." Or "my dad used his belt, because men were men in those days!" :roll:

Yeah that's pretty disturbing.

[Kitty]

The arguments for spanjing are so illogical it makes me wonder how anyone can continue to defend it.

Oh right, it's "my parents would beat my ass whenever I did x, and I turned out fine!" That's not a very good argument, because you're implying that spanking can actually be harmful and you turned out okay in spite of it.

[Rosa]

When I talk to her now she says that was always what she intended it to be, in her culture and time it was just 'normal' but neither her or my Father wanted to do this.

Yeah, my mom spanked a LOT (hi, I have ADHD and I was raised before people believed in it...) and she says always felt bad that she just couldn't bring herself to do it more, because everyone told her that would cure my bad behavior, until she found out that her most well-behaved neice and nephew were getting the crap beat out of them by their dad. Then she decided it was more important not to beat us than to have us be perfectly well behaved. Of course my little brother was also a docile little mama's boy, which increased her belief in less spankings.

One of the ex-QF bloggers who took down her blog because of her divorce used to say that too, she hated hitting and baby-scheduling but felt like that was a problem with *her*. And I have a friend whose parents are totally pro-corporal punishment for "willful disobedience"...except even though they preached that for years, they never actually hit their kids. Or at least not that the kids remember.

So as evil as I think it is to promote this stuff, there's a big disconnect between belief and action. Thankfully, or most of us wouldn't have survived childhood.

[Arete]

The sibs and I were never beaten because my Dad found the practice of an adult hitting a child disgusting and believe it or not, unmacho. The smart money in the neighborhood had us being the town tramps with the out of wedlock kids.

At my dad's memorial, several people came up to us to tell us that they advise their own children not to hit their grandchildren, based on the results they saw with us. These people had all been hitters. It wasn't an apology, it was better. Some people realized that children could be raised without violence.

[Ava]

I was part of a conversation once where my coworker was complaining that her (much younger) sister was "out of control" because she'd never been spanked growing up like my coworker was, and how the coworker was totally going to spank her kids to prevent that from happening, and so on. I kept saying things like "spanking only teaches your kids to be afraid of you" or "my father chased me around the house with a belt while I hid under the furniture" as arguments against it and she kept saying "yeah, totally!" and "me too!" in response as if I was making pro-spanking arguments and she was agreeing with me. Eventually I just stopped responding before I got too upset, because how do you argue with someone who takes all your negative points as goals to achieve?

[Hane]

The sibs and I were never beaten because my Dad found the practice of an adult hitting a child disgusting and believe it or not, unmacho. The smart money in the neighborhood had us being the town tramps with the out of wedlock kids.

At my dad's memorial, several people came up to us to tell us that they advise their own children not to hit their grandchildren, based on the results they saw with us. These people had all been hitters. It wasn't an apology, it was better. Some people realized that children could be raised without violence.

This is absolutely wonderful.

I'm reminded of a conversation I once had with a younger colleague, a cheery, pleasant young gal. She said, "No, my parents never hit us--it just wasn't part of our family culture," as if hitting kids were, of course, some kind of odd, "foreign," dysfunctional behavior.

When I was teaching ESL to adults about twenty years ago, I had an Austrian student who was an au pair. She was befriended by an older Japanese gentleman in my class. One day, I ran into him in the grocery store, and he told me that he was worried about her--that she was very unhappy in her placement. When I asked him why, he said, "Do Americans beat their children?" I told him that some did, but that it was losing popularity. It turned out that the young women's host mother had terrified her by washing her kid's mouth out with soap--something she found bizarre and horrifying. She contacted the agency and quickly found another placement.

[G G Gunhold]

I'm in the group whose parents' hitting fell under the most mild and minimal or might be considered "best practices" to those who think it's okay to hit kids (and those who don't see a reason to outlaw it). It was very very infrequent (under ten times at most through my whole life), never with any object, never to cause pain, and rarely in anger.

It is the single thing that made me lose the most respect for my parents (and by extension adults generally) as a child. They were supposedly pacifists. I didn't get to hit my siblings. It was not a consequence that was fairly imposed. And it made it clear that they were not in control of themselves or the situation (it was a stupid non-solution to ANY problem as far as I could tell because it just made me really angry and resentful and plotting and *I* was the one who got spanked the most because I was "sassy" and it "worked" on me). Basically, it gave me a way of bringing them down to my level when I was really upset/having a tantrum.

My father has half-apologized for it, but my mother vacillates between denying it completely, telling me I deserved it, and saying that since it wouldn't rank as child abuse legally, that made it okay.

For whatever reason, I still am very hurt by it and resentful of it. I should say that I have a very solid relationship with my father, and mostly with my mother (she's hit her mid-life crisis or teenage angst a bit late) and feel they were exceptional parents overall. But I wish I'd been able to look up to them longer and trust in their emotional strength more.