Is spanking a part of your family experience?

It is my opinion that parenting that uses aggression to discipline children is a large part of the violence issue in the US, so I keyed on this article.



ETA: I just realized the joke potential of my headline. Strictly unintentional.

If I was lucky it wasn't with the metal part or to the face.

belt
hairbrush
knife handle
rope
broom
rake
folding chair (that one left a mark :(..)

I made many trips to the dispensary as a kid, with lots of "bumps on my head"..

They probably thought I was the world's clumsiest child..:(

My own kids did NOT get spanked.

twice each.

Grand Parent, I do not believe in spanking and never did. My parents did though!

sense) and I got my mouth washed out with soap once. I give them props for not equating spanking with discipline -- and they were of the age when it was "spare the rod, spoil the child". My brother got whacked in a kangaroo court in his Jesuit high school, and my parents were furious -- my dad called the Archbishop.

she made sure her rings made contact.

to Emo.

I'm not a violent or aggressive perosn.

You know how hard you are hitting. Only used 3-4 times, mainly as an attention-getter, a couple of swats only. I have 2 very peaceable, well-adjusted kids, who are now adults.
Sometimes, "discussing" doesn't get the point across.

hitting your kid after he or she runs out into the road, or the like.

i'm generally anti-corporal punishment, but i can certainly imagine hitting a child who had put themselves at a serious risk, in an attempt to instil some aversion to doing wildly foolish and dangerous things.

i got smacked a couple of times when i was little - i honestly don't remember if it had any effect. I think a degree of fear of the possibility of physical pain dissuaded me from doing dangerous things i thought might freak my mum out and provoke her to give me a smack though.

My brother was beaten. I kid you not. My father would come home, hear that he had been mischievious hours before make my brother pull down his pants and bend over and then beat the shit out of him with a belt in front of the rest of us at the dinner table. See it wasn't enough to just hit him, Dad had to humiliate him too.

I will never forgive my father for that.

Surprisingly my brother ran away from home and dropped out of high school. (As my Dad had done after growing up with a father who also beat him.) Today he listens to Rush, rants about liberals and is fan of teabaggers. Just like his Dad.

I live 3200 miles away and would never hit my kids. They're really good kids though. Polite, smart...OK I'm smitten.

He is in his mid-50s and the "pain" is still there.

It's awful.

But he was the one that visited the Dad every day at the nursing home. Weird...

I never hit my kid. I think any kind of physical punishment (even threatened) is child abuse.

Never from dad and twice from mom. Mom cried the second time,and never did it again.

was a tough guy but he was a big softy around women and children. He may have dome his "duty" spanking my Dad but I doubt he was enthusiastic about it.

My Mom once swatted my butt when I played in the street and almost got hit by a car. Then she cried and promised to never do it again and she never did. My six foot four Dad who was an officer in the Rangers and a specialist in hand to hand combat, never raised his hand or even his voice to my Mom, my Brother or myself (OK, he raised his voice when I was a teenager but so did I).

The next generation in my family has never known family violence. No spanking, no screaming and no bullying. I have to say that it's terrifying to hear other people's stories or worse, watch a mom hitting or yelling at her child. I always go up and try to calm people down and defuse the situation. I have been yelled at because of it but at least they stopped abusing their kid for a little while.

Not fun.

My parents paddled me and as I got older I understood they did it out of love. Like them, I believe in it too as a last line of discipline or for something severe. It never made me aggressive or abusive toward others at any age.

and consider it to be a hideous way to treat a child.

It was normal in rural Taiwan where my parents were raised. My brother and I were born and raised in the US, and we were spanked when we misbehaved. We turned out to be stereotypical introverted East Asian nerds and definitely are not violent people.

Spanked, hit with a fist, slapped, hit so hard I stuck between two 2x4's in a wall where I was hit a couple more times,
hit by a belt swung by the end so it would hit buckle first, chained to a fence, dropped off at the bus station with a
bag full of clothes and told to not return...

On the other hand, he was just one of the guys at the country club, put our house up for collateral so the church could build a school, took me to
church twice on sunday, once on wednesday for 9 years, until mom died. And when he died, for a little while, all that didn't matter. Though I do wonder if, just maybe, all that may have had an effect.

Yea, spanked ;)

We weren't beaten and we weren't spanked past the age of reason. It wasn't the first response to transgressions but I'd be lying if I said parental frustration wasn't a motivation. Did we become aggressive? No. We were the model of well-behaved children in school and other social settings. It may be because we weren't spanked that often and other methods such as reinforcing good behavior played a bigger role in our parents' discipline. This was during an era when corporal punishment was the norm.

We grew up to be nonviolent types.

She has never administered anything other than a VERY RARE single bare-bottom swat to her kids, preferring to rely on denial of privileges, and they also have grown up to be nonviolent. And our family is VERY close - no anger/resentment/drama.

There is a lot more to the development of violent tendencies than whether or not one was spanked.

I was never harshly spanked to inflict plain as punishment.

I learned that there are consequences for bad behavior that way.

It seems more logical that aggressive children who act out more are far more likely to cause disciplinary problems for their parents, thus necessitating a slap on the ass. Some kids are generally impossible and respond best to a bit of the short, sharp shock -- I know, because I was one of them! :evilgrin:

Frankly - if the behavior of America's children is any indication - the trend away from spanking and discipline in general is an enormous failure, resulting in spoiled, rude, and ill-mannered young people.

Others, not so much. Every kid is different.

...I am not a big fan.

Spanking/pain/fear of pain should be used exactly as half a billion years of evolution has refined it. It should come as that bolt out of the blue that says, 'The current course of action should be modified immediately in the interests of health and safety.'

For tinies, two fingers to the back of the hand when they reach for the forbidden. After the first few uses, simple touch is sufficient reminder, and as soon as they start developing language skills it works straight into "Not yours, Don't touch." and "Ask first."

Whatever the age, the aim should not be pain for the sake of pain. It is not punishment as such, but a demarkation that says this is a line that should not be crossed for health reasons. It should be a short, sharp attention getter. The ringing clap of an open hand to a nappy, backhand finger flick, Gibbs slap, or in my case rough side of a stiff nylon hairbrush to the back of the leg for calling mum a bitch at age 10. It's a smaller pain or shock that warns of greater impending pain and possibly real injury that would not be as kind.

The wooden spoon was mom's weapon of choice, but she also used hairbrushes and once threw a bookcase at my sister's head when there wasn't anything else handy. We three girls are not at all violent. I spanked each of my children once when I lost control of my emotions, and they remember every detail of it. It shames me.

I think every parent who loves their child has regrets. It just goes with the territory.

I didn't mind those.

What I did mind, and consider to be abuse would be when I got my mouth washed out with soap. I had to hold the vile bar in my mouth for some period of time.

It was AWFUL. And it didn't help, not one little bit. I'm still very mouthy.

I swatted my girls over their clothed bottoms with my bare hand from time to time. They were more embarrassed than physically hurt.

I was spanked, but never beat.

I can have a short temper, but I have never thrown the first punch in a fight.

The youngest son got a swat on the butt once for running out in the road.

Our three kids all turned out fine.

They weren't spankings, they were beatings with hands, fists, the belt, whatever it was he could find for the most minor infraction. He was smart enough, though, to not leave bruises, or so he thought.

I will never forget the day my mother told my father -- with me in the room so he wouldn't hit HER -- our pediatrician confronted her, and asked why my six-year-old younger sister had ulcers.

I do not have children. Most of the reason for my decision was my childhood. My father didn't want us; I didn't want to take any chance of having a child I would feel the same way about.

If you are hitting your child in public in my view, the cops are coming. I'm not even going to hesitate to dial that phone.

And, one more time, if you believe it's "different if they're your own" or you'll "learn to love them", don't even think about having a baby.

I didn't either and I don't think any of my cousins do either. It's just not something we do.

She repeatedly beat me with anything she could get her hands on. Didn't matter what offense she said I did, she just loved to beat me. She'd repeatedly scream and lose her temper over the slightest things. And she always belittled and insulted me. Living in that home was hell on earth.

Then she was rear-ended in an auto accident. The last 20 years of her life she was an invalid. I wound up taking care of her and doing the housework, cooking and laundry until I couldn't anymore. I had student loans that had to be repaid and I couldn't take care of her 24/7 anymore so I left. Even when I was taking care of her, the belittling and insults still poured out of her mouth. I'd call home and when I tried to talk to her, she still brushed me off. When she died, Honestly, I felt nothing, just numb. She's been dead 15 years and I still am numb.

The response was an overreaction for saying I brushed my teeth when I didn't.

And I've always resented it. Once is enough.

I was spanked, but rarely. I think it happened 3 times that I can remember.

I used to think I would be open to spanking, but now that I'm older and pregnant for the first time, I've been thinking about it a lot. I doubt it will be a part of my parenting plan.

Consistent discipline is important, and I do believe you can successfully discipline your child without spanking.

How about, "well I was bullied and I turned out ok" as some kind of proof that bullying is not bad and hurtful. That's just as idiotic.

Spanking is violence and it means and sends the clear message, "I am bigger than you are so I can inflict physical pain on you, but it's for your own good". Plus, how often is the spanking not done in anger? Pretty rarely I bet.

What happens when the kid gets bigger than the parent? Somebody could be in for a rude awakening then their kid puts them against the wall. Maybe when the kid grow up they will simply avoid that spanking parent.

If someone cannot think of a better discipline for kids than spanking they probably should not have them at all. Violence begets violence.

I don't spank my son, though. He responds perfectly well to other forms of discipline. I am a firm believer in finding creative punishments that really teach a LESSON--the kind that will stay with him and help him make connections. When he was 5-7, we alternated between time-outs and pointless manual labor. For example, when he was six, he continually left his toys and Legos scattered all over the living room floor even after I told him to pick them up and put them away. I gave him one last warning, explaining to him that if he kept making new messes every time Mommy cleaned them up, then he was forcing me to work hard at cleaning them up for nothing. He did it again, so at around 5:00 pm that afternoon, I got him a bucket full of water and a small plastic shot glass and made him water the birch tree in the yard one shot glass of water at a time. I told him he had to use up the entire bucket of water, and he had to walk back and forth between the porch--he couldn't take the bucket with him. It was about a 25-foot walk.

He thought he was getting off easy until he'd made ten trips and realized how long it was going to take--and how much WORK it was. I stopped him when he looked utterly exhausted (maybe halfway through the bucket) and gave him a glass of lemonade and a break so we could talk. I asked him if he liked doing pointless work that took a long time and didn't really make any difference to the tree, as it was going to rain that evening. He said no. I told him that when he made new messes after I'd just cleaned up his previous ones and refused to help me by cleaning them up himself, he was making ME do exactly that kind of pointless labor. He got the message. You could actually SEE it in his face when he made the connection between how miserable HE was and how miserable *I* must have been. He had a couple of breaks with cold drinks and a snack...but I made him finish the bucket.

He still occasionally forgets to clean up his toys, but believe me, when I remind him of it--he remembers that day and he gets the stuff picked up. :)

Tempted once or twice? sure. Kids are not truly kids if they do not push your buttons once an in while. I had plenty of challenges raising my kids, but I chose not to deal with them in this way. I grew up being spanked and occasionally worse and chose as a conviction to never engage in such when I had kids.

One kid will be getting his PhD in three weeks, the other is well into college and an honors student. Despite a few bumps along the way, both came out just fine.

When the time comes that all one thinks they can offer their kids is the palm of their hand, it is time to reconsider. We all always have more than this to offer.

But my twins go after one another viciously. Mostly when I'm not in the room. This is not learned behavior from my husband or myself. I don't even allow toy weapons in my house. But nevertheless, they are aggressive. They wrestle and try to trip up, aggravate and in every way compete, physically and intellectually.

There is no reasoning with them (9 years old) and as an only child myself... I find them frightening (LOL). Maybe their aggressiveness with one another is preparing them to survive and I try to be fair when trying to settle their disputes. Being the same age and size, they are equally matched.


My dad never ever spanked. He was the guy who, when he entered a room, kids and animals flocked around him. My mom always tried to catch me but I was quick. She slapped my bottom once or twice I think. But I can't remember when or why. I just think she must have because dad was such a softy. I miss them both so much and wish they were still alive to help me with my 2.

It was the '70s, so these whippings were done with a rather wide leather belt.

As a result of the deeply negative feelings this form of "discipline" imparted to me, I do not "whip" or spank my kids. I have, on very rare occassion, given a swat on the behind with my hand, but that was when they were in diapers and were having a tantrum and I needed to get them to listen to me.

For the most part, though, we have never spanked and my kids are all nonetheless pretty well behaved. I didn't bully and was far from aggressive when I was growing up, but as I say the whippings I got only served to fill me with a deep animosity toward the person administering them (a person whom I haven't seen since the '70s, fortunately).

and ate some soap as well.

Aggressive? Me? Whatever.

And I don't hit kids.

It didn't teach me a damn thing.

I think the vast majority of the time, spanking is about the parent being pissed off more than about what the kid did or didn't do.

@ my grandmother's house in her basement workroom with a band-saw that was used by my late grandfather.

It eventually broke in half while my father was using it to paddle my younger brother.

My brother and I were often physically disciplined with belts, clothes hangers, and the like by my father and mother, while our two younger siblings were "spared the rod" due to my parents eventually mellowing out somewhat by being indirectly affected by the sea-change of the late sixties.

I guess that would count as spankings, but they sure didn't hurt. I will not use spanking as a punishment or disciplinary tool for raising my children though.

I am saddened that so many people in this thread were beaten as children. Using a belt buckle to spank a child is beating a child.