Not at all, and thank you.
Rilchiam - I found your observations and theory really interesting. And I agree about male vs. female use of “bitch”.
Sheldon Kopp’s End to Innocence, Facing Life w/out Illusions had some really interesting stories and theories about becoming disillusioned with one’s family during adolescence as a part of the maturation process. I don’t recall anything about aggression, but it’s been a while since I read it.
My world is the same world that Euth grew up in.
I am 29 years old and I have still never - ever- called my mother a bitch to her face. Firstly, I do not believe in calling people you love names. In my opinion, if you’ve had to sink to the level of name calling, you’ve lost the argument anyway. Disagreements happen, I argued with my mother a lot growing up. Secondly, if I’d called my mother bitch, I’d still be looking for my teeth on the floor. I was raised to believe that this kind of behavior was completely unacceptable and I agree.
I don’t know that I think a father should spank an 18 year old girl, but I’d hesitate to call the girl an “adult” - aside from legally speaking, as Rilchiam stated.
Rilchiam, I was raised to believe that your elders deserved respect, if simply because they were your elders. This particularly applies to anyone who might have had a hand in raising you. I don’t mind if my daughters diagree with me, but there’s a tone - as Euth said - that is acceptable and there’s a tone that is not acceptable. My mother did not hesitate to let me know when my tone with her was inappropriate. It wasn’t to keep me from ever disagreeing with her, it was to remind me of my place in the family and to remind me that she deserved respect.
No Disguise, I’d rather my father spank me than have anyone slap me in the face, ever. I don’t understand how being slapped in the face is < being spanked.
In short - yes - in my opinion the daughter was 100% wrong for calling her mother a bitch. Changing the gender does not make a difference either. A daughter shouldn’t call her father an asshole or a jerk and a son shouldn’t call his mother a bitch. Any way I look at it, it’s disrespectful and inappropriate.
That’s not on.
Totally inappropriate punishment, especially for an 18 y/o.
I don’t think “it’s not ok for you to lose your temper and swear, but it’s ok for me to lose my temper, destroy a door and hit you” is the message he really wants to be sending.
People say things they don’t mean and without thinking when they’re angry. Yes some of those things can be hurtful, but I’m sure that everyone has had an experience of saying something that they didn’t mean while in an argument, and then feeling terrible about it. Use those feelings of guilt and shame to get an apology and a promise of better behaviour, don’t wallop them.
My family is all about the temper tantrums…we’re a very vocal, loving family who prefer to slam doors, cry and scream for 5 minutes than to seethe silently for hours. In my family, everything is out in the open, heart-on-sleeve stuff, leading to many heated “discussions”. I’ve said a LOT worse to my parents, always in anger, never actually meant.
Their response was to wait until everyone had calmed down and I felt awful anyway, and then asking me not to speak to them like that. Cue heartfelt apologies and a week of me doing my chores without being asked.
If it’s appropriate for the dad to beat a grown woman like that, then it’s not appropriate for her to call the cops and have him arrested for it.
I’m not comfortable with that.
The question I haven’t seen asked so far: Was the mother being a bitch?
Well, this isn’t direct communication, but I don’t read her comments like that at all. I believe she was warning him that he was getting close to crossing a line (and indeed, in some families, calling someone else’s principles or ideas “crap” would be pushing it).
If she were truly refusing him his right to vent, wouldn’t she say something more like “How dare you argue” or punish him for speaking?
If I refrained from calling someone a name because I thought I might get hit, that wouldn’t be me showing them respect, that would be me being afraid.
I have never called my mother a bitch. She can be bitchy at times (who isn’t?), but I respect her too much to call her names. On the other hand, if I did call her a bitch she would be very hurt but would never strike me. My parents didn’t hit.
He was wrong for striking his daughter for calling her mother a bitch.
What he should have done is show her the door and tell her, “No one speaks to my wife like that, including you. Come back when you can be more civil and not until then. You’re an adult now, and actions have consequences.”
This coming from someone else who was raised in the South and would never, ever even think about using that type of language in reference to my mother.
Chiming in:
18 is way too old to be spanked. The last time I even got slapped was at 14 or so. And for uttering a word? Even a bad one?
That being said, I told my parents “Go to hell” and “Shut up” once in my life. And my parents put me through hell. I would justification to say much, much worse, but would never dare. I was frightened of them. Bitch is a bit much but the kid has not been raised correctly if at 18 she thinks it’s even a little OK to call her mom that.
But I still imagine the fright when her dad stormed down the hall, broke the door down, and beat her ass raw. Real mature - who’s the adult here?
Damn, this guy beats his daughter till he breaks blood vessels in his hand, and nobdoy is really that shocked over it? That wasn’t a spanking: that was a beating. She didn’t get a lesson about manners: she got taught a lesson about respect. She’s afraid of him now; who else is she afraid of? Sure, she shouldn’t have called her mother a bitch—maybe. Was her mother being a bitch? Her dad was certainly being a child abuser, although there has to be a more accurate term.
If the mother stood by and didn’t do anything, I’d say the daughter might have been right. Although a father who beats someone for heated language probably isn’t just beating his daughter. Why didn’t the mother intervene?
The father should be in jail.
I think you have to know a lot of things to decide about the daughter, and how serious the act was. I think you have to know a lot about mom too. But any man that beats his daughter so hard he injures his hand is criminally abusive and certainly not going be engendering a filial respect reaching out longer than his arm.
When you have to use force, it is because reason has already failed. The person in the relationship who is responsible is supposed to be the parent, and the failure, assuming reasonable reading of the incident, is the now adult child’s lack of manners. That didn’t happen this afternoon. I have grave doubts that this young lady had been entirely respectful and polite to her mother prior to this one day.
Strict means “closely in accordance with standards” not “enforced by brutality and violence”. Every physical punishment is a failure on the part of the person responsible for teaching behavior. Not every failure is abusive. Folks fail a lot, in raising their children, and forgiveness has to go both ways. But violence, however minor represents an absence of compassion, reason, and roll modeling. Those are better teaching methods. Eighteen is too late to teach manners. That failure needed to be addressed at age two.
So, basic bad news: If you want your children to be respectful and polite, you have to be respectful and polite for their entire lives. If you cuss, and hit them when they cuss, they will cuss your name when you are not around, and eventually call you out and call you names to your face. If you, a father, hit your daughter, she will learn to expect that from men. When she meets a man in the future, she will consider an absence of violence to be an absence of caring, or strength. She will find someone else. Someone who will hit her just like daddy did.
And you will be living in a nursing home she chose because they “Hardly hit them much at all!”
Tris
“Don’t you want somebody to love?” ~ Grace Slick ~
Cut the bullshit about the genteel Southern Upbringing. You aren’t better because you were raised in the rural south and your dad whupped you good. I grew up in that environment myself and I’m decidedly not raising my son that way. Respect is earned. My son, who is 7, doesn’t get whipped; he gets firm verbal guidance and punishments, when needed, are in loss of personal freedom. His teachers say he’s one of the nicest, most polite, helpful kid in the class. I suspect my relationship with him will be one of mutual respect, far more so than the one I have with my father.
The father in the OP should be arrested for battery. The young woman should leave as soon as possible.
To those who think that the father instilled respect and showed her the “he’s The Man”:
If I were this girl, I’d keep out of his way and “be good” until I moved out (6 months?). After which, I’d probably cut myself off entirely from my parents.
He might be losing a lot here…
If the Dad really did give her that spanking/beating, he might have some other things to worry about. The daughter just might be biding her time, waiting for the proper time to retaliate! (Probably not, but it is certainly possible, isn’t it?) She certainly is not going to try anything physical (not while he is awake, anyway), but she might try to slip something like rat poison into his food. After a humiliating and painful experience like that, who knows what is on her mind? Good behavior may be exhibited just to distract “Dear old Dad” while she plans her revenge!
I’m going to respond to the OP without looking at the rest of the thread because I want to give out my “initial reaction.”
Firstly, no, I think you are completely wrong. A daughter saying that is the exact same thing as a son saying it. Furthermore in my experiences as a teenager I found the idea that “women settle things with words” to be completely false. In my experience teenage boys were more likely to start a fight over a brief yet highly anger-inducing incident (an intense argument, a shoving incident etc.) While girls (who in my school experience engaged in fist fights JUST AS MUCH) would tend to start fights via the “gossip ring” in which the two combatants gossiped about each other a few months in advance and then finally it boils over in a classroom and the two girls go at it.
In my experience both teenage boys and girls are more than capable of fighting and for both of them I think words fail to settle certain arguments very frequently.
As for the specific story here, I wouldn’t have spanked my 18 year old daughter. I believe in spanking children, and taking away privileges as well. However I think there comes a logical point where as a parent spanking no longer works, and then there even comes a point where “grounding” or “taking away privleges” no longer works. I think 18 is about the time when taking away privileges no longer works. At that stage I’d inform my adult daughter that she is going to obey the rules of the house because it is not her house. And that she is going to give her mother and myself a decent level of respect, if she doesn’t like it, she can start looking for independent housing.
Then we might as well keep in mind that not all parents are worthy of and deserving of respect.
If my mother’s being a bitch, I feel free to tell her so. If my father’s being an asshole, I inform him of it. Being someone’s offspring does not mean you have to tolerate being treated like dirt.
If you don’t know why that’s being said, I’d venture that the best thing to do is not assume you know that the parent (or adult) is a wonderful person and that the kid/young person is just being a disrespectful shithead. Maybe there’s a good reason for what they’re saying.
This, what he did, is a crime. He physically assaulted an adult without any valid reason of self-defense. She’d have been completely justified in using any force necessary to make him stop.
He committed a crime. You don’t think that’s wrong?
I suppose this is why I disagree with people in this thread. I don’t think that merely having been breathing longer than me automatically entitles anyone to respect.
I’ll fish around in pockets for 2 cents.
plink-plink
Respect is something that must be earned. A person’s age or that they were involved in your birthing does NOT grant them respect in itself. Love must be nurtured or it will die. Authority is granted by someone -to- someone or something else. Use of force creates fear or an awareness possible bodily harm. And though it has its own irritations, I’ve raised my now 16 y.o. son that way and I don’t think I’d change a thing if there were do-overs.
I grew up in the midwest (no genteel southern crap, as someone else noted). My father would often hit us with his hands, with his belt or with a fresh, green switch. I toe’d the line outta fear, not respect. Whether the result of his beatings or something else, I do not use foul language, nor do I call my mother names. My mother, OTOH, seems to have no difficulty at all in calling me a Sonofabitch when I don’t jump quick enough to suit her. The fact that my mother calls me a sonofabitch, I do actually find that amusing.
As others have said, I agree that the father in the OP way lost control. And if he’s not up on charges, then he should be thinking about counseling.
To be fair, catsix, these parents also had to have sex without effective birth control AND make enough food available so that the child didn’t starve to death.
In Euthanasiast’s example, his mom didn’t want him going to a concert. Reason? Apparently none. While you or I might think this is crap, and that mom is on a power trip, he is forced to “respect” this arbitrary decision. Perhaps there’s more to the story, but the snippets we have suggest that she was full of it and he called her on it.
I’m with you, good parenting earns its own respect. Yes, sometimes punishment is necessary, and I’m not against corporal punishment if necessary, but you can’t just beat respect into your children.
One of the points about corporal punishment in children is that is is supposed to be used as a way to teach a child the proper way to act. Not as a way for an angry parent to work out his or her frustration on his kid’s ass. Nor is it a way to get back at a child who did something wrong to you. Hitting your child in anger is absolutely wrong and teaches nothing. A father breaking down a door and injuring his own hand wailing on his daughter’s ass is exactly what happens through anger.
An 18 year old is, IMHO, a legal adult, and can call anyone a bitch if she so chooses without being subject to physical battery. I don’t give a rats ass where she lives, who’s food she eats, or who’s paying her tuition. Money doesn’t give you the right to beat someone.
I’ve been waiting for someone to ask that.
Dude thinks it’s okay to hit - and not just hit, but spank - an adult woman. Does anyone seriously doubt he does that to his wife when she pisses him off? And yeah, I understand that for a man to beat his wife was acceptable at some times in some places. Doesn’t make it true.
A kid getting mad and calling her mother a bitch doesn’t compare to an adult getting mad and beating someone - child or adult. This man’s reaction demonstrates the lie in the claims from those who beat their children that they’re not doing it in anger - the man’s description (he broke down a door without knowing it?) shows that he was blinded by rage. I wonder how often he does this kind of shit to strangers - or is he only inclined to beat on his family members?
[QUOTE=Homebrew]
Cut the bullshit about the genteel Southern Upbringing. You aren’t better because you were raised in the rural south and your dad whupped you good. /QUOTE]
“Be careful.” 