I’m starting to see a pattern here.
My nieces and nephew were never spanked to the best of my knowledge. I can’t imagine them having turned out any better than they are. My 2nd niece had some self-esteem issues as a kid, but as an adult is probably the most together person in our family.
Mom laid into my brother and me with a belt plenty of times (roughly the late 1950s -1960s.) My parents talked about my Dad whipping us if we REALLY got in trouble but it never happened. I don’t think he had it in him. I could imagine my parents doing lots worse things than spanking me.
I was also spanked at school (public school) a couple of times and I was the quiet, good kid who never got in trouble. Some kids got the paddle a lot. I turned out fine.
Nice!
Like rachelellogram, I refuse to have children because I’m afraid that, when I’m tired, and overwhelmed, and frustrated, and hungry, and sleep-deprived (which it sounds like to me describes 90% of parenting), I will revert to how I was raised, which is to say, I’m afraid I would beat the shit outta my kids or treat them like their birth was a personal affront to me. So I am sparing them from existing and having to go through that.
Good on you for having the courage!
I was spanked probably fewer than ten times throughout my childhood. The last time was when I was about eight years old and I remember it well. I turned out Ok, as in, I have a great relationship with my parents, overall fond memories from childhood, no therapy, etc.
No (well once I can remember), but the psychological and emotional abuse was enough.
I’m not answering the poll, because ‘hit’ is abuse. I was spanked as a kid (last time I was 16 - and I deserved it). I turned out fine - I have good self esteem, I like my parents, I don’t do risky behaviours. Admittedly, I was a stubborn child.
I wouldn’t recommend spanking as discipline these days. OTOH, you have to use what works (if something does). I don’t think my parents would spank a child these days.
I votes “Often, and I turned out quite well”, but that in no way means that I think my mother was right.
My mom believed in spanking. She thought “spare the rod, spoil the child” was one of the 10 commandments. I was spanked a lot. Almost every infraction seemed to have spanking as a punishment. I was a stubborn, willful child and my mom really believed she was doing the correct thing in spanking me. She believed that a child’s will needed to be broken in order for their heart to be right with God. Rarely did she spank me out of control and she always gave me the little speech about not wanting to do it, but it was for my own good. Usually it was a measured number of strokes, generally with her hand. Sadly for her, I have and extremely high pain threshold and even knowing I would be spanked for something didn’t stop me from taking the risk of getting caught.
She’s very sorry about that now. She was pretty young and naive and believed without thinking for herself what her church told her. She grew up, spiritually and mentally and by the time she had my brother (11yrs after me) he was rarely spanked. I think I smacked the Kiddo on the bum a couple of times when he was little - single swat to get his attention, but I never felt right about even that, so I stopped. I think he’s turning out quite well, too.
Yup. I got spanked sometimes, but neither “rarely” nor “often” would describe the frequency. My parents are old school. They spanked as punishment, and everyone’s fine. I’m not like a lot of folks here, and don’t think all hitting = abuse. I was never pinched, slapped, cursed at, belittled, or hit with any object besides my mother’s belt. We all were spanked when we misbehaved, then were sent to our rooms without further chit chat.
When I lived with an aunt and uncle from about 5-8 years old, I was switched - stripped to my underwear and beaten with a small flexible tree branch from my neck to my ankles. My mother made a “surprise” visit one weekend after one such incident; when she saw my back she walked into my aunt & uncles bedroom, snatched him out of bed by his shirt and told him she’d kill him if he ever laid a hand on me again. She then flew back to D.C., resigned from her job, flew back to Georgia and got me the hell out of there. She eventually forgave them; I never did.
She spanked me occasionally, but learned quickly I responded better to other punishments. I would be grounded, but not sent to my room. Sending me to my room with its abundance of books was not a punishment. I had to sit in the living room and work on a 8x12 foot latch hook rug. Merciful Goddess I hated that rug.
I have it now - it’s actually very nice - and I still entertain the thought of setting the damned thing on fire.
I ended up with pretty bad weight issues; when I lived with my aunt and uncle the only pleasure I had in life was eating. (Bitch was a good cook) So I am a stress eater. Other than that, I turned out pretty well.
Very, very rarely: I’m told I got spanked once when I was 5 but can’t remember it; I was spanked the second time when I was 11 and can’t remember exactly why but I do remember I wasn’t so much overstepping the line as willfully disintegrating it. That’s it. The threat of Mom’s Dr Scholl’s wooden flip-flops (which never actually got used, with any of us) was enough to make us tune it waaaay down.
There was a lot of psychological abuse, but not physical one.
I turned out OK, but it took me decades to get over the fear that, if I ever became a mother, I’d be as bad at it as my mother, her sister, their mother, and the mother of their father. My brothers (which I co-parented) didn’t turn out too badly, and Middlebro’s worst defects are… the things in which he resembles Mom :smack:
I’m asuming the OP is about childhood exclusively: my mother didn’t start that shit of pinching me because she happened to be mad at whatever (which may not even involve me) until I was in my twenties. She stopped it when I showed her those “playful pinches” were leaving bruises.
Man, my mom used to beat the shit out of me with a broomstick. She never hit my face, but got me just about everywhere else. And yeah, I’m fucked up now. But nobody knew it because I got good grades. Nobody ever thinks you have a problem if you get good grades.
The most common assumption people made about my parents is that they pressured me to get good grades. They never did.
Usually spankings, though Dad did go upside my head a couple of times.
Injuries were caused by my PITA brother.
I chose the last option (often/turned out badly). I do need to explain that by “turned out badly” I do not mean that I became an abuser or was abused in adult relationships, committed crimes, took massive quantities of illegal substances, etc.
I did end up emotionally, educationally, vocationally, financially, experientially and spiritually maimed.
Mr Excellent,
Are you looking for a correlation or hinting at a causal link? I am certainly not denying that one could exist either way. But even if we find that, say, abuse is correlated with turning out badly, it could just mean that parents who hit their children also tend to be incompetent parents who screw up in other ways. That is to say, it’s not the hitting that causes the turning out badly but rather a personality flaw that causes both hitting and raising your children in a way that makes them turn badly.
As for me, I remember:
1 spanking (mother, I think).
3 times being grasped by the front of the collar (2 times father, 1 time mother).
1 time being thrown on the ground (father).
Being yelled at by my father a lot and feeling like I have to walk on eggshells lest I get my father yelling at me messed me up more than any physical violence.
I’d say I turned out alright except for some social anxiety.
I agree with you. I don’t think there is a correlation. I bet that many parents who spank are good parents, and many aren’t. It depends on everything else the parent does.
Interesting. In my experience only the bad grades throw up red flags. As they should, perhaps, but I wasn’t the only kid who got the pinata treatment for doing poorly on a test.
I can’t find an option on the poll to fit me - mine is somewhere between rarely and often. And I think I turned out fine.
I got spanked with a belt (not like in the video, just spanked) on my butt when I did something really bad, mostly for lying, up until I was so big that my mother wasn’t strong enough to make an impression (either parent might spank, but the last one was her, and I just lay there with no reaction).
I think I turned out pretty good, but I don’t think the spankings had a lot to do with it. I am an (sometimes obsessively) honest person, but I think that the emphasis on making the worst punishment for lying is what did it, not the fact that that punishment was spanking. That, and learning by example.
One time my father, who was prone to attacks of anger, whacked me across the face and knocked it into the wall, giving me a bloody nose. I never did find out what that was for. That kind of discipline had no effect whatever, except to make me afraid of him.
Roddy
I think that’s an excellent insight.
Another possibility is that those with “difficult” kids are more likely to spank, and that “difficult” kids are more likely to grow up with problems.