I was at the park today and one of the little kids say “we can’t do that or we’ll get a spanking.” The other kid says “Do your parents hit you?” The first one says “No, but they keep promising.”
I got to thinking when I was little my parents would always threaten to ground me, but my mother never did 'cause she never wanted me hanging around the house all day
What “empty threats” did your folks make to you, that you knew at the time were empty threats? And what, if any, “empty threats” did they make at the time, that you took seriously but now as an adult realize they were empty.
We went caravaning around the South Island of New Zealand a lot as a family. If us kids were getting too rowdy, Dad would threaten to leave us at the side of the road if we didn’t behave.
I think for generally well-behaved kids, they know that the parent isn’t going to go through with it, but it is a warning sign that they are getting seriously pissed off with you, so you know to cut it out.
On the other hand, the thread of ‘the jam spoon’ was a very real one until the day my mother hit my oldest brother on the backside with it and the spoon broke off the handle.
My mother used to threaten to send me to the orphanage when she was mad at me. She would actually go pick up the phone and pretend to talk to someone there, saying I was a bad girl and she didn’t want me any more, could they come get me. I was about 4 or 5 at the time and it used to scare me to death.
One time when my brother and I were approximately four and five, my mother found a little dried-up Flintstones vitamin in the carpet. She decided that one of us must have been snacking in the medicine cabinet (well, Flintstone chewables were delicious little things), and proceeded to browbeat the two of us for what seemed like hours. There was much crying and indignation, but neither of us would admit to having taken any vitamins. Finally, she told us to put our shoes on. She was taking us to the hospital to have our stomachs pumped. She had us out in the driveway, putting us into the car, when I decided to take one for the team and confess to taking the pills. I felt quite heroic.
Later in life, when I felt the statute of limitations had run out, I retracted my confession, but no one ever believed me, not even my brother. I could barely wring a “thanks” out of him for having saved him from the stomach vac, the ungrateful bastard. To this day, I maintain my innocence.
Regarding my death, I have only one wish: That my tombstone be engraved with two lines, the first being, “I did not take the Flintstone vitamins.” (The second will be, “And I didn’t quit my job because Deana told me to”, but that’s a different story.)
Once my sister and I got into such a terrible knockdown fight that my father said we couldn’t watch TV for a week. We probably were about 10 and 9 at the time. The next day he came home from work and asked if the TV was broken. We reminded that he had told us we couldn’t watch. (It was very unusual for us to be so obedient.) He turned the TV on and we never heard another word about it.
My mother would threaten to ‘sell the TV up the road’, when we were younger. If ‘up the road’ had been an electrontic goods store, rather than a bakery, this would have carried more weight.
Not my parents, but my grandmother. Backstory: I have red hair, as did both of my grandmothers. I’m the only one in [del]two[/del] three generations (third generation not yet complete) to get it.
Anyway, my Nana had two threats that opposed each other. One, she “threatened” to dye my hair red if it turned brown. But that meant that when she threatened to snatch me bald-headed when I was misbehaving, I knew she’d never do it - she liked my red hair too much! (Not that I was actually worried about being snatched bald-headed in the first place - my Nana wasn’t mean!)
For my stepbrother it went a step further. Stepmom would talk to the “person at the orphanage”, stepbrother would call her bluff, then we would get in the car and drive down to the creepy old Boy’s Home to say goodbye to our brother. Once we got to the Boy’s Home he would be crying and apologetic.
It wasn’t until I was in my teens that I found out that Boy’s Home had been abandoned for decades. No wonder it looked so freaking creepy!
