One “punishment” that I have never forgotten happened in the fourth grade (way back in the 60’s). Two of my freinds and I were goofing off and making a racket by rocking our chairs back and forth. Raising the left chair legs up 4 - 5 inches, dropping them down, raising the right legs, back and forth. The teacher walked in and ran up to me and slapped me so hard I flew off the chair and hit the floor about 3 - 4 feet away. The other two with me got no “punishment” at all. To this day I belive the reason I got slapped and the others got off was because I was the only “minority” student in the school.
I loved bike rides with my parents when I was little. We had those little seats on the back of the bike where a kid could watch the world go by. Well, I was supposed to take a nap before the bike ride and I couldn’t. I was too excited. I kept coming down every 5 minutes to ask if it was time to get up yet. Finally, my mother tells me that if I come out of my room one more time before she comes to get me for the bike ride, I wouldn’t be going with. I couldn’t stand it and came down to ask if it was time yet and sure enough, she got a baby sitter. They all went without me. To this day I do what I’m told, well, for the most part anyway.
[minor hijack] I know that this isn’t the Pit or anything, but damnation.
There are some sickening cruel awful parents out there. Some of these stories are simply beyond the pale.
In an effort to eliminate my nail-biting in 4th grade, my stepmother made me wear gloves (the thin knit ones used for somewhat cold weather) to school and keep them on during the day. She made me give a note to my teacher to make sure I wore them all day. It didn’t work. I didn’t stop regularly biting my nails until middle school, when I got braces. Even now, if I’m under stress, I’ll sometimes do it.
About the same time, she told me not to write on myself (it was a common fad for kids my age to write words or draw pictures on themselves with ink). After trying to be sneaky about it, she threatened that if I ever did it again, she’d draw a big bullseye on my face with a permanent marker and make me go to school like that. For several years, if I even got a bit of ink on my hands accidentally, I’d be in a panic to wash it off before she saw. It wasn’t until much later that she told me she never would have followed through with that threat, but after the gloves incident, I thought she’d do anything.
[hijack]
In the “writing on yourself” vein, I once drew a parade of bugs marching up and down both my arms. In Sharpie permanent marker. Boy, my mom was upset, especially when I had to go to school the next day with bugs on my arm.
[/hijack]
This one came from my 1st grade teacher, but it was freaky:
I was in 1st grade, and we had these workbooks that we were supposed to write in, in pencil. I didn’t have one that day for some reason so my teacher let me borrow hers. She gave me no further instructions, just the book. I remember I started to write in it. I didnt even complete a single LETTER. Just a LINE. And she came over to me, this psycho beast lady, and took the book away, screaming at me for writing in it. In PENCIL!!! This wasn’t so bad, but then she started yelling at me and she said, “I’M GOING TO KILL YOU!!!” now remember I was SIX YEARS OLD. Obviously she wasnt threatening my life, but what adult says that to a six year old?? I sort of believed her. I did at least think she was going to hit me. She made me stay in the other 1st grade teacher’s room thre rest of the day, this was supposed to be a punishment because hers was like the “dumb” class or something, but this other teacher was a nice woman. I told her that my kindergarten teacher taught me that you learn from your mistakes and I had learned from mine. So later I went back to my teacher and told her this, and she LAUGHED at me and said my kg teacher lied to me and she dragged me back to the nice 1st grade teacher. And, I’ll never forget this, the other teacher betrayed me and sided with my evil teacher and denied ever having heard me or anyone say that. !!!
My 1st grade teacher was NUTS. She once brought in a fertilized chicken egg to show us, but she dropped it and it broke and she showed us the dead, mutilated chicken fetus anyway. She let our class tadpole stay in dirty water till it died. She used to eat expensive chocolates in front of us and tell us we couldnt have any. And I had her the year the challenger blew up and I remember her crying because a teacher was on born…only cause of the teacher. She tended to punish to the extreme. I wish I had told my parents about what she did back then instead of later because I bet she could have gotten in trouble for that.
-having to stand in the corner for 3 days in 6th grade, I was 11. Teacher wanted to make an example (he’d left the class alone for a few minutes, and ofcourse it was chaos when he came back. picked me out of the whole group, just because. I never forgave him).
-my dad had loose hands when we were kids, so when I was 14, the last thrashing he gave me was quite severe. I’d gone over to a friends house I was not supposed to associate with. He came and collected me, beat the living sh*t out of me there and then, and then again when we came home.
never forgave him either.
I’m sad too. And I blame myself for it. I guess I didn’t articulate my OP well enough and that’s my fault…but I intended this thread to be in praise of creative and alternative punishments (i.e. taking away trick or treating)…not rehashing horror stories (which are heartbreaking). I understand that physical and emotional abuse are unforgettable certainly…but it wasn’t what I originally intended for the thread. Oh well.
Apparently I was a slob when I was a child (talking 4 or 5 here).
My mom after countless times telling me to clean up my room
proceeded to go into my room, toss all of my toys including my
monkeys in then nailed the damn thing shut.
Don’t know how long it lasted. Was traumatic, couldn’t sleep
without my monkeys.
To this day I’m still a slob, so much for ‘alternative’ punishment.
::shrugs::
Hey, that last post was my 100th!
I have another odd punishment I just thought of:
Two years ago while working at barnes & noble I was inspired to write a play about the store. i always write comedy plays about everything and people generally agree they’re pretty funny. So anyway because it was just a hilarious place to work, I wrote this play, which was about a fictional bookstore populated by fictional characters (a blue haired poet, a philosophical half man/half rabbit, a male geisha, etc) that all were based on people I worked with. Sort of like one big, crazy in joke that non b&n people found funny as well. anyway, everyone at the store knew I was writing it. They gave me suggestions, they were overjoyed, they all begged me to put them in it. We’d all gather around outside the store after work each night, like at midnight, and read my latest scenes. It was great.
There was one manager who was dying to read it but the rule was, no managers except the two cool ones could read it. So this guy snooped around and found himself a copy of my play. Even though it had my name on it and he found it in my stuff, he read it anyway, read maybe ONE page, and reported me to the head manager. The head manager was very strict and mean and affectionately called “Mr. Suit” in my play. Mr. Suit never read my play, he just HEARD about it, and decided to try and FIRE me for it!
He called me into the office and wrote me up. He accused me of breaking RULE TEN of the all-important Bookseller’s Handbook, which was like, thou shalt not sexually harass people. I didnt sexually harass anyone. I didnt in fact harass anyone at all, since my play was FICTION and how can one prove it was even about our store? The words barnes & Noble werent in the play.
So here I am in a bookstore with a manager stupidly making me define fiction for him, and then even more stupidly telling me, “What you did was…unlawable!” UNLAWABLE!!! He then informed me that I was breaking the fifth ammendment and taking the 1st ammendment away from my coworkers. None of which maked any sense, proving he also isnt that familiar with the constitution. Or the Bookseller’s Handbook, since it turned out Rule Ten was like, no guns in the store or something. No sexual harrasment was actually rule 8.
After consulting with his boss, it was determined that I couldnt be fired because since Mr. Suit never read the play he couldnt prove anything. So my punishment was being written up, plus I had to write an apology to the store and post it in the breakroom. I never apologized for writing the play, I said I was sorry if anyone took it the wrong way, and the manager was satisfied. He hated me after that. It really was the strangest thing to get punished for at work, especially because there’s a part of my play where the character based on me gets punished for writing a play…by the manager who went snooping.
Anyone who wants to read this play let me know. I still have it and my ultimate revenge is circulating it as much as I can!
I had a lot of standard stuff: Smacked, thrown, pinned to the ground by the neck, tossed down a set of stairs, hit with a bookcase. You know, the usual.
The most creative thing my stepdad ever made me do was kneel on a sharp corner of a 2x4 for an hour. That hurt.
Hit with a bookcase? Is your name “Bruce Campbell”? He’s always running into them.
LOL No, sorry. 
It was the closest thing within reach for my mom to throw at me, so that’s what it was.
Ah. My mistake!
Being that I was a perfect angel of a child (;)), I don’t have any creative punishments of my own to share. I would, however, like to tell you about a punishment my 9th grade English teacher, Mrs. Keating, had inflicted upon her in Catholic school.
Mrs. K was in second or third grade at the time, and her class was taught by a notoriously strict (and slightly off-balanced) nun. On the first day of class, the sister asked all of her students to bring in pictures of deceased loved ones. These photos were placed at the top of a bulletin board, surrounded by white construction paper clouds and images of various saints. At the bottom of the bullletin board, there was a frightening rendition of hell, complete with fire and brimstone and other items of the damned. Every time a child misbehaved, the photo of his or her loved one was moved a little bit further down the bulletin board. “Look what you’ve done,” the sister would chide. “Since you wouldn’t quiet down, your poor grandmother is going to burn for all eternity.”
That’s probably the most memorable “creative” punishment I’ve ever heard.
I once flooded my HS chem lab. It wasn’t altogether by accident, so punishment was in order. Being that this was right before our version of spring break, it was resolved that I’d help in the annual repainting of the woodwork in our school that was to take place during that week. I actually had a good time with it, but the best part came later. Some genius later decided they couldn’t have me work without pay, so they paid me the same as the janitors doing the actual work, and they were on time-and-a-half. For a 16 year old kid, it was a fortune. Lesson learned: Crime pays ;).
Hi Dr. Lao! Long time no see. 
Yep, that’s what happened. Mom was at the height of her alcoholism and untreated bipolar disorder at that time…
I went through a period of several years when I would say that I hated my mother. But she’s sober now and takes medication for her illness.
Parents are human and make mistakes. My mother has apologized for everything she ever did, in excruciating detail sometimes… I have forgiven her. Being a good parent seems to be a daunting job for someone who isn’t sick, y’know? I think my parents did the best they could.
C’mon, it’s so obvious. Your “friends” Gina and Karen ratted you out.
I have several “horror” stories about punishments.
The first one was when I was maybe 4 or 5 i thought it would be a GRAND idea to draw on the white bedroom door with chalk and tell my father that i didn’t do it and i didn’t know who did, my younger sister was only 1 so i couldn’t blame it on her and they never went into my room so i told them the boogy man did it and so i got grounded for 2 days
The next one was when i was in the second grade and i NEVER did my homework and one day miss somerville decided she had had enough and gave me 3 pages of the dictionary to copy while everyone else was at recess and lunch and gym (there was a lunch period for the bad kids where we were not allowed to talk)
The final one was when i ran away from home and I was found and my mom and Dad decided that if they couldn’t trust me in my own room then i would have to share a room with my younger sister who is now 12 and they STILL dont trust me in my own room and that was almost 6 mos ago.
Amanda, Daughter of Norinew
This wasn’t a punishment per se but it was close enough. My mother used to make my older sister (4 years older) and I fight eachother until one or the other couldn’t move. This started when I was around 7 or so and continued to around 10. At first, it was like rough housing and kinda fun but my mom gradually made us hit harder, go longer, etc.
When I turned 8, it wasn’t fun anymore and my sister and I didn’t want to do it anymore. That is when she got out the baseball bat and said that she would beat us if we didn’t keep fighting. Neither my sister or I would fight so my mom hit me in the head with the baseball bat. I couldn’t move for several moments and I think my mom thought she killed me. Eventually I was able to move and was sent to my room without supper. My sister was not hit with the bat.
The next day, we had the same threat, fight or get hit with the baseball bat. My sister and I cried the whole time because we didn’t want to fight eachother but our mother was so much scarier at the time that we stopped.
This sort of thing stopped when I was 10 and told my mom that I would murder her in her sleep if I ever had to fight my sister again. She didn’t believe me the first time and made us fight again. That night I stabbed through her locked door at least 100 times with a butcher knife with my mother screaming at me. That was the last time I had to fight with my sister and the last time my mom ever tried to hit me. Later that year she kicked me out of the house and I lived with my grandparents. She started up the abuse again after that. On a side note, CPS was called many times but nothing ever happened on our end and our mother never stopped.