The effectiveness of spanking as a punishment

Dear BunnyNub

This is a copy of my own post from "Do you spank your mother?"

Although a mother should make the rules and she is in charge I have always maintained that a mother should NEVER be exempt from them just because she is a grown up, or she is your mum, or she is too big to spank, or a child should never spank there own mum, or she can do whatever she wants but you have to do what you are told etc or any of a million more excuses that I heard from my mum when she did things that I knew that I would be spanked for.

If your mum does something that you know that she would spank you for then she should immediately offer herself for a spanking to show that NOONE is above the rules and if anyone does something that they were not suppose to do then they will be spanked.

All I saw was yet another female getting away with murder and I felt very resentful.

When I was a kid, mothers, teachers and all women in general had the opinion that everything they said goes because if it didn't they were afraid that it undermined their authority and would make people lose respect for them.

Well that was bull$%!@. It was that attitude that was the reason that I lost respect for all of them. They were all Feminist Tyrants in charge. I have no respect for Tyrants!

The mother who willing bends over to take a spanking is the more respectable mother and the 1 who I look up to.

PS I so want to use that brush on your mother and see how she feels!

PPS You have not said if you are male or female. (If you don't want to say that's OK)

I'm male. I don't think my sister got treated the same way I did. When I was being beaten it was all very novel to her too so she was curious enough to come and peer through the open doorway to see what happened to me.

My mother has been dead quite a while. She was no feminist, though. She was a stay-at-home mother. She was quite religious, but I don't know if that's where she got the idea that beating children was an acceptable way to treat them.

I still remember what that brush looked like, even though I hadn't seen it before that occasion. Indeed, the first time I ever saw it was when it flew out of her hand and onto the floor and I stood up, thinking the beating was over. It was cream and red, and has become emblematic of my childhood. I hadn't even known what I was being beaten with up until that point, but when I watched her pick it up and tell me that it wasn't over, I realised it wasn't just a brush, and to me now it isn't just a random implement picked for a spanking on the spot. To me it was a weapon designed to wound me, a tool chosen to inflict the maximum amount of misery on me for as long as she fancied, with the aim not really to punish, nor to teach a lesson, but to break my spirit.

As you can see, I've never got over it, and never will. Whatever else happens, I will always be that little boy who was beaten by the person who was supposed to protect him from pain, and told he deserved to suffer that agony, as if temporary agony can teach anyone anything but to fear. In a way, I'm still suffering that beating now. I'm just permanently trapped in that moment where I see her pick up the brush and realise this might never end if she so chooses.

Dear BunnyNub

I completely empathise with your position. Your mother believed that discipline is the be all and end all of everything (that is wrong) she also believed that you can instil discipline with fear. (you can but to do so is also wrong)

Her extremely sexist attitude towards the spanking of boys is one that I am extremely familiar with myself.

Your mother never took responsibility for her failures and like every Tyrant is exactly the person that gives spanking a bad name.

I'm sorry you suffered at the hands of your mother. Our experiences we suffer as children say with us our entire lives.

The issue is the effectiveness of spanking as punishment. No punishment is effective if it is abused and your mother abused it. She was a bad mother.

It never was long or drawn-out, but very effective. Mom would just ground me to my room to await dad or if dad was home, he would take/send me to my room where spankings occurred from age 9 to my last at 16.

Dad would bring the wood paddle hung in our utility closet or as I got older, he'd use his belt he was wearing. After a quick 'chewing out' for what I had done, he'd have me stand...as a younger adolescent, he would then put me over his leg with arm around my waist and pull down seat of my pants and paddle my butt; when I got older & the belt was coming off, he'd tell me to get'em down and bend over my desk or bed bare butt.

Rick

"I completely empathise with your position. Your mother believed that discipline is the be all and end all of everything (that is wrong) she also believed that you can instil discipline with fear. (you can but to do so is also wrong)"

I wonder if I would have a different opinion about this had I not been beaten the time I was beaten (when I hadn't done anything particularly wrong, even if I'd been told not to do it), but had instead only been beaten the time the time I actually deliberately did do something I knew I shouldn't.

A big part of my objection is to the injustice of it all - that I didn't deserve to be beaten at all. I don't think I could ever believe beating a child could be right, least of all the humiliating, ritualised, sustained punishment I received. But I read posts from people who were beaten just as badly, or worse, with belts or canes, and my first thought is relief the worst I received was the brush. Yet they don't seem to think they were mistreated. They admit to the offence and they consider the beatings they received from their own parents the fair price to be paid, that they did something that warranted a beating and that they deserved it when they got it.

And these people are most likely to say that spanking is an effective punishment and that they will spank their own children.

I will never hit my kids, as and when I have them. It doesn't matter what they do. The thought of me as a young boy, bent over that bed, being beaten - that image haunts me, even though I didn't see it. I remember how it felt, and not just the temporary misery, but the lasting emotional damage. I could never inflict that upon someone else, least of all a child, my own blood.

So that's the only comfort I can find in the experience. Because if I had been beaten the time I did do something wrong, or hadn't been beaten at all, I might not really understanding why it is so wrong, and how it's far more than 'just a spanking', and might even believe it was a useful way to teach a child. If I tell myself that I took the beating that my own kids now never have to have, then I can find peace in that. I would happily accept a beating so that they will be spared ever knowing what it's like.