...Actually, we probably won't be referring to any child of ours as a bitch, but the title was too good to avoid. Well, I'm not intending on making a habit of doing requests, but since one of my lovely readers asked whether I would write something about the whole smacking issue, here it is.
Both K__ and I were smacked as children. Neither of us believe that smacking amounted to abuse and neither of us believe that smacking has left any form of trauma (perhaps we're just suppressing it though, maaan...)
When I was smacked, it was nearly always by my dad. My dad worked nights when I was a kid. He was the night news editor for the national news agency. This meant he woke up at about 1.00 p.m, left the house at 2.00 and started work at about 3.30. Consequently, it was often the case that if I had been naughty, any smacks that I was to receive weren't administered until the following day and I certainly recall that the time waiting for my dad to wake up was far more of a punishment than the actual smack itself, which was unpleasant, but didn't actually last long. I can remember my dad saying, 'This hurts me far more than it hurts you.' At the time, I always thought, 'Oh, chinny reckon,' but now I can see he was probably telling the truth. My grandfather was a vicious son of a bitch and would beat my dad up, literally to a pulp. The past, as they say, is a different country, particularly in Scotland where they had rather unenlightened opinions about the chastisement of children. Birching was commonplace and my father tells of children regularly going home with cut palms from where some sadistic schoolmaster had thrashed them. More serious crimes were punished with crucifixion and iron maidens. Very naughty children were beheaded. Okay, I may exaggerate a wee bit but things were done differently back then. There were probably a lot of men who beat their kids as my grandfather did. Not, you understand, that is any defence or justification.
That my dad grew up to be a much more gentle man than his father is considerable testament to his strength of character. Plus my mother would have karate chopped him in the windpipe if he'd ever tried something like that on us. Smacks were given out as punishments administered apart from the heat of the crime itself. I always knew why I was being smacked. I can't think that it was ever in error, though maybe I got unjustly punished once or twice. I simply don't recall (goddamn it, it's that suppression of bad memories thing again, isn't it?).
So, smacking; yeah it happened. No, I don't think it did me any harm. So, will we do it with our kids?
When K___ and I were discussing it, she made the rather sensible point that yes, we both got smacked and not without reason and no, neither of us felt it did us any harm. But did it do us any good?
I used to have this rather appealing habit of eating sugar straight from the sugar tin. The sugar tin must have held a kilo bag of sugar and I would take it down from the shelf and tip it to my mouth and eat it. Yeah, I know. I was weird. Anyway, not only did I have this thing that I did, I wasn't very good at it. My mother would come down in the morning and find that the floor in front of where the sugar tin was kept was crunchy. Apparently this wasn't a good thing. It was getting it on the floor that used to get me a smack, rather than the eating it per se, though I doubt they were particularly impressed with that either. Look back at the first sentence of this paragraph. I describe it as a habit. I used to do it a lot. I used to spill sugar on the floor a lot and I used to get smacked for it a lot.
K___, who by her own admission was a rather willful child, easily bored and quickly tempted into mischievousness (I find this quite easy to believe), found that smacking would make her more likely to do whatever it was she'd got into trouble for.
Clearly, it seems, smacking isn't terribly effective. There's also the law. Things have changed since we were kids. Not that we would ever want to do this even if we did smack our kids, but if you leave any sort of mark, you can be sent to prison for five years.
So, to answer the question, no, we won't be smacking. It's not that we think it's always wrong, but we just don't think it works. Of course, we say this now, when all this stuff is pure theory. It's certainly our intention not to smack now, but let's see what happens when we actually have a child.
Both K__ and I were smacked as children. Neither of us believe that smacking amounted to abuse and neither of us believe that smacking has left any form of trauma (perhaps we're just suppressing it though, maaan...)
When I was smacked, it was nearly always by my dad. My dad worked nights when I was a kid. He was the night news editor for the national news agency. This meant he woke up at about 1.00 p.m, left the house at 2.00 and started work at about 3.30. Consequently, it was often the case that if I had been naughty, any smacks that I was to receive weren't administered until the following day and I certainly recall that the time waiting for my dad to wake up was far more of a punishment than the actual smack itself, which was unpleasant, but didn't actually last long. I can remember my dad saying, 'This hurts me far more than it hurts you.' At the time, I always thought, 'Oh, chinny reckon,' but now I can see he was probably telling the truth. My grandfather was a vicious son of a bitch and would beat my dad up, literally to a pulp. The past, as they say, is a different country, particularly in Scotland where they had rather unenlightened opinions about the chastisement of children. Birching was commonplace and my father tells of children regularly going home with cut palms from where some sadistic schoolmaster had thrashed them. More serious crimes were punished with crucifixion and iron maidens. Very naughty children were beheaded. Okay, I may exaggerate a wee bit but things were done differently back then. There were probably a lot of men who beat their kids as my grandfather did. Not, you understand, that is any defence or justification.
That my dad grew up to be a much more gentle man than his father is considerable testament to his strength of character. Plus my mother would have karate chopped him in the windpipe if he'd ever tried something like that on us. Smacks were given out as punishments administered apart from the heat of the crime itself. I always knew why I was being smacked. I can't think that it was ever in error, though maybe I got unjustly punished once or twice. I simply don't recall (goddamn it, it's that suppression of bad memories thing again, isn't it?).
So, smacking; yeah it happened. No, I don't think it did me any harm. So, will we do it with our kids?
When K___ and I were discussing it, she made the rather sensible point that yes, we both got smacked and not without reason and no, neither of us felt it did us any harm. But did it do us any good?
I used to have this rather appealing habit of eating sugar straight from the sugar tin. The sugar tin must have held a kilo bag of sugar and I would take it down from the shelf and tip it to my mouth and eat it. Yeah, I know. I was weird. Anyway, not only did I have this thing that I did, I wasn't very good at it. My mother would come down in the morning and find that the floor in front of where the sugar tin was kept was crunchy. Apparently this wasn't a good thing. It was getting it on the floor that used to get me a smack, rather than the eating it per se, though I doubt they were particularly impressed with that either. Look back at the first sentence of this paragraph. I describe it as a habit. I used to do it a lot. I used to spill sugar on the floor a lot and I used to get smacked for it a lot.
K___, who by her own admission was a rather willful child, easily bored and quickly tempted into mischievousness (I find this quite easy to believe), found that smacking would make her more likely to do whatever it was she'd got into trouble for.
Clearly, it seems, smacking isn't terribly effective. There's also the law. Things have changed since we were kids. Not that we would ever want to do this even if we did smack our kids, but if you leave any sort of mark, you can be sent to prison for five years.
So, to answer the question, no, we won't be smacking. It's not that we think it's always wrong, but we just don't think it works. Of course, we say this now, when all this stuff is pure theory. It's certainly our intention not to smack now, but let's see what happens when we actually have a child.
Ha ha! That's fantastic! :-)
ReplyDeleteI would have made you eat the sugar from the floor... ;-)
ReplyDeleteSeriously, bravo, it's great you and K are agreeing on such matters from the outset.
I was smacked occasionally and always deserved it. Don't know if it worked, but I turned out all right. Gotta go now, I need to go and clobber an old granny.
Getting smacked was never any form of deterrent for me. As Dad to be says, I was rather strong-minded as a child and getting smacked just made me want to do the things again as a kind of statement about how I wasn't bothered about being smacked.
ReplyDelete