_vega_

In my house it was more getting hit with the belt. My dad hated tantrums so that always deserved some rough punishment when I was around 3 or 4 and my brother and I had troubles as kids eating food that we were not familiar with so that always drove my dad mad. I also got hit with the board rubber a few times for being late at school. Anyway, my brother and I did great at school and turned out to be well behaved kids after all, although a bit too introverted at times. I have some issues regarding my father but being hit with a belt when I was four has nothing to do with that.

I think emotional abuse is worse. I think most of those kids that were spanked must have had very volatile parents and must have inherited that characteristic, that's why they turned violent too. If anything, I always thought that spanking could be dangerous for kids if they ended up in some abusive relationship as adults. The "he hits me because he loves me" thing that you sort of accept as a kid from your dad could be later transferred as an excuse for an abusive partner.

sunnykerr

I think emotional abuse is wrong... but I also have issues with anyone who hits a four-year-old with a belt. No offense intended. I don't want to judge people I don't know. And, most of the times, parents do the best they can with the tools they have and the things they know.

My dad spanked. Open palm to buttocks, straight-forward spanking. And I don't think the way he did it was appropriate or conducive to anything but inculcating humiliation and fear into his children.

So that's me. I think children need discipline, but I also think you can't teach them to "use their words" if you don't show them how it's done.

TheAngel

Sometimes it doesn't matter how many times you use your words, the behavior doesn't change. I know that my parents told me over and over about certain behaviors and they didn't stop until I got spanked or their was a major punishment. It was like I tested my limits until then and realized that I could no longer get away with it. Lets be honest, time out isn't a big deal once you've been there often enough and the memory of getting toys taken away fades pretty quickly when you're six years old.

I think if spanking's done right, where it's a direct punishment for something you've done at the moment that you've been punished for multiple times in the past, when it's not done out of anger, and when it's done in conjunction with verbal lessons, then it can have a positive impact on the behavior of the child. For example, my dad always explained to me why I was being spanked, how my behavior had lead to the spanking, and what I could do to avoid it next time and he never, once, hit me out of anger or hit me very hard. For this reason also, I see abuse and spanking as two very different things. The last time I was spanked I was probably seven or eight. As soon as I progressed psychologically to a level where I could reason and could understand consequences and had a much better understanding of right and wrong, the spanking stopped. To me there's a big difference between hitting out of anger and spanking and the former is abuse. My dad spanked me because no other behavior modification techniques were working (and I mean none, I'd seen a psychologist who suggested I go on one of the dime a dozen ADD meds at the time but my parents refused. They probably saved my life when they chose to do that). But if any man hit me, or even if my father hit me today out of anger, I'd see that as abuse and I wouldn't put up with it. A lot of it has to do with context, but a lot has to do with the parents who are doing the teaching. My parents spanked, but they also taught me how to be a strong, independent woman who won't put up with any type of physical or emotional abuse from anyone. A parent who regularly hits their child in anger probably wouldn't be inclined to do the same thing.

sunnykerr

I was referring to the child being taught to "use their words" as opposed to, say, throwing a tantrum.

Like I said, I have no objection to a parent resorting to spanking, so long as parenting skills are applied.

I do know that my mother never spanked, never hit, never applied physical force. And her ability to change my misbehaviour (or my brother's) was unparalleled. She used what Supernanny calls "the naughty corner" to great effect. And she didn't flinch. You didn't negotiate with my mum. What she said was the law. She didn't tolerate tantrums and she didn't tolerate kids talking back at her like she was "one of our friends" either.

And she did all of that, if not all of it, pretty much as a single parent.

My father scared us that we would piss him off by doing the stupidest things. Like passing gas in front of other people or dropping an egg on the kitchen floor or talk over him. You could see the point where he snapped and it was over his knee, down came the pants and whack. He wasn't a violent person. It wasn't like we were walking around in fear of his temper at all times. Just that he would spank because he got pissed or frustrated. And that never yielded results because there was no rhyme or reason to it. One day, passing gas would make him laugh, the next it got you spanked.

Which is why I'm saying, I'm not about to argue the merits of spanking with someone who's had a successful experience of it.

I just know that, in my own experience, spanking was not necessary. At all.

TheAngel

Yeah, that was one thing. My parents were always consistent and they always warned me before I got a spanking. So, for example, if I'd been in time out for back talking my dad, he'd tell me that I'd be spanked if it happened again. If I did, he'd take me into the bedroom, explain that I was getting a spanking because I had talked back to him even when he asked me to stop and even after I'd been in time out and had privileges taken away and then he'd spank me five times, always with my clothes on, and then we'd talk again about how he wanted my behavior to change. He never hit me out of frustration and what got me in trouble one day always got me in trouble the next...though that took me a little bit of time to figure out

_vega_

I think in my house it would be hard to use our words since we were taught that whatever dad said was law and there was no negotiation. I do see several mistakes that were made during my upbringing by my parents and I'd like to think I learned from those so I won't repeat them with my own kids, if I decide to have them.

My father stopped using the belt when I was also around 7 or 8 but my biggest problems with his way of scolding started for simmilar reasons than you mention here related to spanking but that for me were present in the verbal scolding I received as an older kid and in my teenage years.

There were strict rules for the belt: tantrums, not eating what mom made, not keeping our rooms clean and not keeping up with school. He never hitted us hard, just enough to leave a slight sting that stopped just a moment later. There was never a lack of consitency or logic then because he was very aware that something like that would be called abuse.

Meanwhile, the verbal scolding always varied depending on how irritated/tired/angry he was, so there was no way to know how bad we would have it. There were all types of reasons for the scolding, from making a noise he didn't like to washing my sneakers with my old toothbrush. In fact, one of my biggest gripes with my father was that whenever he had a bad day at work he would always come home looking for a reason to scold us so that he could yell at someone and there were times when he just remembered something we had done in the past so he would scold us AGAIN. We, figuratively speaking, had to walk in our tiptoes around him.

sunnykerr

I don't know what to say. Presumably it took more than one time-out for specific things to register in our minds as children, but my mum never graduated to a more severe form of punishment. And we weren't the kind of kids who, as a result of lax parenting, misbehaved. Like I said, what my mother said was law. But she always made sure we saw her reasoning.

I mean, the biggest sin you could commit in my mum's house was lying. So we stopped doing that pretty early on. And she didn't punish for accidents. You broke something, you pooped your pants... whatever it was, you had to take care of it yourself (after a certain age, obviously, no two-year-old is gonna sweep broken glass on my mother;s watch) and that was the end of that.

But you didn't lie, you didn't hit and you didn't throw tantrums.

If you did, it was a time-out. At the end of which there was a discussion as to why there had been a time-out. To make sure we understood why that was.

And, i mean, there was never a window to "talk back" to my mother. First of all, she wouldn't tolerate it. Second of all, she always had massive lines of communication open. It was very important to her that we develop our critical thinking. So there were a lot of discussions about "well, what did you learn from that experience?" and "why do you think I do this?" She explained her reasoning a lot and it always made a lot of sense.

And she never raised a hand to us. Like I said, one of the big rules in the house was "no hitting" and she always taught us that what was good for the goose was good for the gander, as it were.

TheAngel

One thing my parents did when I got older was to literally make me pay when I was bad and when I got bad grades. Spanking stopped when I was about six, as soon as I got more responsibility, and my parents gave me $5 a week for allowance that I could spend however I wanted, but, for every F I got on my report card, I had to pay them $5 and for every D I had to pay them $3...I don't actually ever remember having to pay them, so it was a good deterrent, and then I had to pay for misbehaving. If they had to put me in time out I had to pay a dollar, same thing if I got in trouble at school. But they'd reward me if I did chores. So, if I did everyone's laundry one week, I'd make $8 instead of $5 and it really just taught me the value of doing something right vs wrong. I've done my laundry since I was 8, and for a while I did my parents as well, not because of the money, but because I learned that it was the right thing to do.

sunnykerr

We only started getting an allowance after my parents split up. In theory, my dad would deduct a quarter every time we burped, farted, broke a plate or whatever. It never actually happen, mind you. My mum, of course, couldn't NOT give us an allowance after my dad started. Like I said, she was all about fairness.

For her, though, it was about learning money management. We had always been expected to do our shares of chores, so it's not like she could tie the allowance to our ability to do chores. And I'm not sure it would have been fair for her to tie to grades either. I was always fortunate in that department whereas my brother struggled with a lot of attention-deficit issues in school.

Stacie18

I got spankings when I was a child. They were issued as a form of discipline when I acted out. I thank God for my parents everyday because they molded me into the great woman I am today.

sunnykerr

Obviously your parents provided solid parenting with the spanking.