Crime and Punishment

I’m so very glad I don’t have children. My dog, cat, fish, and one little succulent are plenty of responsibility. I’ve never had a biological clock to speak of, pushing me to procreate. Parents are humans who created humans (or adopted another’s creation) and manage to raise them, without any sort of reliable guidebook. That’s terrifying. Even in giving credit to all parents for doing their best in a difficult role, certainly some do a better job than others.

One common topic of parenting comparison is punishment. As beating your children becomes uncouth, procreators are forced to head back to the drawing board, seeking more creative solutions and responses. Does this require a stern conversation? Perhaps loss of privileges, time-outs, groundings? While they weren’t above hitting us, my parents were ahead of their time in getting inventive when it came to punishing their children.

Spankings

Ah, good old spankings. My father only used this on me when I was little, but the rules were simple. You got hit once for whatever it was you’d done, but three times if you’d also lied about it. I appreciate the attempt to instill honesty… but it somehow seemed inevitable that I’d be hit either three times or none if I got away with it. Being hit slightly less wasn’t much of a convincing argument in my mind.

My mother probably still likes spankings. The more I write these stories down, the more convinced I become that my mother has a humiliation kink. Not to be humiliated, but in humiliating others, especially those she has power over. All the way through high school, (and only stopping because I moved out shortly after), she would reach a point of anger and insist whoever was in trouble pull their pants down, and lay across her lap on the couch for a bare-ass spanking. I’m a few inches taller than my mother, and had to bend over her knee with my bare 17 year old parts exposed so she could feel like she’d gotten her message through.

One such occasion with my sister began a long love-affair she maintained with yard sticks. (Not like that) ((I hope)) (((Ouch, splinters))). When Evelyn was little, maybe four or so, our dear mother went to spank her bare ass with a wooden spoon, and hit that little bottom so hard, the spoon broke. While my mother became FURIOUS at the loss of a good, and damned expensive wooden spoon, my sister laughed her little naked butt off. So. Wooden spoons were too good to waste on children’s butts.

I’m not sure how or when it happened, but my mother realized she could get free yard sticks each year at the state fair. Was she supposed to get only one? Yes. Did that stop her from stocking up? Nope. And there, in the corner of the hallway, just before the kitchen doorjamb and once-was shutters…. Sat her yardstick. She could reach it from the red stool under the spice rack, or while she cooked at the stove, and importantly- while she was on the phone. The beauty of the yard stick was its simplicity and its reach. You can’t beat someone all that hard with one, it’ll break. But, you can follow a child around, screaming and regularly smacking them with it to vent your own frustration and keep goading them to work faster at whatever it is you want them to do. Also, and I feel this goes without saying, the ones with metal tips hurt significantly more.

Languages

My father liked punishment to be educational. So, one of his favorite punishments was making the wrongdoer learn 20 words in a language of his choosing. Something small, and you could get away with proving you’d learned 20 new words in American Sign Language or one of the romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese). Large transgressions, and you could land yourself in Swahili or Serbo-Croatian. Though, despite sneaking out and getting caught having driven around with a local boy late at night, I never actually completed my Serbo-Croatian tape he gave me.

One that sticks out in my mind as a particular injustice was being asked to solve the code of the Dancing Man from Sherlock Holmes (essentially a pictogram), and proving I’d unlocked it by reading the letter back to him he’d written in the code about how disappointed he was in me. My brother had used a BB gun to shoot tiny holes in a large painting and the front window of the house. Since I was supposed to be watching him, I was punished equally or more, especially since my parents somehow became convinced I’d joined in the shooting fun, which had never been a big part of my life or interests, while my brother has spent his entire life obsessed with guns and weapons.

How to Care for Your Possessions 101

Sometime in elementary school, I gave in to the deep desire to decorate my own room. I still had nursery wall paper from when I’d been a baby. With a hoarder for a mother, I’d rarely really gotten to choose what belongings stayed or went. I took my pretty pink nail polish and swiped a few, very artistic, slashes onto the side of my white pressboard dresser.

What’s entertaining now is to review this incident as an adult who is often responsible for reacting to children’s behavior, as a teacher. The most obvious solution to this would be to take away my nail polish, and make me use nail polish remover and cotton balls to remove the swipes. Following, it would make sense as a parent to talk about wanting to decorate our things, finding something appropriate to do so with, and the idea of consulting a grown-up before making decisions like that on my own.

That was far from how my mother decided to handle the situation. In her mind, I didn’t respect my belongings. So, she’d take them away. Except, the only thing I remember being taken away was my clothes. I was left with one school outfit I had to wash each evening in the bathroom sink and hang to dry, and I was only allowed to wear that one outfit to school all week. I can only imagine what was said about me, and the bitter anger at being the kid who wore the same thing all week. I was also left with one sleep shirt, which I was asked to wash once mid-week, in the morning before school. All clothes were washed with shampoo, rinsed under screaming duress, and left to hang and dry. I’m sure she had to secretly throw them in the dryer, but I feel absolutely no pity for what bit of effort this pulled from her day. And, strangely, that dresser is still sitting in the closet of that bedroom, with pretty pink nail polish swipes on the side.

Perhaps all of these solutions led to what success I’ve found in my life. But, I choose to believe there are ways to raise healthier, happier children, fully capable of success without the constant inner monologue about how if someone treats them this way, they deserve it. I have friends that make their kids do burpees, squats, and wall-sits. Others find that clear, quiet conversation goes a long way. I am, at least, heartened, that as parents continue to seek creative, caring solutions to child behavioral problems, we help raise communities of adults with greater empathy, compassion, and higher self-worth.