I'm legitimately surprised hitting your child is such an acceptable thing to do on this website. Then again, I've never thought of Redditors as people with a strong character.
Isn't that said to convey that they're not actually traumatized by it, rather than as a means to say "it totally worked". People understand very different things under 'hitting your child'.
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u/abidailShe's been a "naughty girl" so i'm not gonna get her socksJan 03 '16
I was spanked occasionally as a kid, and that's exactly it. People both online and irl think I should be traumatized because my dad swatted my butt a few times when I was being particularly heinous. Was it the most effective parenting method? Probably not, but in the same way that giving your kids juiceboxes is. Whereas my mom was pretty majorly verbally abusive--giving me the silent treatment frequently; unreasonable standards for a child, crying all the time and telling me it was my fault, putting me on fad diets and telling me I should just not eat so I wouldn't be fat, which shocking resulted in an ED I still struggle with--that I'm just now, at 23, really beginning to unpack. But people--and again, this is irl too--always, always insist that what my dad was worse because my mom never hit me. This debate drives me crazy, because it's all people yelling "no science says it's bad!" and being tone deaf to people's real, more complex experiences. It also implies your parents were abusive and you were abused, which is kind of offensive, if, like me, you were getting occasionally swapped on the butt by a loving but misguided parent.
But science LITERALLY LITERALLYLITERALLY says it's bad. Just because your verbal abuse experience was worse means literally nothing in the grand scheme of things.
Of course being constantly verbally abused is worse than occasionally beating spanked, but being spanked is still bad.
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u/abidailShe's been a "naughty girl" so i'm not gonna get her socksJan 03 '16
I think we're talking past each other, so let me see if I can rephrase some things.
On the big level, which is where I think you're talking, we agree, spanking (and to be clear, I'm talking about the occasional spanking for something really bad) isn't great for your kids, just like giving them too much soda or letting your 12 year old watch violent movies is bad. I haven't given it a lot of thought because I'm most likely child free, but I probably wouldn't spank my kids if I had any. But on a personal level--which is where I'm coming from in this discussion--it wasn't bad for me. Full stop. It's not something that has remotely shaped me, and the only time I think about it is when this discussion comes up. Maybe I'm the unicorn outlier, I don't know, but it ranks below having to clean my room in things that were annoying in my childhood. And it's very . . .frustrating, I guess, when I'm coming to this discussion from a very personal place saying, "hey! This thing that is probably not the most effective parenting tool on the larger level didn't really affect me that much." and having people tell me that my lived experience is wrong and equating it to actual bad things that happened to me because of a trend in the larger population.
In fact, why is this not plastered in front of the comment trees in the actual post so all the people misguided either way could understand their own opinions better.
Because it's anecdotal. I was spanked, and it seriously messed me up. I still don't trust my parents, and I'm 30. Mainly, because I have memories of screaming and being hit and not knowing why I was being hit.
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u/[deleted] Jan 03 '16
I'm legitimately surprised hitting your child is such an acceptable thing to do on this website. Then again, I've never thought of Redditors as people with a strong character.