Iniquity

It was sometime in 1998. My older brother was spending the week with his biological mother, so three-year-old me was just playing by myself - or so the story goes.

My father called my name from the other room. Being preoccupied, I didn't respond and instead continued playing. My father raised his voice to get my attention and called my name again. I was playing in the hallway, just down from where he was sitting. I stood up and looked at him, but I didn't come to him.

"Come here," he said. I took a step backward.

This was the moment it became that night. My father would tell me about what happened and how I would need to do the same to my kids when I got older. He tells me with a smirk how I will reap what I sowed with him.

When I took a step backward, he got up from the couch and walked over to me. He grabbed my arm and walked me back over to where he was sitting, and he sat down.

"When I call your name, you must come here," he said. "Stay here."

He got up and walked to the kitchen. He returned a moment later with a wooden spoon.

"Bend over," he said. I bent over, and he spanked me six times. I started crying and writing on the ground.

"Get up," he said sternly. "Stop crying or you'll get another spanking."

I gathered myself and stood up.

"Now, go back to where you were."

I walked back over to where I was before.

"Now. Come here," he said.

I didn't do anything at first, and then I took a step backward again.

My father got up, grabbed my arm, walked me back to the couch, told me to bend over, and spanked me again. Again I started crying but tried to keep it in.

That happened several times over until eventually, I came to him when he called my name. I thought it was over, but it was not yet.

He told me to go back to where I was originally.

"When I say your name, you need to run to me and say 'Yes Daddy?'" he said. "Now, come here."

I stood there for a moment and then plotted to him. Not a run, but a faster pace than a normal walk. When I got to him, I didn't say anything.

He looked at me with a slight snarl and raised eyebrows. When it was clear I wasn't going to say anything, he shook his head.

"Bend over," he said.

I dutifully bent over and took my spankings, seemingly determined to defy him.

Again I went back to where I had been, and again we did the same thing all over again, several times, until I was fully sprinting to him upon command. However, I was still not saying anything when I got there.

My mother said this process took about two and a half hours, and that I was bruised for about five days after this. She said she hated it when it was happening, but trusted my father to do the right thing.

However many rounds it took, eventually my father "broke my spirit", as he would put it. He would quote:

Proverbs 22:15

Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline will drive it far from him.

This would be used as the basis for all discipline he would give, noting that the Bible says a "rod" and means physical punishment. I was strong-willed and that needed to be broken early if I was going to be raised as a good & obedient boy.

For years afterward, he would test how rebellious I was at a given moment by calling out my name. If I did not run to him and did not say "Yes Daddy?", I would get in trouble & spank on the spot. That only happened once before I learned my lesson.

I would also hear him brag about how well he'd broken my rebellion to other people. It was common that when one of his friends was over, he would talk about his parent's techniques and recount this story with me as an example. It would always end with him demonstrating how well it still stuck with me even several years later. I would be on the lookout for when he called my name, and when he did, I dropped everything, ran to him as fast as I could, and said "Yes Daddy?" like a good boy.

I was only allowed to call him "Daddy" until I was 16. That was the designated age that I would no longer be getting spankings as punishment, but rather if I needed it, he would knock us out. With this newfound trust, we didn't have to call him "Daddy" anymore and could just call him "Dad".

My Turn

Spankings were around every corner growing up. I only remember flashes about the time above, but there are plenty of others I remember in great detail. They will often be playing in my mind on repeat.

This year I'll be 30. I have a three-year-old son now too, and I'm one year older than my father was when I was three and that whole thing took place. My wife and I have discussed how we would discipline our children extensively, and we both agreed that unless there was absolutely no other option, we would not be spanking. If there was a critical problem that either threatened their safety or was clearly something that must be disciplined, and if we'd exhausted all other options, only then would we spank as a last resort. We weren't sure what that would look like, and we typically navigate parenting moments as they occur anyway.

Well, it happened. My son recently woke up in a very unique mood and must have decided that he was going to call all the shots that day. He was testing the boundaries of everything around him: the daily routine, what we told him to do, things he knew not to do - you probably know what I'm talking about, especially if you have children.

The trouble really started when instead of eating the plate of scrambled eggs and avocado (which he asked for) for breakfast, he refused and threw his plate on the ground. This was very out of character for him, and so we gave him an opportunity to help clean it up and course correct. Instead, he looked at my wife and hit her in the face. Another very out-of-character thing.

We made him help clean the mess up, apologize to his mother, and sit back at the table and eat his food. He was not allowed to leave the table or play with any toys until he at least took a bite of his breakfast. He stayed sitting there from 9:30am until his nap at 1pm. I and my wife were both surprised and frustrated that he was proving to be so stubborn. We weren't sure if making him sit at the table for so long was even very good parenting, but we made sure he had his water and that he was, you know, not dying.

He took his nap, and when he got up we didn't put him back at the table, but we agreed we needed to not let this slide. We had saved his plate in the fridge and prepared it again for him. He again refused to take a bite, and his wife harder.

I removed everything from his room except his mattress. We sent him to his room, and after a little while, I went in with the plate of food. I sat down and explained that he needed to take at least one bit of this food, otherwise, he'd have to spend the rest of the day in here, even if that meant it went all the way to bedtime (we were planning on at least giving him a glass of milk so he wouldn't go hungry, I'm not a monster).

I said there for another hour with zero progress. He hit me a few times, and each time I told him that he needed to apologize and show me "gentle hands", and he did. However, he seemed content to just sit there, facing me in silence with the plate of food sitting between us.

Eventually, I left the room and consulted with my wife. We reflected on the day and we both agreed that we needed to wrap this whole thing up and that clearly nothing we were doing was working. He was too young for us to really talk & explain why this was an issue. We decided that unfortunately, if we wanted to end this on our own time, we had to spank him. Otherwise, the lesson we'd be teaching him was that if he protests enough, he will get what he wants without any consequences.

I walked back in, sat down explained what was about to happen, and gave him one more chance to take a bite. Instead, he asked for a spanking (which told me he had no idea what I was about to have to do).

I turned him around and spanked him with my hand. He didn't cry, and I wondered if perhaps I was a bit more easy-handed than I should have been. When we left the room, he came up to my wife apologized for all the hitting, and asked her for a hug. It was then that I saw he was feeling some emotions about what just happened. I came up and told him I loved him, that I didn't want to do that again, and that he just needed to do things when we told him to. Then we carried on the evening as normal. We made dinner, he wolfed it down, and it was at last over.

To Spank, Or Not To Spank

The moment I spanked my kid my mind flashed with a lot of memories. All the times my father explained how I'd have to break my children's spirit to be a good father. All the times I was spanked by my own father while he demanded I do not cry, do not scream, and do not writhe, with the threat of more spankings if I did. How that if I ever told anyone that I was spanked, and especially how hard I was spanked, that bad people would take me away from them.

I hoped I wouldn't have to face anything like that again, and I especially did not want to do the same thing to my own kids. At the same time, I am an avid believer in children receiving discipline swiftly and absolutely. I don't want to legitimately traumatize them, but I do want them to understand that when they are children, what me and my wife say goes.

When a child is very young, I think they need to know to listen to their parents and do what they are told. They don't understand the world and run around like dumb drunk adults, and they need to instinctively respond to their parent's voices for their own safety. If my three-year-old decides to start running away in a parking lot, they absolutely must respond when I tell them to stop and to come back.

I think as they get old this should transition away from being such a black-and-white concept. One thing that I've noticed as a core difference in how I and a lot of my friends are parenting versus how the generation above us did things was that in our minds, we are raising little adults, whereas our parents seem to have only ever thought about it as raising children. For me and almost everyone else I know, their parents seem to have never thought about them as anything other than little kids who need to obey their parents. Maybe that gets burned in your mind after raising someone from a baby all the way through adulthood. I've only raised up to three now, so I wouldn't know just yet.

Since we are oriented around parenting our children in such a way that we're thinking about the adults they will grow up to be, I think that naturally changes the way discipline happens.

As an example, there are two things that think about a lot. One is that our children need to understand that EVERYTHING has consequences. The other is that they need to understand that "yes" means "yes" and even more importantly, that "no" means "no".

Binary

How you raise your children certainly has lifelong consequences. I wish I could have multiple childhoods to go off of. I feel severely limited with only having my one childhood experience. There is very little of it I want to pass on to my kids. Honestly, I'm trying to think of what that would be, but I'm having trouble doing so. My parents don't have any children addicted to hard drugs or in prison, so by that measure, they're successful. Though my little brother was smoking weed at 13. He's also been arrested for drunk driving (which is probably from the drinking problem). He's also dealt hard drugs, albeit briefly. But still, beats prison.

I know the consequences I've faced from my upbringing. I can only guess what's going on in my brothers' heads but I think I have a pretty good idea. I don't think it's possible to be anywhere close to happy, let alone fulfilled, when you're embedded in my family.

For my part, I did everything I could to rectify this. To me, there were two options, both sides of the same consequential coin. I could either stay, or I could go. If I stayed, the odds were very high that I would have to sacrifice most parts of my life to fit. If I left, it would give me a chance to start over and the expense my my family and the void I'd leave behind. Both are difficult options.

It's a frustrating lesson to learn about life; the sins of your father have consequences, and their children are the ones who pay for them.