My parents spanked me when I was a child.
I haven't admitted that before because I'm painfully ashamed of it. (So ashamed of it I can't bring myself to open comments on this post. If you circumvent this by using other posts, you will be banned.) I've been sitting on this post for years, and could never bring myself to actually post it.
But yesterday, I saw a lady spanking her child.
I wanted to run over and stop her. I wanted to run over and tell her how it affected me, the unintended consequences that coloured my whole relationship with my parents and could have been disastrous if bad things had happened in other areas of my life.
But I was too chicken.
So, as penance for not stopping that lady's destructive habits, I'm going to lay bare my shame. Here is what I learned from being spanked by my parents:
First, I learned that if someone is doing something you don't like, you should hit them. Seemed logical. But then I'd get in trouble if I hit someone else. So what I learned from that is that my parents are great dirty hypocrites (although I didn't know that word yet).
One problem with spanking specifically is that it's a smack to the bum. Your bum is a private part - I learned that very early on. People aren't supposed to touch your private parts, and if they do you're supposed to respond with "It's my body and I say NO!" I learned that from a little orange book my parents read to me when I was probably under three years of age. So the next time my parents wanted to spank me, I said "It's my body and I say NO!" But that didn't stop the spanking. From this, I learned that the rule about private parts being private wasn't actually true. There was some kind of secret other rule that I didn't know and they wouldn't tell me.
For the majority of my life, I've had a sense that the actual rules of society aren't what I'm being taught they are or shown they are - there's a secret other set of rules that I'm left to guess without any guidance. This feeling has hindered me for decades - sometimes to the extent where I'd receive clear, specific instructions from teachers or employers and automatically assume that wasn't actually what they wanted - and I'm quite sure at least part of its root is in spanking.
Because spanking violated at least two of the major rules I was taught, I concluded that my parents' rule system was inherently injust. Therefore, I decided that whenever they issued a punishment that I considered injust, it was logical to punish them for it. I would sabotage things in the house, return to the prohibited behaviour when I wasn't going to get caught, or otherwise stealthily do things that made life more difficult for my parents. The possibility of punishment being a natural consequence of my actions never occurred to me - it was quite clearly an injustice that I had to counter.
More importantly, because spanking violated at least two major rules, I concluded that my parents either enjoyed doing it, or enjoyed seeing me hurt and humiliated. This meant I didn't tell them when someone else was hurting me or humiliating me. The people hurting and humiliating me were my peers, but this statement would have held even if it was a teacher or other authority figure. Because my parents had shown me that they like to engage in violent, unwanted, humiliating physical contact with my private parts, if another adult - or anyone at all, for that matter - had tried to touch my private parts in a way that was violent, unwanted, and/or humiliating, I would have assumed that my parents thought I deserved it (and perhaps would punish me even more for being someone who deserves it) so I would never have dared tell them and in fact would have taken active steps to keep it secret from them. Fortunately, I never found myself in this situation, but, if I had, they results would have been disastrous.
In short, spanking completely eliminated my parents' trustworthiness and credibility in my eyes. It never once even occurred to me that they might want to protect me from outside threats. It never once even occurred to me that they might have my best interests in mind. It never once even occurred to me that there might be a good reason for any rules they set out. It never once even occurred to me that if I was having a big problem with other adults I could go to them. I never saw them as an ally, always as a threat or an obstacle. All in the name of...what? I don't even remember what the alleged infractions were that I was being spanked for in the first place!
I've told all this to a few people before, and one response I often get is "Kids don't think that way or draw such far-fetched conclusions." So I'd like to make one thing perfectly clear: this is what my actual child-self actually thought and concluded, in real life, based on the input available. It's articulated here in more adult terms than I could express at the time to make it clearer, but it is the absolute truth of my child-self's thoughts, feelings and conclusions. This isn't child psychology, this isn't parenting theory, this isn't social engineering, this isn't political correctness. This is what an actual, real-life child actually learned, in real life, from being spanked.
Dear lady spanking your daughter on Roehampton Avenue, in front of the construction site, between 2:30 and 3:00 p.m. on Saturday, August 17: are these the lessons you want to teach her?
