Pride of the Spankees

I saw this meme this morning: "As a child, I had two choices for dinner: Take it or Leave it."  I'm not sure I get the point of the meme.  Are they making fun of modern parents who give their children choices for dinner?  Do people really do that?  Is it a common thing?   Because I think it's kind of cool if you can manage it.

I mean, okay, it might be a little too far to actually give your kid a full menu every night, but if the kid truly hates meatloaf, I don't see the crime in offering to microwave them a hot dog.  My wife was forced to eat a lot of things she didn't like as a kid, and to this day she has some debilitating food issues because of it.  Seriously, ask her the pineapple story sometime.

I understand the point of making kids develop healthy eating habits, and I understand they should get a variety of foods early on so they can appreciate more foods later.  But some kids actually do hate certain foods to the point that it makes them nauseous, and parents often force them to eat it anyway.  This is how eating disorders start.  Don't be that parent.

"But we're training them to be adults here!  Adults don't always get choices."  Um... actually, adults do get to choose what they want for dinner, most of the time.  What the fuck kind of adult life do you live, where you think this teaches kids about life?  Are you training your children for a future in prison?

You know, it doesn't matter, that's not even the point of this blog.  Making your children eat "yucky" things isn't what's bothering me, it's being so proud of it that you made a meme.  I understand that sometimes parents have to be cruel to be kind, but this whole culture of "Ha, I'm a crueler parent than you are" is like some primitive dick-measuring contest.

I see tons of variations of, "In my house, if you talked back, you got the belt" or "More kids are criminals these days because their parents didn't spank them enough."  Look, I don't want to tell other people how to raise their kids.  I'm generally wary of spanking, but I understand that different children require different punishments.  Time-outs simply don't work for some parents.  So while I lean toward the anti-spanking crowd, it's not something I'm very vocal about.

But again, it's not about the spanking, it's being proud of it.  At its best, spanking is a necessary evil.  At its worst, it's child abuse.  This whole attitude of, "Yay, I got to spank my child today, I must brag about it on Facebook" strikes me as brutish and fetishist.  Can you imagine if people bragged about hitting their spouses as often as they do about hitting their children?

And it's not just parents who brag about it, sometimes the kids do too.  I know one guy who says, "When I was a kid, I was spanked every day whether I needed it or not, and I turned out fine."  Well, actually he grew up to be an asshole, but I'm not going to tell him that.  It's weird to me that so many people are proud of having been spanked, though.  Are you saying you're proud of your parents for being strict, or proud of yourself for being a rotten kid?  "Oh yeah?  You got spanked a lot?  Well, I went juvie for sexual assault.  Top that!"  But again I'm getting off track.

Or how about those "creative parenting" posts?  You know, where parents give their child a humiliating punishment, like holding a sign that says, "I stole a piece of candy from the drug store" in public?  Again, I'm not criticizing the parents for trying a different punishment, especially if all the other punishments failed.  I'm just annoyed that they were so goddamn happy they got to humiliate their child that they decided to upload it to Facebook as well.  It makes you wonder if it was really about teaching their child a lesson, or more about the attention they got from their Facebook friends.

My parents were pretty light on punishment, or maybe I just wasn't bad very often.  But whenever I went to a friend's house, I paid attention to how their parents punished them, and usually I was horrified.  The parents who had the harshest rules were the ones with kids who lashed out the most, but I make no claims on which was the cause and which was the effect.  Maybe the parents had to up the punishments because the kids kept getting worse.  Or maybe the kids were getting worse because they were starting to realize their parents were monsters.

Regardless, I will never forget this one time...  We were probably in the fourth grade.  My friend and his little brother kept fighting and calling each other rude names.  Their dad ignored it for as long as he could, until they got so loud that he couldn't hear his TV program.  That's another side note - I've rarely seen kids punished for actual sins.  They can punch and kick each other as long as they want, as long as they do it quietly.  They tipping point is always when they damage something or annoy the parents.

Anyway, my friend's dad reached that tipping point, and he went to get his belt.  But… I will never forget the gleam in his eye when we went to punish them.  That look was not “This will hurt me as much as it hurts you” or “I don’t like doing this, but it has to be done.”  It was just for a second, but his expression very clearly said, “They were bothering me and I will enjoy straightening them out.”  I sat in their living room and stared into space while I heard the loud thwacks and cries of pain from their bedroom. 

Afterwards, I went into my friend’s bedroom to comfort him.  My friend wasn’t thinking about what he’d done, or pondering how to be a better person.  He just talked about hating his little brother for getting him into trouble.  The assault had not put the fear of God into him, only the fear of Dad.  It was pointless pain, and the only outcome was that it widened the rift between all the family members involved.

Was there a better way?  Could he have resolved the issue without violence?  That’s not for me to judge.  He did give them a couple of verbal warnings before he stood up, so there’s that.  Maybe they wouldn’t have listened to anything but the belt.  That’s a debate for another time.  Today’s gripe isn’t about the action, but the attitude behind it.  The sociopathic egoism it takes to hurt someone out of so-called “love”, and then to feel proud of it.

Bill Cosby - you know, the rapist - had a whole bit about his children’s nightly beatings.  To be fair, that’s just a comedy routine, and I used to find it funny.  It might be based on actual experience, it might be exaggerated for comedic effect, or it might be made up from scratch.  But then, my point isn’t that he beat his kids, but that he thought the act was so funny it was worth describing it to an audience for laughs.  And isn’t it kind of interesting that the kind of person who made those jokes is the same kind of person who drugged women for sex?  No, I’m not saying everyone who spanks their child is a potential rapist, I’m just saying… it’s an interesting coincidence.

Look, I'm not a parent.  I know it's a tough gig, but I'll never know just how tough.  And the last thing I want to be is one of those judgy non-parents who criticizes parents for doing what works for them, without ever having had to deal with it myself.  But having to punish your child should upset you as much as the child.  It's not something to be proud of, it's just something you felt you had to do.  It's fine to commiserate with other parents about how tough it was, but spanking/beating is not something to joke or brag about.