doing the very best she could to provide for us, but I just wanted to fit in with my friend- group and not be branded the poor kid. But the inability or unwillingness to investi- gate the root cause of negative behavior was the missing component for my mother, most of my friend’s parents, as well as today’s par- ents. My mother was raising a house full of kids her entire life, 14 of her own, and she took on the role of daycare for a lot of my nieces, nephews, and cousins during the sum- mer months. And although my mother was probably the wisest person I’ve ever met – I don’t believe she had the patience or the emo- tional intelligence to get to the actual root cause of any kid’s bad behavior. Instead, like most stressed out parents, it seems more effi- cient to continually grab a belt and beat it out of them. I also question whether the severity of some of the beatings that I took matched the seriousness of the infraction. Or were some of them enhanced by my mother’s lone- liness, financial struggles, her disappoint- ment in being left to raise all these kids alone by my no-good-for-nothing-ass father, or his past mental and physical abuse of her. Similarly, when I look at some of these
viral videos, I have to question how much of this child’s beating is: the parent’s frustration with their job situation, or the person that cut them off in traffic and flipped them the mid- dle finger, or a father who cheated on the mother and left her to raise the kids without child-support, or the unresolved previous abuse that the parent has internalized. And now the kid comes home and get caught in a lie, or mouthed-off to a teacher that routinely disrespects him/her, or is acting out because he/she is just missing the other parent – and the end result is the child gets violently whipped. And there are kids that are going to be beaten today for wetting the bed, as if that’s going to help? There are also kids with ADD/ADHD and hyperactive disorders that are going to get beaten today for having too
much energy. Because an overwhelmed par- ent has branded the kid as being hard headed. Now by today’s standards, my mother and a lot of parents in the late 60’s/early 70’s would have spent a good portion of their adult life behind bars for what they called disciplining their kids. Yet, I’m gonna’ stop short of calling my mother a child abuser. She certainly loved all of her kids, but there sure wasn’t a lot warmth and tenderness. Furthermore, I was definitely given very stern verbal warnings about my beating-level behavior before I was actually violently whipped. I was always given plenty of time to change my behavior – I just chose not to. Because after so many beatings, I did not fear my mother or the beatings any- more. This is why I say this form of discipline don’t work, and there is a lot of research sup- porting my claim.
https://www.psychologyto-
day.com/us/blog/family-affair/200809/rewa rds-are-better-punishment-here-s-why If this form of discipline actually
worked I probably wouldn’t have gotten caught shoplifting in the same calendar-year I left my mother’s home for college. I definitely wasn’t thinking about the pain of all those beatings when I got drunk with a group of my teammates and went to a grocery store that night and got arrested for trying to steal two packs of bologna. When those two, big refrig- erator-size cops took me to jail they didn’t handcuff or restrain me, nor did they take me out in the woods and whip me. They referred to me only as Sir or Mr. and they never once cussed at me – unlike my own mother and the parents on these Fakebook videos I wit- nessed.
On the ride to jail one of the cops asked
me if I was hungry, keep in mind I was going to jail for attempting to steal two packs of bologna – and I was hungry as hell. He then said they had two buckets of KFC at the police station and that I could have some after I was booked. They took my mug shots, finger- printed me, and I sat with them and ate Ken-
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