With the greatest of respect, as a person who suffers from mental illness myself, please don’t lump racists in with us. Racism may correlate with certain psychological conditions, but it’s important to remember that psychological conditions don’t cause racism. Racism is a value judgment that people bring to the world,…

What a brave woman. Not that I’d want to spend any time with a person like Rusty, but I’m glad someone did just so we can understand why he does what he does. We may not agree with his actions (I certainly don’t), but I appreciate that someone took the time to find out WTF Rusty’s damage is in case it can be fixed.

There are so many gems in this, but I just wanted to point to exactly the dynamic that people seem to be missing when discussing corporal punishment. If your kid is acting out for some reason and in such a way that you are tempted to hit them: (1) they probably are craving attention and/or are wanting to feel valued…

This is because what these abuse enablers won’t admit is that the majority of these “spankings” take place purely out of the parent’s frustration or anger. That they can’t understand that it is at least just as fucked up to take your frustration out your child by hitting him/her as it would to do the same with an…

That’s what I got, and the idea wasn’t so much to inflict pain but to get us focused enough to stop whatever dangerous thing we were doing. Like if “I said get away from the stove!” didn’t work, a yank away from the stove and an open-handed clothed-butt swat would. But the goal was to get us away from the stove so we…

And this reaction represents about 50% of all whoopings in my opinion. From what I’ve seen (from relatives), most people who use the belt do so for everything. I’ve never seen any of these hypothetical “only as a last resort” spanking methods. It’s always the first - and only - method most people who use it know how…

Kids don’t need beatings. They need to better parenting.

Yeah. Same happens to me too kinda. Thankfully, I rarely dream about it. But out of nowhere, I’ll remember them yelling at me or some shit, and then I have to do some mental exercises to get rid of what just popped up in my brain.

It is completely a shortcut.

On average it happened weekly, but after awhile you just stop caring, you know it’s coming so why bother getting bent out of shape over it? I think if I was more emotionally caring or sensitive that it would probably bother me more, but at this point it really was just “oh, well that part of childhood sucks”.

Mostly the same experience, except my relationship with my parents are pretty good, at least on a superficial level. But, like, I know it’s not all real because whenever I have a really bad dream it usually involves one of them. The people I’m mad at the most in a bad dream turns out to be one of them.

I have been trying for 10 minutes to put into words how great the comment section is here. Couple times a week there are comments worthy of being whole posts.

Oh, I know, my Dad did the whole whupping thing, and can recall his grandma sending him to get a switch. His Mom once broke a plate over his sister’s head. My mom (who is white, so wtf) is always suggesting my 3 yr old is being defiant and needs a spanking. I don’t think any of those things do anything more than…

True.

Yeah, that shower thing was weird as hell to me. If your kids are old enough to shower by themselves, they are too old to be disciplined in that way, and deserve to have basic privacy around their body.

It may depend on the person. But no one knows what kind of child they got when they are doing this?

That’s not even getting into the fact that many adults were trained how to hurt people. I know I was; learning how to defend myself was a requirement, and since most people aren’t Hollywood stuntmen we weren’t trained on pulling punches or holding back.

I got a lot of whuppings as a child. If anything it made me angrier and also kind of got me to think that inflicting pain on someone was a means to show my displeasure with them. So I became violent. But what I saw was violence. My grandma would whup me for something and then later that day, my dad would too or maybe…

“And, let’s be clear, if you can go to jail for grabbing your spouse (and saying your did it, ‘cause you love them), why it is all right to hit your children?”

Will you do things differently when or if you become a parent?