To wonder if this discipline was excessive of my mother?

[PineappleFwitters]

My mother always physically punished us as children. It's what she grew up with and what she knew, but I think it happened more because she lost her temper than because I was badly behaved.

Once, when I was about 12, I was keeping an eye on my brother but also reading my copy of Mandy (yes it was that long ago!) Before I knew what was happening my brother, who was probably about 9 months at the time, rolled off the bed and fell into the (carpeted) floor. He was not injured (as the bed was fairly low) but he cried, and my mother came storming into the room, slapped me and tore my magazine into pieces.

Now I don't deny that I should've been keeping a closer eye on my brother, but was her behaviour not a tad OTT? Again, I think she lost her temper and didn't know how to deal with it. I don't hold a grudge against her but I do wonder if it's why, even today, I get easily annoyed with her. Part of me is worried that I might wind up acting like that with DC, but fortunately so far so good.

Anyway not sure why I'm posting this really, maybe to see if my feelings are justified or if her behaviour was excessive.

I think the point here is the frequence. Parents who lose their temper and slap their children two or three times in their entire childhood is not really that big a deal. Someone who does this on a regular basis, however, is something else entirely.

"She was always flying off the handle tbh, over the smallest things. In fact I remember once bringing up this incident years later and she just laughed and said that's what she's like when she loses her temper. Any attempt to call her out on her behaviour still results in her bursting into tears and refusing to acknowledge that she's done anything wrong"

I think you can ask people to acknowledge the wrongs they have committed in the past, but if they won't they won't. You just have to move on. It's hard, but you have to. Win by not letting her drag you down any more.

Bert to be honest I can't believe what a hard time you are giving a woman over something she did by mistake years ago!

"Bert to be honest I can't believe what a hard time you are giving a woman over something she did by mistake years ago!"

I'm notgiving her a hard time. I am trying to say that on this particular occasion most parents would have punished. I have also said that no one should ever hit anyone ever for anything. If she is trying to sort out stuff that's happened in the past she needs to do it with clarity of vision.

You've made it clear you think the slapping is wrong but the magazine being ripped up? And the OP wasn't posting about her being a terrible person however many years ago!

I think that another thing that is entirely different now compared to the 70s is the amount of caring for younger siblings that a twelve year old would be expected to be capable of. By the time I was twelve in the early 1980s, I was responsible for my three younger siblings, including a baby, a lot of the time out of school hours because my father worked shifts and my mother had an evening job. Our elderly grandfather lived with us, so there was an adult present, mostly, but I was the one doing teeth and nappy changes and bedtimes etc. Which probably wouldn't happen now, or if it did, it would be seen as exploitative.

My mum used to do similar things but it was through temper and going through the menopause. One memorable time she ripped up a library book that I was reading.

Fortunately I don't seem to have inherited that intolerance of my children and you sound like, as you're aware of her temper, that you haven't either.

LaContessaDiPlump that's a joke right?

70's child here. My parenting was pretty crap. Mother's answer to my brother hitting and bullying me was to hit him with the wooden spoon. And he'd laugh even though it hurt. Then she'd laugh and I'd have two bullies, not one. My father worked long hours and weekends and both he and my mother were very immature. So my mother was very much the only parent a lot of the time - and it showed from her stress levels. Father also hit mainly my brother as I was for the most part silent and withdrawn to avoid the criticisms and attacks (narcissistic family). Brother ended up with nasty bruises sometimes - the full black handprint when he was about 7 sticks in my memory. Brother also punched his hand through glass and needed stitches to avoid the "wait till your father gets home" beating. Mother whacked me round the face even when I was around 17. She was driving so I couldn't retaliate as I had started to do. The punishments were punitive, nasty and not thought out. She'd disciplined me by withdrawing pocket money and goad me to bite back so that she could up it - what could be better than getting your daughter to have no pocket money for a month? - she seemed to really get off on it. Pretty angry and vindictive. My father is dead now and she can see nothing wrong with her behaviour. She has also criticised my far superior parenting and told me my dd won't turn out well bla bla bla and threatened to smack her. For a ridiculous reason in that she inferred Dd bullied her son, my brother, she was 7.5 at the time. Silliness and high spirits btw but it was made out to be something sinister - just waiting for my nephew to reach that age!! To say that after his appalling behaviour is, well, words fail me.

Personally, I don't think that our children will criticise our parenting on the same level. Dh and I talk and reason with our dd. We discuss other's behaviour and the importance of being kind to people. Even when they are not always kind to us - not in a doormat kind of way either. I'm sure we've done plenty of things wrong as parents too. However, I think the most important thing to do is to accept and admit our mistakes and failings. In a way that my mother could never do. The way my brother was allowed to treat me was abusive. She cannot see how his holding me captive in rooms, shaking me around like a rag doll, hitting me and encouraging his friends to call me the most vile names was anything more than sibling rivalry.

Yes, I think what your mother did was excessive and ridiculous. And there was a lot of it around back then. All she did was teach you not to trust or respect her and in the process possibly love her a little less. Now that we know better, we can do better. I also think it is easy to forget just how much pressure many parents - particularly mothers - were under back then. Pressure to conform to social norms, pressure because of standoffish fathers, who took no involvement in child rearing, pressure from their mothers to perform and act in a certain way. There was also very little media and role modelling beyond the immediate community and family. There were even very few soap operas and they weren't perceived as "educational" in the same way as they are today. So I think society has made a great leap in the right direction for many although for some, the pendulum has swung too far and entitlement is far more rife than it was 50 or even 20 years ago.

LaComtesseDiPlump that's a joke, right?

Which bit did you mean? I totally agree that she's crying to deflect. Exactly what my mother did. Screamed the house down, went bright red, shouted "bugger off" several times until I backed down and apologised. Freaked me out completely when all I wanted in my naivety in my 20's was to be treated with respect now I'm an adult and put the past behind us. My mother will never, ever accept her failings. She's a narcissist.

I have a temper of my own and have often wanted to smash DS1's head into a wall - in fact I used to daydream about hitting them when they were smaller and more irksome, that's how bad it got. I didn't, though. Self-control, innit

Mummy - that bit!

If you were slapped the once then I think it was an acceptable punishment for the era. At 12 back then children were expected to be more responsible than they are now - my mum would have reacted the same way if something had happened to my siblings under my watch. I started babysitting both younger siblings at 7 and by 9 was expected to do drop offs/pick ups and make tea & dinner around my school times. That was only in the late 80s/early nineties. Would never dream of doing any of this now but you really can't compare previous parenting standards with current ones

Puppycotton which bit? After a lifetime of seeing my mother treat me one way and herself another, hell no I didn't trust her anymore! And I do think the op's mum is deflecting, absolutely.

If it's the bit about hitting my DC, it's unfortunately true that I really wanted to. I didn't, though. That is the important, crucial part. I was in a very bad mental place and was not coping well. But I managed to not take it out on them.

X-post. Yes, I'm afraid that bit is true. It's not true anymore, but was then.

"You've made it clear you think the slapping is wrong but the magazine being ripped up? And the OP wasn't posting about her being a terrible person however many years ago!"

No. and I have never said she was a terrible person. I am saying that most modern parents in a similar situation would confiscate a 12 year old's IPad if they had been paying so much attention to it that they did not do properly something they had been asked to do. So what the OP did merited a punishment that even these days may have included the equivalent of having a comic torn up.

badtime that's interesting, yes I would go along with that.

Being sent to the headmaster for the cane was quite normal when I was at primary school and many of my friends were smacked at home. For my friends it seemed to be only for big mistakes an over and done with. With my Mum we never knew when she would blow and over what. We would be happy playing a board game and she would come raging in. Screaming about who had done it and why, I could rarely work out what the crime was. She would shout at us for ages for being lazy, selfish, hating her blah blah blah. Lined up, pants pulled down and hit very hard about 10 times with a stick. Then shouted at again.

To me it felt no different from when she was none violent and do things like randomly decide my bedroom was untidy. Come bursting in shouting and going on about how lazy, ungrateful I was. Then she would throw all the contents of my cupboards and wardrobe on the floor, keeping an eye out for things to disprove of and rant about. Then screamed at me to clear it all up and I wouldn't go fed until it was done. As you can imagine having everything chucked in heaps creates los of work. I spent the next hour sobbing and unable to do anything, terrified of when would next burst in and start up again because she would. It would be different if she had given me warnings and some clear punishments layer out. Like the smacking she was just in a rage and looking for something or someone to blame.

It wasn't much better when I really had done something and was sat down for a lecture. She raged and told me how terrible I was in an unrelenting manner. When she got bored it finished but who knew when she would come bursting back in and start all over again. She would demand answers to "so what are you going to do about xxx* but no response was ever good enough. Buy a new one, say sorry, repair it, sell all my toys, save up and buy a better one? No, all wong but no clue as to what she was looking for.

Funny how we still walk on egg shells around her.

Huldra it's horrible when you just know that you've done SOMETHING wrong, but you don't know what or have any way to prevent it. All you can do is wait.

That still affects me now, at work, actually. Clients send us a vague brief and we do the best we can, but there are one or two unpleasant characters who will be arses when we don't read their minds correctly. I get the same feeling of churning dread that I'm going to get shouted at whatever I do, and I seize right up. These things don't just stop at childhood, as you say.

Puppy

I've also wanted to hit my dd. Not to the extent of LaComtessa - although I do understand the rage. Desire in anger and then there's self control - which is what's stopped me from picking up a knife when I was in the depths of despair and using it on me in sadness or someone else in anger. But then we've got lots of media, which starts with baby books, which tell us to put the baby down somewhere safe, go into another room, take a few minute and scream if needs be. And counselling, which has seriously helped to fix me.

My mother frequently lost the rag with us when we were kids. She definitely suffered from depression and I don't think she was happy, but she herself had had a horrible upbringing with a mum who wasn't in the last maternal (Irish catholic though and had 9 living children!). In a way I think she had us to somehow make up for her own bad childhood and to "get back" at her mother by showing her how perfect a mum she was. We were always impeccably turned out and the house was immaculate, we didn't speak unless spoken to etc etc but I often felt like I was the parent and she was the child in emotional terms and have many memories of soothing her down from high anxiety panics. To this day she remembers our childhoods with rose coloured glasses and gets very upset if we dare to mention any episode that was less than perfect. The result is that any bad behaviour on our part in childhood or teen years is seen as completely our own faults because my mother is absolutely beyond reproach. It's very tiresome.

Yes "churning dread". That's it. The therapy I'm doing now is deprogramming me from such feelings

Huldra. That's awful. She sounds very mentally unstable.

Bertrand Russell violently destroying a comic is not at all the same thing as maturely and calmly confiscating an iPad. Confiscating the comic would be the equivalent.

Kitty

From very young, I bought my mother presents with my pocket money to appease her. I, too, was an "awful teen". She still talks about it now and I'm 45. Mother was also beyond reproach. All I wanted to do was to be a person in my own right and for her to knock on my bedroom door before barging in, for my brother to leave me alone and not play "the funky worm" for hours on end at full blast when I was trying to sleep, read or study. I never bunked off school, passed my exams, behaved well etc. I now realise I have mild sensory processing issues so the noise from the music was unbearable but this has translated into them all having to "tiptoe around" me. Wtf??

Brought up during 60s and 70s - I think that the lines between teaching, punishment, bad temper were a lot more blurry for some people, Hence getting hit to teach you a lesson they hadn't bothered teaching you in the first place.

Most of my smacking etc was to do with bad temper, so it was rather hard to work out what you were supposed to be doing (rather than running fast in the opposite direction). What was ok one day would not be another. I even remember being hit for tidying up before mother's mother visited (huge stress) - which was what she wanted us to do - it was pretty miserable.

In modern parenting, you would have made sure the 12 year old was fully aware of what was expected of them, had put down their I-pad/Mandy and was giving the baby their full attention in the centre of the bed. However, even then babies can roll off beds, which every one knows, so should not have been there in the first place.

My parents were a bit young and their parenting was a combination of their perception of what was done to them, along with a backlash to what was done to them, along with a bit of Dr Spock and later on, Penelope Leach (who didn't agree with smacking). Since they both worked children, you would have thought the wooden spoon was not necessary .

If your parents were physically punishing you do you trust them babysit your dc? I ask as my fil used to hit my dh as a child and, although the situation has not arisen yet, I wouldnt want him to babysit my dc

Mummy - I too saved up my pocket money for presents to appease her - finally realised it did not work in my 40s.