To think if a child accidently pours Ribena over Coco Pops instead of milk, you don't make them eat it?

[AliceAbsolum]

Me, aged 8. That memory is causing a disproportionate amount of distress. It was a lot of Ribena and I felt so sick 🙁 Or maybe I'm being a wuss and it was a proportionate punishment?

It would have been 1995.

No not posted before to my knowledge!

But equally there are parents, not many, but parents who when they are in a bad mood for whatever reason will absolutely delighted that you did something wrong because they now have an outlet for their rage. And if you have the second kind, this stuff does stick with you, and people minimising it is actually quite cruel.

Yes this is exactly it.

Why on earth is this important know in the context of your adult life!?!? ffs how ignorant. Lucky you for not having an abusive childhood. Or if you did I feel sorry for you that you cannot see it for what it was. Do you realise some children never get to experience true unconditional love?

PookieDoo
Munchkingoat
How awful for you.

Ohyesiam
Same for me. Game changer. I get a lot less upset by my past and the affect it had on how I felt about myself. Largely now I can care for that hurt little girl.

My parents had the Sunday force feeding ritual with my brother when he decided to go veggie. He wasn’t veggie for long. He cannot see his childhood as abusive. He was in many ways given far more privilege than me. To feel any self worth he abused me.

Try not to make a big deal of old stuff. Life's too short!

If a woman came on here saying her husband forced her to do this people would be advising her to leave

I DO wish people would stop with this crap.

If one adult forced another adult to do half the things we force children to do it would be a LTB situation, but it’s irrelevant because it’s not the same thing at all

Ribena is and was far more expensive than other squashes but if money was tight, a family wouldn’t be buying it anyway.

They might buy it as a treat.

Yes, it's clearly wrong that was done. I'm guessing this was part of an ongoing pattern of toxic parenting? Smacking also used to be common, but you don't tend to see people defending that nowadays.

I look at many incidents in my childhood where my Dad was unloving, unkind, hurtful, at times cruel, whilst maintaining a pretence to himself, us and others that he was a great Dad. He still does it to this day. Blows hot and cold, whilst looking for little opportunities here and there to be hurtful and mean. Makes him feel the big man to knock me down. Annoys him like hell when I choose not to react or pretend not to have noticed his poison remarks and behaviour. Very difficult to fully forget and move on. My mantra for parenting my own children is 'I am thankful for the horrible people in my life, as it has taught me exactly who I don't want to be'.

Look after yourself. Make your own life from now on. Leave the past behind. All much easier said than done. Good luck

My DM, pillar of the local religious community, once served me a plate of soil from the garden in a red plastic bowl because she had seen me putting my fingers in my mouth while playing outside. I must have been about three but the memory is still vivid and shocking.

I certainly wouldn't make a child eat that. But nor would I offer another bowl of Coco pops in that circumstance. 8 is old enough to start paying attention to what you are doing.

Forcing anyone to eat anything is not on though.

Depends on circumstances - maybe they couldn't afford another meal ? Or you had been messing about ?

If it was an accident then yes it's cruel - was it a one off ?

There's a difference between discipline and humilation in child-rearing.
Discipline is putting kids to bed at the same time every night for their own good.
Humiliation is emotion-based reactions to children. Emotion-based parenting is when a parent buys everyone extra large ice-creams because they are in a good mood. Then next night everyone is punished and sent to bed 2 hours early because someone asked 'can we have ice cream?'.

Oh goodness OP, sounds like we could be related! I once poured a whole glass of Ribena without putting water in it in so my mum got mad and made me drink it all. Haven’t liked it since🤢 Using food/drink as punishment is vile behaviour imo and always causes problems in later life i.e. eating disorders. So sorry that you’re feeling this way OP

I wouldn't force my child to do anything that would cause distress to make a point/punish etc. Why the fuck do some people think it's ok to treat children like crap!!

OP, unfortunately you have picked up some ‘AIBU’ type replies here. A childhood of treatment like that is not easily left behind because it plants stuff deep within you.

You did not deserve the habitual treatment you received.

There are some very good self help books: the Stately Homes thread could be a good starting point.

Why is it "abusive"? I agree it isn't pleasant. But why "abusive"?

Abuse can take all sorts of forms - belittling people for having made a genuine mistake is just one of them. It's not really about the fact that Ribena and Coco Pops probably don't taste that nice together - it's the insisting on 'punishment' for having made a very minor and easily-dealt-with accidental error.

It would be the same principle as threatening to shame your 10yo by telling all their school friends about them wetting the bed when they had a very bad dream or felt anxious about something. That would be abuse too. A loving, non-abusive parent would say "Oh dear, you had a little accident - let's just get you cleaned up and change the sheets" before giving them a cuddle and not mentioning it again. Obviously, if it was a recurring problem, you would gently probe the child and/or seek medical advice, but you still wouldn't ask for it to go in the school's weekly news bulletin.

Yes I think the wider context here is not whether you were being silly at the table but whether you generally felt well loved and cared for by your parents.

I have a good relationship with my parents and I often have a different reaction to parenting "mistakes" to my DP who had an unhappy childhood and can find them triggering

I think it's an unnecessary and cruel thing to do regardless, but it may be more upsetting if this is in a wider pattern of you being made to feel that you were worthless when or because you made mistakes
Were your comfort and happiness ignored and your needs and wants continually minimised/it was considered unimportant if you were distressed etc?

I'm not asking for an actual answer, just something to think about.

These "little" instances can carry a lot of weight, in a way that they wouldn't if it was a one off in an otherwise healthy parenting relationship.

If it is still playing on your mind OP and causing you upset, it might be worth thinking about working through these issues with a counsellor or in another way that suits you.

I'm so sorry this is causing you distress

I wouldn't , No.

If one adult forced another adult to do half the things we force children to do it would be a LTB situation, but it’s irrelevant because it’s not the same thing at all

Why is it not the same?
Being a parent means keeping children safe, and helping children learn and develop into independent people, why does this mean that it’s ok to lose your shit with kids? Or ‘punish’ children for mistakes? We all make mistakes and get things wrong, and we all do stupid stuff sometimes, I don’t understand why it’s ok to inflict nasty ‘punishments’ on children.
In this situation if you wanted to teach the child about not wasting food then why not replace the spoiled food with plain bread and butter? If you accidentally cocked up your food budget you wouldn’t eat shit combinations of food as punishment would you you would just eat plain cheap food for a week instead.

Op, whilst your punishment does seem excessive, it’s in the past. I imagine it was at least a decade ago. What good is it doing for you to keep remembering it, it’s in the past, move on.

Here is an analogy: a comedian tells a joke, the entire audience laugh. He then tells the same joke again and gets a few titters, he then tells the same joke a third time to uncomfortable silence. After telling the joke a forth time the audience is getting fidgety. And after telling it a fifth time people start leaving.
The lesson is we don’t enjoy the same joke time after time, so why keep telling yourself the same bad thing over and over again?

Start enjoying life today rather than dwelling on a punishment from last century.

Yanbu OP. I had a physically and emotionally abusive alcoholic "D"F who used to occasionally use force feeding as a punishment too. He once made me eat a sausage that I had accidently dropped into mud outside (age 4!). Sat me down and forced me to eat 3 weetabix with a lot of milk in one sitting, again aged around 4 because I had cried that I was hungry at 6pm. I don't think you are being precious at all by still being affected by it sometimes

(Cross-posted with people who better articulated what I was trying to say!)

8 is old enough to start paying attention to what you are doing.

Anybody can make a mistake, though - not just children. Has nobody else ever peeled a banana or opened a snack and found themselves going to put the banana/snack in the bin instead of the peel/wrapper? I'm in my 40s and I'm certainly not infallible.

We once had a friend's teenager with us and we were playing Yahtzee. Without thinking, when it was his turn, instead of dropping the dice into the shaker, he plopped them into his cup of tea! We all laughed about it WITH him, but it didn't occur to us to force him to drink the tea, dice and all, as a punishment for this despicable premeditated crime.

@Hotterthanahotthing

However at 8you knew what you were doing.So Yabu

Omg, are you the op’s parent?? Are you cruel to your own kids?? Get a grip!

Please , please don't listen to those people who tell you to move on or minimise it in any way.

I'd definitely recommend some therapy, like inner child work. It may change how you feel about yourself completely.

I had a similar experience at about that age where my mother made me eat a whole large can of baked beans because there wasn't a smaller one. They wouldn't have been wasted as I could have had the rest the next day. It was cruel and about power and control more than discipline and fear of waste.

My parents used to do this sort of thing to me too OP, especially where food was concerned. It left me with a pretty fucked up relationship with food throughout childhood and my teen years. I was also always punished disproportionately for normal childhood mistakes and accidents. Knocking over a glass of water for instance would result in plenty of shouting and name calling. I didn’t realise at the time that adults don’t get punished for mistakes and accidents, I do now though!

It is exactly the kind of memory that stays with you, Op.
There was a thread recently where someone was saying their children had an amazing wonderful childhoods but she did hit them and couldn't understand why they were hanging onto that. Some people (in general, I'm not aiming at anyone on this thread) need to understand the things that stay with us as we grow older are not always the lovely things.
You do you need to try to let it go because it's still hurting you, but it's not that easy.