To think smacking was 'acceptable' in the 90s?

[Grapeflavour]

My parents smacked me as a child, usually if I did something they deemed as 'very naughty' or sometimes if I just didn't stop doing something quite trivial, they would threaten me with smacking.

I just assumed this was normal (albeit bad) attitudes back then, but talking to a couple of friends around the same age (30s) recently, it seems like that's not the case? They seemed pretty horrified that my dad used to occasionally hit me well into my teens if I pissed him off. As a teen he would often square up to me and threaten to 'knock me out' if I challenged him or talked back. I was 16 the last time he hit me. (I know this behaviour is totally unacceptable, and bearing in mind he is a huge 6"2 man and I was a 5"5 teenage girl). I think this has had an impact on me and trying to work through it.

Would you say it was fairly typical and normalised for parents to smack kids as punishment in the 90s? Or not at all?

@BeingATwatItsABingThing Calm down, I didn’t say it was right, I said it was normal, which it really really was then.

It was considered an acceptable thing to do, I don’t think hitting teenagers was considered normal or acceptable then and that is what the OP asked.

Why not? Because they could hit back?

Yes, of course.

My mum never smacked my brother and I, but my dad did. On the back of the legs. Not often, but often enough.
Once, when I was 6, I called my brother a "twat" during an argument (in my defense, I'd never heard the word and was attempting to make up a new insult so took an existing one- "twit"- and tried it with different vowels. "A" seemed to fit nicely🤦‍♀️). My dad came storming into the living room and smacked me right across the face.
When my mum came home I told her and she was livid with my dad because she obviously knew as a 6yo I wouldn't have a clue what the word meant.

At the time I didn't know any different. I hated it and resented the person who would inevitably dish it out. I can now see that the whole culture was wrapped up in this attitude of beating your kids and so I can't really blame the person for what was "normal" socially.

Looking at it now it was not okay and should never be okay. If you have to hit a child then you have lost your cool. If you haven't lost your cool then you are psychopathic and don't care about the trauma it can leave on a child. The idea "I didn't do me any harm" is ludicrous but I hear it all the time. In James O'Brien's book "How Not To Be Wrong" he gives examples of how people use that phrase when actually they haven't stopped to question the statement.

Ironically its those who were smacked a lot that often have the more hard line views and dismiss it. I suspect this is defensive; protecting the person who smacked them about. People don't want to see loved ones as abusers.

@Grapeflavour

Ps. I think smacking kids is abhorrent. I'm just curious about attitudes of the time as I wouldn't be able to tell, I was too young.

Yanbu that it was more acceptable to be smacked.

Yabu if the question were whether what you endured was normal. A parent squaring up to a child threatening to knock them out etc I think would have been considered abuse under any standard even 90s.

I grew up in 90s. Parents tapped my hand when little and smacked me maybe twice on the bum/legs when primary with an open hand once or twice each time and not hard.

I remember my english teacher in secondary in 93/94 saying she had hit her two young girls hard enough to leave a mark and that she felt bad about it. I remember feeling horrified and wondering why she had chosen to share this with a class of 14 year olds!

I was a parent of young children then, I never hit my kids once. I knew people who did though.

Born in 1990. Definitely used to get smacked occasionally as a kid. Wrong in my opinion, but it wasn’t hard or very regularly as far as I can recall.

My dad hit me once when I was a teen after I’d argued with my mum. I hit myself in the same place to make a visible bruise and make him feel guilty, which worked.