Grandfather smacked DS bottom

[ranblungs]

DS can have meltdowns/big tantrums, usually when he's very tired. More so when he's at his grandparents' house (ex's parents). They have communicated to me that they found his behaviour very difficult at one point, but it seems to have resolved now.

ExDP did live with them but moved our two weeks ago.

DS (aged 4) told me yesterday evening that grandad had smacked his bottom because he was being naughty and that it "really hurt" he got upset as he was telling me and cried. I get the impression this wasn't necessarily recent.

DS also can play up at bed time when he is there and he told me that grandad pushes him back onto the bed for being naughty at bed time.

I'm not sure what to do next?

They are huge sources of childcare, ExDP is supposed to have him two nights per week but often works away so they will have him. They also help out during the week as/when needed.

The relationship between us was once very strained when DS was tiny.

I am furious that he has hit my child. Am I overreacting as it was just a smack on the bottom?

DS can be very challenging there.

core.ac.uk/download/pdf/29197209.pdf …..interesting study from 2002 on the history of physical punishment (it’s a NZ one) but even in the 90s apparently 50% of mums and dads still hit their kids once a week or more

YouGov study from 2021:

While eight in ten Brits say they were punished, only some 62% of parents have physically punished their children, versus 34% who have never done so. However, they say at some point we all turn into our parents, and this survey shows that those who were physically punished during their upbringing are likely to repeat the behaviour.

yougov.co.uk/topics/society/articles-reports/2021/09/27/smacking-parents-who-were-physically-punished-chil

However, they say at some point we all turn into our parents

Pray to God it's not true.

These studies are confirming something I suspected but hoped wasn't true. At least part of the reason why we still have tons of apologists for this is because a lot of people still hit their children, not infrequently, and aren't interested in looking at alternatives...presumably because those would involve the parents doing some hard work on themselves.

Perhaps I'm unusually lucky, but as frustrating and infuriating as my kids can be - and they can - I've never, ever been tempted to hit them. It's just so obviously a stupid, lazy, damaging and counterproductive thing to do.

@ReneBumsWombats it's a real shame not everyone is such a perfect parent as you obviously are

@ReneBumsWombats don’t feel disheartened, i think probably most people regret or feel shame /guilt if they hit their kids ,and the study I posted has shown changes in attitudes and behaviour,it’s whether people have the ability to move forward and make bigger changes with each generation. In my own family it’s gone from domestic violence at grandparent level to smacking in my childhood home to my much more infrequent hitting behaviour for which I had the means to seek help for…hopefully the pattern is broken and my kids will have more skills and self regulation than those generations before. In your own situation, it’s a testament to yourself that you did survive abusive parenting and have been able to parent in a more loving way.

I totally disagree. I am 42. I was smacked at home and school. It was abuse then, it is abuse now. I would definitely contact social services and the police.

Why are your methods better than smacking? What's the improvement?

Thank you. And well done for working on yourself in that way. Those studies show how few people manage it and even on this thread you can see how many people still can't stop making excuses and getting defensive.

He also pushed him. It is not only one incident, it is actually a pattern of abusive behaviour. Hitting is violence, to suggest otherwise is absolute nonsense.

Something else people forget is how much it hurts when a grown adult hits a small child. Yes yes, I know, just a tap, blah blah. Bullshit. You're three times their size. If you're only going to tap them and it doesn't hurt, why not use a method that doesn't involve pain and humiliation at all?

I realise that it is particularly difficult for you to call it abuse, given that you have done it. I feel that it is imperative to call it abuse, so that we acknowledge it is always wrong. There is no acceptable violence against children.

Are some children hurt to a greater degree? Yes. But that still does not make it ok that a lesser amount of violence was used against some. Some women get groped, that is not rendered unimportant or acceptable because some women get gang raped. Sexual assault is wrong in all it's forms. Acknowledging groping as wrong detracts nothing from a rape victim

There are no grey areas. There is no magic point between acceptable violence and unacceptable violence. It doesn't matter who does it, whether they love their victim, whether they meant it, whether they didn't mean to hurt anyone, whether they were not thinking, whether they were out of control. How harshly we judge people may depend on some of those factors, but none of them make a wrong thing right. Violence is always wrong, and black and white thinking helps with clarity and makes it very obvious what expected standards of behaviour are.

Getting back to the OP, I would also be furious. I think it is always wrong to hit a child, and I think it is doubly wrong for someone to use that method of chastisement on someone else’s child.

I can’t agree with the whole “quit work and don’t send him there again” mentality. At the heart of all this is your son’s welfare. You have to weigh up the impact on him of your losing your job against the possibility that if you spoke to them, you might be able to sort this out and they might agree never to use physical chastisement again. I don’t know what your financial safety net is. I was very occasionally smacked as a child and I would never ever do it, but it had less of an impact on me than sitting in the dark, while cold and hungry and scared we would end up on the street, after my dad lost his job. Don’t impoverish yourselves unless you really have to because that WILL harm your son.

And you have to see the above in the context of the likelihood that your ex will continue to send him there on his time so your son would still be seeing him even if you did quit.

Absolutely all of this.

So he pushed him back into bed, do you mean a shove across the room or being gently pushed back down?
Mumsnet is so quick to get fucking hysterical about a smack and some discipline, it's an insult to anyone who has actually been abused. I've experienced smacks and pushes and actual genuine abuse, there's a big fucking difference.

I've experienced smacks and pushes and other forms of genuine abuse. They're on the same spectrum of shit and there's no level of violence against children that's acceptable.

Nobody on this thread is anywhere near as hysterical as the hitting apologists.

I remember being smacked and it not hurting.

Begging the question of why they couldn't use a non pain centred method.

Saying it's discipline and implying it's fine is strange imo. If another 50 odd year old man annoyed him would he hit him? I think not.

Don't understand how or why you would hit a child.

Didn't hurt me either

Now look here @Squamata and @Emmamoo89, @ReneBumsWombats has made it extremely clear on her nine million posts that you're obviously lying deluded hysterical child abuse apologists who had terrible traumatic childhoods that you won't admit to (not that there's any possibility that she's just projecting about her own shit parents).
So get back in your boxes now, thank you.

My childhood was definitely not traumatic cause I got smacked a few times. I was a little shit at times and definitely learned to not be a little shit!

My childhood was traumatic but it wasn't primarily because my parents smacked my siblings and me a lot. (My DM accepts that this was wrong now.) It was because I was also being sexually abused by my F and others, as was my DSis.

However, I think it's possible that we would have felt able to tell my DM what was going on if we hadn’t been afraid that she would smack us for telling lies. We were often afraid of getting into trouble.

She was devastated when we told her about it a few years ago. Because there’s no question that she loved us and wasn’t intentionally abusive. She thought she was doing the right thing. (We were a Christian, church going family and parents were encouraged to smack in many churches in the 70s and 80s.)

The end result, though, was that we were abused and she never found out about it.

Why are your methods better than smacking?

@ReneBumsWombats I'm not sure why you feel it's appropriate to take over OP's thread like this and keep repeating the same thing to me like a stuck record but I have already explained my position and am not doing so any further to you

Because you haven't explained.

You're angry, you're defensive, you're insulting other posters and lying about what they've said, all to be an apologist for hitting children. You claim you're not actually advocating it, though, and use better methods.

Given how many excuses you're making for hitting children, and all your anger at those who won't back down about it, it's fair to ask how you think your methods are an improvement on hitting. The offence you're taking and constant refusal to answer are their own answer, of course.

But if you can keep attacking other posters and excusing hitting, I can keep asking. You said ages ago that you were going to ignore me because I was beneath you anyway.