To wonder why my parents are denying they ever smacked me?

[LilMagpie]

I’m so confused. My parents are fairly stereotypical boomers and so I had a typical 80s/90s upbringing where we (my brother and I) were smacked if we were ever out of line. I’m not talking daily beatings but I have very vivid memories of it. I can recall at least 4 or 5 specific occasions but if I had to guess I’d say it happened once or twice a month between the ages of 4-10. I certainly lived in fear of it. The phrase “stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about” was thrown around a lot in our house. I know this paints my parents in a bad light, but I am still close to them in spite of this and have a good relationship with them as in other ways they were and are very wonderful and I do understand it was a different time and they thought they were doing the right thing at the time.

I was talking with them the other day and the topic came up and they said
“oh, you were such a well-behaved child, we never once had to smack you…”
and I was like… huh??? What do you mean? You definitely did! And they both seemed genuinely confused and started backing each other up saying “no! We had to occasionally smack your brother but never you!” And I kept saying “but I remember it! I can still remember the sting on the back of my legs at the supermarket one time!” And both are absolutely adamant that they didn’t, to the point they were both getting annoyed that I was accusing them that they did.

So do they just genuinely not remember? Or are they gaslighting me? But why would they admit to hitting my brother and not me??
I just felt frustrated by the whole conversation, it felt like it really invalidated a big part of my childhood where I lived in fear of misbehaving. I left it at “well I can’t understand why anyone would hit their kids, the thought of hurting mine makes me feels physically sick” and dropped the conversation but it was awkward for a while after.

Im probably going to get flamed for this but I think our childhood memories are flawed as well. We remember things as happening much more often than they did and we also only see it from our point of view

I think it's possible they can't remember. My mum seems to have forgotten some things about the past (not terrible things, just normal things) which are really clear still in my mind. But I have forgotten details about my own children's lives that I thought I would never forget, such as I'm not even sure what one of my child's first words were. Especially my eldest, who is a few years older than my second child. It's just gone from my mind. They have their own memories of things though, details that I have completely forgotten, about days out and holidays etc.
Personally, I would just forget about it. That kind of thing was really common at the time. Now, we think it is wrong, but it wasn't seen as wrong back then by a lot of people. When my eldest was small Supernanny and her ideas were the big thing, now even that is viewed as poor parenting.

My mother and grandmother both do this. I remember them both smacking me (not badly or regularly) but they deny it. Selective memory.

I try to avoid mentioning anything to do with my childhood as mine seem to take it as a personal criticism if I say anything vaguely critical and have not jokingly accused me of having false memory syndrome. I do think as we get older we sometimes develop quite comforting narratives of how things happened and feel quite unsettled when these are challenged.

No it isn’t!
Eg for example I can only remember only about 5 of the history lessons I had at secondary school (my favourite subject) but I know I had classes twice weekly for 5 years.
i can only specifically remember about five of the time I had awful period pain as a teen (which stopped in my early 20s) but I know it was awful almost every month.
Lots more examples I could cite.

The specifics of what you do and don’t remember may be different to the op, because your brain is different to hers. That doesn’t make what she does and doesn’t recollect odd. I suggest that instead it means you are trying to minimise or invalidate what she’s saying.

This is interesting and undoubtedly true, although I’d argue that this is more likely to apply to specifics than to feelings.

For example, my very worst memory of this type is me sitting in the car, waiting to be taken inside to be punished and listening in total fear to my brother screaming from inside as he was hit first. Don’t remember anything after that other than thinking ‘yes, that was as bad as I expected’.

Clearly, the memory is incomplete and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it turned out to be incorrect in various ways, but I don’t believe I’m misremembering being very frightened and then physically hurt.

It's not societally normal to smack kids anymore - you would be seen as abusive. It was a very different time so it's hard to compare - if your parents were parenting now I'm sure they wouldn't hit you either. And if you were parenting in the 80s you'd probably smack your kids.

Not saying it's not wrong to smack kids, but you're saying you're a better parent because you don't smack, when I think that's probably more to do with the decade you're parenting in than you as a person. I don't know anyone who smacks their kids now.

Well my 19 year old son says we never used to get him medical help and once let him walk around with a broken leg without getting help for him when he fell off a bike.

This is categorically not true. He did fall off a bike and complained that his leg hurt for a few days when he was about 8 years old. It is true we did not take him to a&e as he was running around on the leg the day after, though he did say it hurt . Within a few days the pain was gone.

Obviously he was in more pain than I realised and when he told me this, I initially was astonished that this was how he remembered it. After my initial surprise I apologised for the fact that he felt uncared for and said that was my failure as a parent as it was my job to make him feel loved and cared for.

DS had other occasions when he hurt himself and we did get medical attention for him but this one time he remembered has stuck and turned into we never took him to hospital when he was hurt ,which is completely untrue.

Also know that I smacked DS once but he absolutely does not remember it and actually said we never hit him but we never took him to the doctor when he was hurt, during a conversation talking about his childhood and that of one of his friends

Memory is a strange thing . I am not saying your parents didn't hit you, you remembered it happening often so I'm sure it did but perhaps not as often as you remember and probably more often than they do.

It seems strange they would admit to hitting your brother but not you if they remembered it the same way. Maybe they did a lot of threatening but less actual hitting than you remember. Either way though they should have acknowledged that their memories might be flawed and apologise that this aspect of their parenting had a lingbterm negative effect on you

I was born early 80s and my experience is very similar to yours OP. Denial and minimising. Very damaging.

My parents were weirdly in denial about doing it at the time they were actually doing it. Our step mother used to go on about how she had it worse than us and we were lucky because one time her mum dragged her out of the bath and smacked her bum because she swore. She would use weapons on us regularly!
And one day my day was being suprisingly nice to me and telling me it's awful how stepmother just keeps yelling at us after we are crying. He would be there yelling at us as well! Utterly bizarre, gaslighting behaviour.

I feel it had similar effects on me. My df didn’t deny smacking us, but he minimised it. “It never did you any harm” and I think deep down he knew it had because he brought it up on his deathbed, looking for reassurance.

What is seen as normal child behaviour now, has also shifted considerably since the 70/80s. My dm told me that my dc weren’t “giving cheek”, that they were explaining themselves. I didn’t need telling; I was listening to their pov, and there was nothing rude or disrespectful in it. But in my childhood that was “lip” and “back chat” and while she wasn’t much of a smacker herself, she would have told us off, and warned us not to talk back to teachers or df.

Both my dps have childhood memories of what happened to “bad children”. A friend of my df’s was taken away by the “truancy man” to the devastation of his widowed df and put in an industrial school. My dm remembers a particularly savage caning that resulted in the village schoolmaster being assaulted by the child’s dm and her being taken away to the “mad house”. I think the fear of what could happen to recalcitrant dc was imprinted very early. Even though they smacked us and had some deeply flawed parenting they were also trying to break the cycle as best they could.

Sick of anxiety being use as a way to undermine an op’s credibility. She doesn’t sound like she has debilitating anxiety to me. And if she did, there are ways to suggest it may be affecting her perspective without being so dismissive.

I don’t see the contradiction in what she’s saying either. I was afraid of being hit as a child, but I’d be amazed if they did something like that now. As many have said on here, for most it was what you did at the time rather than intentionally abusive and now society has moved on, so have they. Doesn’t mean the memories don’t affect us though.

I don’t doubt the OP’s perspective in the slightest

and since when would debilitating anxiety impact one’s memory of their childhood anyway?

ok so you don’t see a contradiction in thinking your parents are lying to you about smacking you very regularly for 6 years and yet being happy to leave your own children in their care? You don’t see a contradiction in thinking your parents subjected you to “constant” anxiety around being smacked for 6 years and being happy to leave your own children in their care? And you dont see a contradiction between viewing the consequences of your parents style of parenting likely resulting in you now as an adult suffering lifelong anxiety and being happy to leave your own children in their care?

ok. I do.

But it is the fact the parents appear to be lying to the OP that would be my concern

and the op describes feeling “constant” anxiety around being smacked

and now as an adult suffers with her mental health

this doesn’t sound very “lite touch” to me

Boomers gonna boomer. They are never wrong 😑

I was smacked as a child and there were definitely occasions where a line was crossed. My parents appear to have simply erased this from their brains.

I appreciate that it was “of its time” but I was angry about it for a time after I had my kids. I can honestly say it has never occurred to me to smack my kids. I’d no sooner smack them as I would my husband or anyone else. It makes me wonder how mine could. If that makes sense.

@2fullsizedcoffees - I apologise if I misunderstood you. I thought you were casting doubts on op’s version of events by exaggerating her anxiety - it’s a very common tactic on here. Having reread, I can see this was not the case.

I still don’t see the behaviours as contradictory as I have a similar dynamic with my parents. I’m quite sure that being afraid of punishment as a child has played a big part in me being an adult with anxiety - I wouldn’t say it’s debilitating, but it does impact me - and yet I’m aware my parents were doing as many of most did at the time. I’ve never doubted they loved be. So I get what she’s saying.

My sister is also revisionist about my time as a kid. I ended up having a row with her when I was remembering how racist our Dad was, it’s stultifying when someone is denying your lived truth in front of you. He was also violent but now I feel I can’t even go there.

They know. And can people please stop telling people they remember incorrectly. I'm sure someone who suffered abuse remembers it only too well. OP has her parents gaslighting her she doesn't need it here too.
My parents are the same OP. Denial. My mum even tried to deny I left home at 16 recently. Said I hadn't paid digs, I said that's because I didn't live with you. I moved out a month into a full time job a few weeks after my 16th birthday 🤷
She's denying it because she now realises I was a child and allowing a child to move in with an older man might just have been pretty crappy parenting.

my parents are the same as I’ve said on other threads they’ll only go as far as “well we gave you correction” or “smacking is not the same as hitting” yes it is or they’ll go the other way and say “you act like we’re the worst people in the world” and start waterworks! 🙄 you absolutely cannot have a constructive conversation with people like that, they’ve distanced themselves from their actions so far it’s not possible. sympathy OP

I don't know who's right in this instance - or whether the truth is in between, like it actually only happened 4 or 5 times but the threat was used a lot and that's why you feel it was hanging over you all the time. But I will say one of my siblings has memories of things that I, my mother, my father and our other sibling are 100% certain never happened (mainly around things our parents did which are totally illogical and make no sense), and no memories of things that did happen (mainly around their bullying of me and our other sibling). They obviously have very different feelings about our upbringing than the rest of the family. I don't think they're lying. I'm not lying. My parents aren't lying, nor my other sibling. It's very tricky.

Well, as a parent, I will raise you one. I have one who has ‘actual memories’ of myself perpetuating an act of physical violence against one of their older siblings. Except it genuinely never happened. As confirmed by the sibling it supposedly happened to. And the other older siblings who supposedly watched it happen at the time. We are all accused of gaslighting. The only way to resolve it would be for us all to admit to something that honestly never happened. Sometimes kids gaslight their parents!

My parents said "we never once smacked any one of you!" when I am certain we were smacked most days. Like your parents, they acted horrified at the "accusation", all my siblings remember being smacked very clearly