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.

I think often it's a big thing to you but not to them so you would remember it and they wouldn't. It's very normal for people to remember the same thing differently.

My dad said the same thing to me, granted it was really rare but I told him the memory in full and then he remembered.

I remembered because I thought it was unfair to be punished for my sister choosing to sneak out of the house, knowing she shouldn’t have and did it anyway while I was doing homework. She did it on purpose to get me in trouble, form for her always and going out of her way to embarass me in front of people but since I hadn’t done anything wrong I was more confused and asking what the issue was and then both of us would be scolded for arguing.

Memories are funny things though. I'm convinced I remember things perfectly from my childhood.

But then, I have a teen ds who will say things like:"remember when you and dad did x/ said y?" And both of us are like, mate, that never happened. Because it really didn't!

Which has really made me question what I do actually remember of my childhood.

My dad used to rap my head with his knuckles if he didn't like what I said.

Very clever that. A quick way to shut me up without using words, or without having to listen to my POV. His way, or the knuckles. It fucking hurt, it shut me up and there were no visible bruises.

Once year, he was putting up the Christmas decorations and I snuck into the kitchen to see how they were progressing. He reached down from the chair with the heavy stainless steel scissors and banged my head with them (saved him putting them in other hand to use knuckles).

They broke in half, at the hinge, assymetrically, blades partially on one side, handles and the rest of the blades on the other. I will never forget the look of shock on his face, while he tried to rationalise how that was possible. There was no rational explanation. Maybe he thought it was divine intervention because he stopped hitting us on the head after that. Maybe he was ashamed.

A PP makes a valid point that parents feared we'd become bad'uns and there was an fear of shame from the community if your kids were not well-behaved and deferential, particularly in certain cultures. I actually forgive the wooden spoon: We'd always get some kind of warning, We'd usually have done wrong, the quantity and force of the hits could be tailored to the misdemeanour. Indeed, many people remember their wooden spoon without resentment (and sometimes a bizarre fondness that people sometimes get in mistaken nostalgia for hard times!)

But the violence was excessive, it wasn't a planned sanction: the hits, the slaps, the hairpulls, the bruises, the knuckles. They did this just because they could; they were allowed and it was easier than real parenting. There's no way, in any epoch, that this was OK. It even happened in a time when a man was frowned upon if he did it to his wife, but you could do it to your kids with impunity.

I'm younger than you (late 20s) but can also vividly recall getting smacked as a small child. Not severely or regularly, but there's at least 3 or 4 incidents I can distinctly recall. My brother can also recall getting smacked. Like yours, my parents flatly deny they ever smacked us. I think they genuinely feel bad because they now know it's inappropriate but instead of accepting it and apologising, choose to plead ignorance.

My mum will regularly bring up (like, every time I see her) how awful I was to her in my late teens/early twenties, but it’s all completely one sided and never, ever will she apportion any blame to herself for things I might have said when I was being ‘nasty’. I admit being unfair at times in my anger towards her but it was a direct result of a mental health issue (anorexia) that she absolutely refused to acknowledge or discuss even when I was receiving out-patient care and her very obvious favouritism of my younger brothers over me as, by her own admission, they were just ‘easier and more fun’. They all went to Barcelona on a city break without me as she said I wasn’t invited incase I spoilt it but if you ask her about it now she’ll say I said I didn’t want to come, which was absolutely not true and I was extremely hurt at the time (I was 17 and stayed home alone)

When I was 12 and we were visiting my uncle he pinned me down in front of her and my aunt and tickled me relentlessly, to the point I couldn’t even speak to say stop. I was young for my age so no bra and all my top half was exposed before my aunt eventually persuaded him to stop and I was in tears and so embarrassed. My mum didn’t react much at the time (I think she might have nervously laughed) but when I recounted this years later, she denied it ever took place and said there’s no way she would have let that happen and not intervened. But that’s what happened and I think she’s just rewritten it in her own mind, or maybe she forgot entirely and thought we were all having a laugh at the time, I’ll never know.

So I think this is a really common phenomenon, doesn’t make it easier though.

Exactly this. I waited all my life for my mum to say sorry for how she treated me as a child, even on her death bed I thought it might still come. When it didn't I then hoped I'd find a letter left for me amongst her things, but nothing. I desperately just wanted her to acknowledge the pain she'd caused, it wouldn't have completely made up for it but it would have been something.

That’s so understandable but so sad. I think often parents aren’t able or willing to, for many reasons, but that doesn’t make it easier or okay. Wishing you healing ❤️‍🩹

Mine was the same. Didn't do me any harm. I got a smack if I deserved it.

No child deserves to be hit.

My son had an undiagnosed medical condition and was in continent until he was about six. In desperation I tried everything including seeing an extremely expensive therapist who believed it stemmed from a deep seated fear of toilets.

Anyway in one of our early sessions she was asking me a lot of background questions about the situation. I started crying because I felt like a bad mum and that my own mum was insisting that I should “belt him” every time he did it and that I was an even bigger parent failure because I couldn’t even bring myself to do that. She was speechless and then explained that no one who professionally deals with this situation would ever ever recommend that as a treatment. Anyway that was quite an eye opening experience.

fir context I was very distressed at the time as my youngest was a terrible sleeper and after a year of not having more than 3 hours sleep in a row I was quite unhinged.

My mother, despite giving me these sterling parenting nuggets of advice painted herself as quite the Mary Poppins.

The wooden spoon! 😬

In my primary school in the 80’s there was one scary cover teacher who brought the dreaded wooden spoon with her. Some kids couldn’t even cope with the idea of the spoon and would be crying as soon as she arrived. I can’t even remember what happened if you did get the bloody spoon, just the idea of it was terrifying enough!

Yes.

I suspect that many parents on this thread will get a shock one day when their adult kids claim a memory that never happened.

'The axe forgets but the tree remembers'.

But you didn’t deserve it. Children do not deserve to be hit. In suggesting that they do you’re proving the hitting did do you harm - it normalised violence against children for you.

I see where you're coming from. Things have changed a lot really. I just think that it's just a form of discipline. Obviously there is a very big difference between a smack and being beaten or abused.

The alternatives, in my my opinion don't really work, which is why kids these days are more and more out of control. Asking little Freddy over and over really nicely to please stop doing that, please stop flicking your sister in the eye etc does nothing.

we've gone from one extreme to the other in society, somebody get Supernanny back from America!

Maybe they smacked your brother a lot more, so they remember that and it didn't even really register with them. Hard to accept, I know, but it probably just doesn't matter to them like it does to you. It was normal parenting then and not, in their heads, something memorable. They've got it stuck in their heads that he was naughty and you were good and nothing will shake that overall impression.

Whatever, with smacking, it’s different times now. Why are you still thinking about it?🤷‍♀️

Get on with your life. 👍

OK Boomer.

I really wish people would stop using the word smacking. I’m not trying to be the vocabulary police but I honestly believe it trivialises the act of assaulting a child.

@dreamiesformolly I use the word ‘smacked’ because I was smacked with an open hand, not punched with a fist. My F smacked my siblings and me very hard; if he’d punched us that hard, we’d have probably been pretty badly bruised. As it was, we were never bruised.

I’m not minimising it at all, I have no reason to let him off the hook as he also sexually abused my DSis and me.

I could be minimising where my DM is concerned. Because she accepts that she was wrong to do it; and she never did it as hard or as much as my F. She also genuinely believed that she was doing what was right, as it was what parents were told they should do in the conservative Evangelical circles we grew up in.

Another reason for using the word ‘smack’ is that it’s always been legal, whereas punch leaving a bruise never was even when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s or earlier either.

Yes, the legality thing is partly why I dislike the word and consider it trivialising. But I get what you’re saying, and I’m really sorry that happened to you.

They have conveniently forgotten what they did because it doesn’t fit their narrative of what kind of people they are, my mum is the same. It is very hard but you know the truth.