For calling out my parents on abuse as a child

[Welshmum2010]

I have been thinking a lot lately about things my parents did to me as a child that are illegal now and would be classed as abuse. Because if this I don’t really want to have much to do with them but do I tell them or just reduce contact. I think if I said anything they would say all parents did it but I dont know if that’s really the case. I’m realising now I have my own children how bad it really was. I was a well behaved and polite child who did very well at school. I’d be smacked on a regular basis and this would be arranged to happen at a certain time and not just a tap on the hand at the point of doing something. I’d be sent to bed with no tea for a minor issue. I had my mouth washed out with soap on 2 occasions, once for saying a word I dint know in a sentence and another time for asking what something meant. We’re these typical in 1980s or was I harshly treated. They are very judgemental people or others for example if someone is what they would consider to be ‘common’ which now seems crazy when they used to hit kids and lock them in their room

No, it wasn't, it was considered normal.

This is one thing that has culturally changed, thank goodness. Even those parents who still think violence against children is ok - there are a disturbing number of them on this thread - now seem to understand that going for the child’s head is dangerous. When I was a kid I’d say a good 60% of the violence I experienced was blows to the head, or having my head bounced off a wall. My stepfather knocked me out when I was 12 - and my family certainly didn’t consider themselves abusive.

Well in so glad you know that it was abusive. It was truly horrible

Of course they didn’t

abusers never do

God these stories.

Love and support to everyone.

No abuse wasn't normal no matter how people try to explain it away.

Is anyone else trying to figure out how to handle Christmas in the company of a parent who used to do shit like this? 😥

I was born '84 and subjected to violence by both parents growing up and I think I would have considered this the last straw and called the police myself!!

Nope! I have refused to go to my parents' house for Xmas since 2007. Somebody always ruined it, usually my dad; and now it's ruined permanently.

I don’t think it was considered normal to do bang a child’s head against a wall at all. Smacking with an open hand was considered acceptable and is still legal today. But I know that it was illegal to leave any kind of bruise when I was growing up. (I’m 56.) I’m sure that banging a child’s head against a wall would have been against the law, too.

Of course that didn’t mean that parents who did it were generally reported, sadly they weren’t. After all CSA mostly wasn’t reported either.

By the time you would remember late 80s early 90s, it would not have been considered normal, but I was born quite a few years before that, and grew up in the 70s and 80s, banging heads together was absolutely normal, and actually expected if the kid's were acting out, usually a punishment for fighting and arguing between siblings.
I for one never had that done to me, my parents weren't violent as a rule, but I was threatened with it, untold amounts of times.

Well spousal abuse was actually illegal, but guess what, no one did anything about it. You think if battering your wife was ignored, they were going to get all offended at you banging your kids head or boxing their ears? No chance.
Im glad its changed now, but pretending it wasn't normal is really harmful. Denying atrocious behaviour of the past means we cant learn and move on, as if we deny it, there's nothing to learn from.
If you did not see or hear this, thats great, and nice for you. But it did happen

My parents would hit us because it was quicker than having a conversation. My mum would just throw stuff if it was handy and wouldn't break on contact. The pink fluffy heeled slippers didn't feel as soft as they looked.

We weren't allowed to talk back or ask why, so a lot of the times I got hit I would have to work backwards through what had happened and identify the behaviour I wasn't supposed to do, so I'd know for next time.

Nice for me? My DSis and I suffered CSA as a child, which was never reported. There were people at church who knew about it. There were a lot of others like us too. But if asked, no one would have considered it as ‘normal’. They just didn’t do anything about it.

The same thing with domestic violence, towards both women and children. It was illegal and considered unacceptable but people didn’t want to get involved in what were considered domestics.

Ok, well let's agree to disagree on our understanding of normal. For me normal is behaviour or circumstance that is shared by peers

I’m sorry. My understanding of ‘normality’ in those times is without doubt very skewed. My childhood would have been considered very far from it even then. (Although we seemed like a decent family from the outside.)

Oh my mother banged mine and my sister's heads together as a punishment for arguing, sure...but bashing a child's head against a wall - I struggle to imagine a time when that would be considered normal. :(

It’s not that it wasn’t more prevalent but it still wasn’t considered acceptable in the seventies and eighties by a lot of people. It wasn’t unquestioned. I would say this is when more people did start to question it. I remember having a debate about it in my English class in the mid eighties.

My mum didn’t hit me (I was born early seventies) because she had been physically abused herself and didn’t want to perpetuate it. She absolutely considered it as abuse.

I’m a hard working pillar of society to anyone who thinks this isn’t possible without this kind of ‘discipline’.

Well I don't smack bums but I too am proud of my lovely adult children, who work hard, have lots of friends, are law abiding, kind, know how to behave socially, did well at uni and generally the sort of people that we need more of in the world.
I never forced them to eat what they didn't like, everybody has likes and dislikes, my parents had things they wouldn't eat so never forced us to eat things we didn't like. It's important to listen to your body and not to eat just so you clear your plate, the inlaws has that philosophy and were overweight and eventually suffered illnesses
because of that.
If I had someone over for a meal and there was something that they didn't like (unlikely as ID have asked previously) no way would I refuse to let them leave the table until they had eaten it. If I can do that for an adult not in my family, I can do that for my children.

Well, you're the one that sounds feral tbh.i would never have dreamed of setting fire to a woodland, killing a tree or smashing people's windows. Neither would my children have dreamed of doing anything like that. When my son was old enough to want to have campfires we taught him how to do it safely, so nothing was damaged. Going around smashing windows-that sounds like being a hooligan, if it was by accident playing cricket, and I admit that it could happen once, why on earth didn't your parents teach you not to play cricket or whatever near neighbours buildings, so you broke another 11! That sounds like you got away with it. An accident I can understand once, for anything, even adults have accidents, my son and friend damaged our neighbour's garage door, not stopping in time, it wasn't deliberate, the door was actually already badly damaged. They paid for the rivets to mend the new hole (which wasn't much, just a token really) and never did anything like that again, and never played near the door again. Many years down the line that mend is the strongest part of the garage door!

My brother and I came to the conclusion that the worst punishments were handed out for poor behaviour in public - anything that brought shame on the family and made my parents look bad. Poor behaviour was tolerated within the family household. Bullying, violence, name calling, fat shaming that was ignored - but do something wrong in public and that was when the smacking would happen.
I think my parent did a poor job when it came to discipline, they focused on the wrong things. The bullying, name calling and violence between siblings led to dysfunction family dynamics that continue in the present.
I learned from my parents, how not to parent - I would not lift my hand to a child. They might have done their best but it was not good enough and I was determined not repeat their poor parenting.

I was thinking exactly the same thing when I read that post! All that smacking and still the breaking of windows, setting a woodland on fire and killing a tree, along with all the siblings who did much worse. What a family!

Modern sensibilities? So a woman should be compelled to obey her husband, because you don't believe in modern sensibilities? So it's not right that we no longer stone adulterers, because of our modern sensibilities? Should we get the townsfolk to stone a disobedient son because not doing so is just modern sensibilities. When thank heavens for modern sensibilities
(if someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, * his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town. They shall say to the elders, “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.” *Then all the men of his town are to stone him to death. You must purge the evil from among you. )

My now ex husband and his brothers were routinely hit, didn't stop one of them setting his bedroom on fire, all it taught ex was that if someone smaller than you does something you don't like you hit them, (that was me, not the children thankfully, he said he'd never hit them because of how it made him feel )

As you can see from the thread, many people were smacked as children but because it wasn’t unusual & we knew our parents loved us, it hasn’t caused scarring or trauma.

If you felt unloved as a child & still feel unloved as an adult, then those are reasons to look closely at your relationship. If your parents’ current treatment of you is causing stress & unhappiness then cut contact. You feel that their behaviour when you were a child was deliberately & unacceptably harsh, but if they are a positive presence in your life now you would forgive them. But they aren’t, so you don’t.

I think I’m trying to say that you can go low or no contact because of their behaviour now. You don’t have to look back at their behaviour 20 years ago to build evidence against them & justify your decision.

Many of the posters defending some of the more extreme examples of parental discipline, often involving violence, seem to believe that the children who experienced this will grow up into model law-abiding citizens when it is more likely that the opposite is true.

Many, not all, children who are taught that violence is the answer will carry this pattern on into adulthood. The children who grow up and don't replicate the fucked-up dynamics of their own abusive childhoods, often still massively struggle with self-esteem and forming healthy relationships.

I'm so sorry you went through this. I agree teaching kids that the way you deal with undesirable behaviour is to lift your hand can create it's own problems. My kids were lucky enough never to have to witness violence administered by their parents or their siblings. Our home has always been a safe place.