So is that what you want? Do you want your kids to grow up with fear? To be scared of you? To hide first the cigarettes, then the beer, then the weed, cocain, sex….must I go on? Then one day when you are like my dad You tell the story as I mentioned and also spend every evening feeling like you are missing out on all of the thongs in your child’s life.

It is disappointing that when Googling help for such an issue I come accross a post like this. You don’t remember your beating. I do. I am also 30 and still dealing with how it has affected my relationships and my ability to chase dreams.

The most intelligent, confident, loving, loyal, disciplined(as well as self) talented, loyal, tough as nails kids I know were never beaten. The reason is because their parents say do or dont do something and mean what they say. Whatever the punishment is the get it no matter what the circumstaces.

Brains take a long time to grow. Consensus is that the ability to properly understand cause and effect takes ~23 to 30 years. Of course, if you’re not already that old, you’ll deny that you’re impaired by being unable to see the long term implications of behaviour.

if you haven’t taught your kids about the real shortcuts to success (which are anything but), there’s little chance that they’ll figure it out until it’s too late to do anything with the knowledge… cue parents warning kids.

I think the big thing is to make sure they get to experience the joy of “no” and “he77 no!” over and over as toddlers/kids/adolescents. Because if they wait until they’re 30-something to come to grips with the big unexplored universe of No, they’ll be mighty sad tomatoes… and mess up a bunch of lives at the same time.

My dad beat me periodically until I got big enough to scare him off. His dad was worse on him by a hundred-fold, and I pity the childhood of his dad’s dad. Must have involved scalping and branding irons, but then again he was an indian fighter around the time of the civil war.

One day I found some letters, only to discover that the son of the indian fighter grew up to marry and live with two women who liked each other a lot. A whole lot, along with a cast of a dozen or so french beavers*, a small raft of white powder and enough hooch to float your cooch. In the midwest, no less.

Wild parties circa 1920, until WW2 put an end to it, more or less. Fast forward to me remembering one of the women as a cranky old spinster (church going, fire and brimstone, no fun)in her 90s. You’d never have known without the letters. House was empty save for a bible, a cross and a cat.

I’m guessing she died wishing she’d had more “no” in her life, but less violence.

* yes, that’s EXACTLY what I meant. They had pelts in those days.