I feel like our parents’ generation had it the worst when it comes to all manner of discipline and related techniques.
Everyone before them, for thousands of years, they all got hit as kids, when they were being little scallions or when they wrote with their left hand, or even just because their dad had a few drinks.
The church was fine with it, schools did it. It was a normal part of society, like a pretty major part. It was encouraged and if you didn’t smack your kids around other people wondered what you were even up to.
Kids had no rights, and adults kept it that way for a reason.
But then to make up for it, when the kids grew up they were all allowed to hit their own little ones. And other people’s. Any kids really. With no repercussions.
A cycle of abuse that, on an individual level, culminates in redemption for the older, stronger people.
But society changed as soon as they became parents, I think in the early 80s, and all of a sudden beating your kids was basically the worst thing you could do.
So while they still got hit as kids, they’ve never been allowed to hit us. If they did, we’d get taken away, and they go to jail or at least court, where they need to wear a tie or a corset.
When you grow up in a culture of corporal punishment but aren’t allowed to participate when you’re on the better end of it, that’s gotta be pretty frustrating.
Which is why they resent us in different ways.
Like whenever I’d need money for a field trip or a bottle of milk, my dad would throw the money on the ground in front of me and I’d have to pick it up like the guy from Sigur Rós in the Purple Wedding episode of Game of Thrones. And I totally get why he did that. I thought for some reason that his money was my money, even though I did absolutely nothing to earn it.
I felt entitled, and maybe it’s because I never got hit. Who’s to say.