Do you approve of hitting children to punish them, under certain conditions?

[moriah]

68. See, it wouldn't have worked on me.

At 11, the one time Mom spanked me and lost her temper, I didn't care about the pain. I was blatantly defying her, pissed off as hell, and felt that whatever she did to me couldn't be worse than what the kids at school had already done to me (concussions, broken arm, etc). So when she threatened to spank me if I wasn't ready to go in 10 minutes, I told her to go right on ahead and do it then.

And didn't make a sound, despite having blood drawn by the switch. I remember feeling it running down my legs after.

Since she'd caused so much damage, she couldn't send me to school anyway. I won.

If, at 11, I could handle that kind of pain, there's no way that any number of spankings would have taught me any lessons at all. She would have had to have done permanent damage before I would have submitted my will.


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Edit to add: I actually was a really good kid. This incident was completely out of the norm for us -- it was the first time since I was a toddler I'd told her "No". I'd just completely and totally had my fill of being bullied, and refused to deal with it anymore. She only spanked me because she couldn't think of another solution right then, and was angry that I was defying her, something she'd never experienced before. Especially while trying to go to work to keep a roof over my little ungrateful head and all I was doing was causing her to be late, when the kids at this school hadn't made me require medical care yet. I knew they would if it kept on, though, and wasn't about to go through it again.

She enrolled me in a private, GT school that had about 15 kids, that was willing to take me on scholarship. And we never had fights about me going to school again, since I wasn't being tortured there.

As a teenager, the worst thing I ever did was run up her phone bill with long-distance calls to download files for my BBS. She punished me by making me take the modem out of my computer for two weeks. THAT hurt, far worse than being switched to the point of bleeding.