Xerox the World and Call It My Life

Don’t spank your kids, don’t smack them, don’t thump them, don’t paddle them, don’t whoop them with belts, don’t throw shoes at them, don’t even slap their hands with wooden spoons. Most importantly, INTERVENE when they fight each other. When you use corporal punishment, even if it’s reserved for the most egregious of malfeasances, and when you allow kids to ‘duke it out,’ you’re teaching them to ESCALATE THE SITUATION, and you’re teaching them that physical violence is an appropriate response to insult and property damage. Hopefully, by the time they’re adults they’ll come to realize that it’s not, but some people never unlearn it, and in the meantime those who do can inflict a lot of damage along the way. This is what leads to so many problems in society.

Now take my family. Growing up, spankings were reserved for only the most “serious” of crimes: breaking things, setting fires, and cussing directly at parents. Sibling disputes were handled like this: I would say something mean to/about my brother, he (being 4 years younger than me and of limited imagination) would punch me, I would complain to parents, and they would ask “What did you do to deserve it?”. I, not being satisfied with that response, would hit my brother back, and he would hit me back, and so on it went until we both got tired or somebody separated us. I don’t think the physical damage from those fights was normally that bad because I wasn’t the violent type and only aimed for a proportional response with my punches, but maybe my brother would disagree. Eventually he started to catch up to me in size, and fights during that era were the longest and bruisiest. Once he outgrew me, though, the nature of the fights changed. His physical limitations had disappeared, but his underdog mentality had not. He still came at me with everything he had because he couldn’t beat me with words, and that was when I started grabbing weapons. Many a fight ended in an hour-long standoff in the kitchen, both of us holding knives. An argument about what time I was supposed to pick him up from school resulted in me pulling over on the side of the road to call mom because he kept punching me while I was driving, and I when we got home I locked myself in the car in the driveway until she got home.