Dan says:

My father was a firm believer in corporal punishment. It was, at times, in the mind of a 10 year-old, to the extreme. It wasn’t a simple over the knee session with a few swats. It was down to the basement, drop your drawers and bend over. Then the belt came out.

It hurt like hell, but I refused to cry.

With 5 boys to raise, all the while working two and sometimes three jobs, my father had few options in his mind when it came to discipline. This was in the 60′s, and times were different.

Life was good. We each got a new Sting Ray bicycle as our first and only provided means of self-transportation. Our parents went into hock for those bikes, working out a payment plan with the local bike store. It took them years to pay those off. We also had a swimming pool, a couple of mini-bikes, and there was no shortage of toys. We wanted for nothing.

We also had chores, and they were many. Most of it was yard work. My father worked mostly for family, (Italian), in the construction business. He was a heavy equipment operator; bulldozers, scrapers, cranes, etc. We had a large sunken backyard that was maybe 250′ deep. One day, he brought home a dump truck full of fill dirt. The dirt was full of rocks. I soon learned what working the rock pile meant. Don’t perform your chores, you’re on the rock pile, which meant raking the rocks out, putting them in a wheel barrel and hauling them off to a pile. Later, you might have to move the pile from one spot to another.

Ignoring your chores never led to a “ass-whoopin.” It only meant more hard labor. That taught me early on about making “good decisions,” being responsible for myself and most importantly, it taught me a good work ethic. The one thing my father would not tolerate was disrespect for our mother, lying, and stealing. Break one of those commandments and your butt was headed down to the basement, and rightly so. The big item was sins against our mother. Don’t even go there was the rule.

There was one time that none of us five boys would own up to something, and honestly, I don’t recall exactly what is was. I think, maybe, something was broken. What i do remember is I didn’t do it. I may have been all of 11, maybe 12 at the time. We were all lined up, oldest to youngest. Dad asked for a confession. No one complied. He was about to start with the spanking when I blurted out I was the culprit. He summarily dismissed my four brothers.

He never spanked me that day. He never said why, but I suspect he knew I was lying. That alone should have been enough for a good old fashioned ass-whoopin but he let it go. Truth was, I was saving my youngest brother from “the belt.” I wish now maybe he would have gotten it He’s still a little shit, in spite of being bigger than me.

I’m a better person for my exposure to “corporal punishment,” which included a few sessions with Mr. White, my elementary principal.

As for me and my children, it was minimal. Short of one rather funny story, the occasional swats on the ass happened. I learned early on that the psychological approach has a far greater impact than a swat on the ass.