it taught me that bigger people can do what they want to you, but that doesn't make them right.

I got that from the phrase, "because I said so" and "because I'm the mom, that's why." Heh.

Hold up! Michael Jackson is 50?!? Crap. That's really shocking to me for some reason. Holy cow.

Prince, Madonna, Michael Jackson -- all the same age, which wasn't so surprising 20 years ago, but 50 looks pretty different on each one of them now...

Puppy bumper cars!!!

Spanking was still "okay" in the early 60s when I was a kid. My mom was not the tough one in the family. My dad did spank us (although not very painfully--it always seemed as if it was for show) as children. He also clouted us on the back of the head a few times, which was painful. I will say that the clouts were always after we did something REALLY bad, so they weren't surprises.

When we grew up he apologized to each of us and I know he deeply regretted it. He was beaten a lot as a kid and although he was a million times better parent than his parents, I know he wished he had never lost his temper with us. Because it happened so infrequently, it never made any of us afraid of him or of authority.

My brothers have never hit spanked any of their kids.

My mom did slap me across the face once. I won't say I deserved it, but it was provoked. I had quite the mouth on me at 17 and no hesitation at all about saying something both cruel and smartmouthed.

I was spanked and it was effective, and I think I would spank children of mine--just not in anger.

I find it shocking some times how ingrained physical responses can be. As conscious as I am of NOT behaving in the ways that my parents did, I will still, in a pique, swat Bartleby's butt if he's doing something dangerous like eating out of a garbage bag and not paying attention to my "walk on" command.

When I was married, my husband had 3 kids. One day, the youngest did something...I can't even remember what...and I raised my hand to him. Not as an object lesson, but an actual impulse to harm him. I saw the terror in his eyes, looked up at my hand and turned to stone. I told him that I wasn't mad at him but that he needed to go far away from me right then. He bolted and I fell to the floor sobbing.

Thinking, in that moment, that I could do what was done to me changed everything in my world...bot the better, in a way. I recognized the impulse and hated myself, but acknowledged that I didn't actually follow through with it...so I wasn't my father.

My fear of becoming an abuser led me to never have children of my own, but I know in my heart that I would not have been. Such is the power of choice.

I don't think children suffer from 'swats'. It's a distraction with the opportunity for redirect and/or learning. But when I see people beating their kids in public, I feel physical pain and cannot NOT say something. It's gotten me into trouble more than once but the compulsion is strong.

I'd love to have great words to say, but I don't. Any ideas?

My husband was beaten as a child and well into school age. He refuses to believe he was abused, but I think if you can't go to school the next day because of how hard you were punished, you're past the point of swats. There's a lot of weird violence in the stories he tells me of when he was a kid, and he shrugs them off as his mother not having any other way to control three obnoxious kids while their father was off on deployment, but the stories make me nauseous.

It's another reason I'm glad we don't have kids, because I would not have been able to let it lie if he'd behaved in a way that still does not ping him as excessive.

Oh, another time I was spanked was when my brother and I were hitting small stones with tennis racquets into cars as they went passed on the highway in front of our farm.

Damn, we did some dumb things....

That is a tough one Connie. As a kid, if you are told something is normal, you have no real reason to doubt it. Plus, as an adult, acknowledging wrong-doing involves some internal work that may seem unnecessary or even scary.

Even though it is my business to guide people through journeys like that, sometimes it really isn't practical. If no blood is being let, that wound may not need healing.

You've clearly made a good choice.