When I was about twenty years old, I met an old pastor’s wife who told me that when she was young and her first child, she didn’t believe in striking children, although spanking kids with a switch pulled from a tree was standard punishment at the time.
But one day when their son was four or five, he did something that she felt warranted a spanking first in his life. And she told him he would have to go outside and find a switch for her to hit him with. The boy was gone a long time. And when he came back he was crying.