As a child of the 1970s, I was the product of many spankings. Although I wasn’t a bad kid, my bottom felt the sting of a hand or hairbrush at least a dozen times a year. Since my father travelled a great deal during his climb up the corporate ladder, my mother tended to the […]

Disrespect earns a sore bottom My sixth grade teacher, Miss Anne Faron, was so beautiful that I had a crush on her. At the end of each day, she would dismiss the class and as you walked by her, she would say ‘goodbye’ or ‘have a nice day’ to each student. They would respond with […]

I grew up at a time, and on a street, where corporal discipline was a given. Spanking was the accepted means of correction from toddlerhood to mid-teens. The attached ‘rowhouses’ were close together and in the summer, windows were wide open – air-conditioning was common enough in public theatres and malls, but not in homes […]

The following is an extract from Shirley Temple-Black’s out-of-print autobiography, Child Star. That afternoon, Mother had summoned me into the front hall, where I was confronted by a clot of self-conscious strangers. When she asked me to give them a little song-and-dance routine, I stuck out both my chin and lower lip and shook my […]

The following are all posts from an internet forum set up to support a BBC project called ‘Scotland on Film’ in 2003. Here, several posters recount their memories of childhood discipline from the 1950s onwards… Sarah Forsyth from Edinburgh My father was quite a disciplinarian and as the head of the household, his word was law. […]

I was not used to being spanked when I was a young kid. On those rare occasions, my mother would grab my arm and place one or two mild swats on the seat of my pants. It wasn’t a painful experience but I would cry a lot, because I didn’t like my mom being so […]

I grew up in the 1950s, when Britain’s canal network was still a place of work rather than a holiday destination. A canal ran close to the back of my home and I would often play next to ‘the cut’, watching the barges go past with loads of coal, ceramics and steel. To make things […]

My mother was not a pet lover, and my brother Jeff and I wanted a pet so badly that we would have done just about anything. Each time we talked about it, mother would say: “No, we have discussed this and there will be no animals in this house. That’s the end of it!” So […]

In our house, mom used the belt for the more serious offences committed by my siblings and I. While I received plenty of whippings in my childhood, I can remember one in particular that stands out in my memory. I was 15 and decided to experiment with alcohol with my best friend Julie. Her parents […]

This incident happened when I was nine years old. My mom had hired a sitter for me for two weeks – our nanny was on vacation. Anyway, the sitter came to watch me and my sister for a few days. I was making life hard for the sitter – everything she told me to do, I […]