When I was about eight years old, my best friend Johnny and I did everything with each other – shoot baskets in the driveway, play catch in the backyard and ride our bikes until the rubber came off the wheels. We also got in trouble together, for typical mischief. Usually, when, that happened our parents […]

 I was staying with my grandmother for the weekend because my parents were celebrating their wedding anniversary. As child, I wet the bed until I was alot older and wore diapers at night – I sometimes had daytime accidents, too. While I was staying with her, grandmother took me to the zoo. While we looked […]

When I was growing up, I spent the summers working on my aunt’s farm. My uncle had passed away a couple of years before and she continued to run the farm with a combination of hired hands and relatives’ children, like myself. It was a huge old farmhouse and normally there would be about eight […]

I had a friend named Scott. He and I would often play at his house – in fact, we did pretty much everything together. However, after a couple of months we started to get bored with the usual things we got up to. In such circumstances, Scott usually would take the lead but this time, […]

From: The Outlook (periodical published in New York) 5 July 1913  When Corporal Punishment for Children is Right: A Story of Personal Experience My mother is a stepmother, and a kinder, more patient, more conscientious mother never lived. She loves children instinctively, otherwise the moods and caprices of her little stepdaughter must have utterly discouraged […]

You may have already seen my previous mention of Miss Rose, the young Matron who looked after the younger boys when I was a boarder at a prep school on the south coast of England in the 1960s. Here is one particular incident which stands out from all the other times I was subject to […]

One of my earliest memories of being spanked by my mother was as a three-year-old (in the 1930s). I was an adventurer, and one day I decided that it would be grand to ‘run away’. I didn’t know much about it, but had heard from other children that it was something kids were supposed to […]

I grew up in the Midwest during the early 60s and corporal punishment was widely practised at the time, especially by the mothers in the neighbourhood. On more than one occasion, I ended up bare bottomed across my mother’s knee getting a good dose of her infamous hairbrush. When I was 12, my mother died […]

As a child, I was smacked very rarely and then only by my mother. Her method was the old standby – over the knee with trousers and underpants down, and a bottom warming with her hand. She was a good performer and I usually ended up in tears. When I was 13 years old, I […]

This happened quite a few years ago, probably 20. My mom and I lived with her sister and her kids after my mom was divorced, which left a house full of kids, and plenty of trouble to get into. My cousin, who is just a few months older and I, decided one day the fish […]