Protecting the Free-Range Kid

[Smitty-48]

My father employed the whip of sarcasm, far more biting than any strap, better to be strapped and be done with it, then to ride home after every hockey game, under the critique of the coach who never lets up.

And this is why I didn't want my husband coaching our kids.

Acerbic as he could be, was actually my father who was the big softie, was my mother, who was the iron maiden, far better to face the king of sarcasm, than to ever be in the dock before the Queen of Hearts.

First time I saw the Queen of Hearts in action, I was just a wee lad, and my father had his drinking buddies over, one lipped off to my mother, my father just sat there not knowing what to say, my mother waited until the guy got up, then pounced on him from behind and threw him down the stairs, he called her a name from the bottom, head already split, she came back with a knife, and he ran for his life, never to return again.

[DrYouth]

This has become a heck of a thread...

I have this crazy feeling that most folks are trying to do better by their kids than they were done by... but somehow the obstacles to parenting keep getting bigger.
Our neighborhoods are less cohesive, technology keeps outcompeting parents and the mental health and addiction problems of the peer groups our kids are in keep ratcheting up. Not to mention now kids are expected to define their gender and sexual orientation on some kind of 8 point scale.
It seems parents are on a treadmill dialed up off the charts.

No wonder many are choosing to stick with pets.

[Speaker to Animals]

I don't agree with physical violence against children in most cases. I recognize that some kids are serious trouble and need physical discipline, but it seems to me the only thing we teach kids with violence is that the solution to impasse is violence.

On the other hand, when you become an adult and enlist, I am all for using violence to train troops. Violence serves a purpose among men. It's important to teach your kids how to use it when necessary.

Right now we see the worst of both worlds. Society teaches most men to be weak and womanlike, whereas it coddles the most aggressive and reprobate males so that they grow up to become criminals and abusers.

[Smitty-48]

Never felt the need to use violence of action against my own troops, they never crossed me, never even looked at me funny, they would have gone through the breach for me, at the forlorn hope, no questions asked, and that is in end, all of them that I would ask, so long as they go over the top when the whistle blows, no need for a lash, and all is forgiven therein.

[Speaker to Animals]

I remember dudes who really needed an ass kicking. Hell, I probably did too.

[Smitty-48]

That sort of thing is for the troops to sort out amongst themselves, in their Mess. Never said nobody ever got a beating, it just wasn't administered by the chain of command.

As I said, to be decried before your peers as having let the team down; the fiercest lash of them all.

[Speaker to Animals]

I don't know, man. The best troops in history were trained in that way. They used to beat Spartan boys into a pulp. The other boys would beat each other to death in some cases. End results were some bad hombres.

[Smitty-48]

It's never been the Canadian way, no one in the chain of command ever laid a beating on my great grandfather, and he went over the top, from Second Ypres, to the Hundred Days, God, King, and Country, nary a lash required.

General Sir Arthur Currie, never had to flog the Canadian Corps over the top, not even to the last man fallen, on the last night of the war; Private George Lawrence Price 256265, at the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them.

[Speaker to Animals]

It used to be the American way. Even back in the Vietnam era they used to beat on recruits and conscripts.

[Smitty-48]

In HM Royal Canadian Infantry Corps, we have no use for flogging, our regiment, our patres familias, our fathers, we shall not fail.

To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Ducimus.