My name is Ambra, and my parents beat my butt. The preferable term here is "spanking", but within a cultural context, there are many who know the word "beat" is merely an idom and not literal. I come from a long line of corporal punishers. The fact that I say this with so much pride is a bit disturbing. I am still proud to say I am a product of spanking.
I wasn't a bad kid, but I was definitely a smart-mouth (some things never change). If you attempted to reason with me, you would have to enter into a full-out, head-on debate. This was something my mother refused to do and thus she employed other methods to "help" me to obey. Generally speaking, this form of "help" didn't feel good.
One guest on [a talk] show outlined the "steps" she used to discipline her children:
Step 1: You get a warning
Step 2: You get a time-out
Step 3: Privileges are taken away
When I was growing up, we had no steps. It went like this:
Step 1: You do it.
End of story.
My children felt the sting of hand or paddle from time to time. They seem to remember it to have been more frequent than it actually was, which is evidence of a beneficial unintended effect of the occasional application of flat object to round bottom -- the very presence of a credible threat serves to reduce outbreaks of unacceptable behavior.
Hmmm. Sometimes I sound a lot like Ronald Reagan.
