My Why

I was raised in the evangelical spanking era, and if you weren’t, here’s how it worked in my house: my parents never spanked in anger. That part they were proud of. It was calm, deliberate, almost liturgical — you did the thing, you were told why it was wrong, you were spanked, and you cried, because you weren’t done until you cried.

Then, and only then, came the hug. The “I love you.” The immediate, required restoration of the relationship, like a reset button had been pressed and we were all supposed to walk out of that room like nothing had happened. Sometimes, we were even supposed to thank mom for spanking us.

My family even had a special paddle.

I don’t say any of that to drag my parents. They believed, sincerely, that they were doing the loving thing. It’s what they were taught, by their parents, by their church, by a whole theology that treated a swat as an act of care. Spare the rod, spoil the child and all that nonsense.

I know that. And it still shaped me in ways I didn’t understand until I had kids of my own.

The part nobody warned me about

Here’s what I didn’t expect: when I became a parent and started spanking my own kids, I could not replicate the thing my parents were so proud of.

I didn’t spank calmly.

I spanked in anger — at the end of my patience, in the moment I’d already lost, using my hand as a punctuation mark on my own frustration instead of some careful, dispassionate lesson. It wasn’t liturgy. It was just anger with a justification attached.

And it never worked.

Not once did I spank my kid and think, there, that fixed it. It didn’t teach the lesson. It didn’t produce the calm, restored relationship I’d grown up expecting as the next scene. It just left both of us worse off — them scared or shut down, me ashamed and telling myself I’d do better next time, which mostly meant white-knuckling it until the next time I didn’t.

The kicker is that my parents, watching from the sidelines, thought I was going too easy. In their eyes, I wasn’t disciplining enough — I was too light, too permissive, letting things slide that they would’ve handled. The grandkids threw too many fits and talked back too readily.

From where I stood, I was doing damage I couldn’t undo and somehow still failing to meet the bar. That gap — between what I was doing to my relationship with my own kids and what my parents thought I should be doing — is where I finally started to ask real questions about all of it.

Getting off that train

It took years.

It wasn’t one lightbulb moment — it was a slow accumulation of watching what actually happened in my house after I hit my kid versus after I didn’t, and being honest with myself about which version of me I wanted them to remember. Eventually I stopped.

Not because someone convinced me with a study, though the studies exist and they’re not subtle or kind. I stopped because I could see it in my own kids’ faces what I was doing…and I couldn’t keep pretending I couldn’t.

What I found on the other side wasn’t permissiveness. That was the fear I’d absorbed — that without spanking, there’d be no discipline at all, just chaos with extra steps. What I actually found was harder in some ways and infinitely better in every way that matters: staying present through a meltdown instead of ending it fast, teaching instead of punishing, repairing a hard moment without a ritual attached to it, holding boundaries without needing fear to enforce them.

And I still, sometimes, feel like I suck at it.

Why I’m still talking about it

I’m not writing any of this to shame anyone currently in the thick of it — I was in it myself. I was the guy losing his temper and calling it discipline, telling himself it was for their own good, getting criticized by his own parents for not hitting enough. If that’s you right now, I’m not looking down from somewhere above you. I’m looking back from exactly where I was.

But I am on a mission now, because I know what’s on the other side of that decision, and I know how hard it is to make it while the people who raised you are implying that you’re getting it wrong.

You’re not.

Every spanking-free day you give your kid is a day they don’t have to build the same walls I built, or unlearn the same anger I had to unlearn as an adult.

It’s slower.

It’s harder in the moment.

And it actually works — not just to stop the behavior in front of you, but to build the relationship you’re going to want to still have when they’re grown and deciding how to raise their own kids.

I got off that train. I’m holding the door for whoever’s ready to get off with me.