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First, you know it is coming because it is promised as a consequence of your actions. Actions that aren’t malicious but mistakes because you were just a fucking child who didn’t know better.
It is still coming regardless
Most of those mistakes were not even things you had done before but new twists that you never expected. You were told not to take stupid risks but you didn’t even know that this new thing was yet another risk.
I didn’t quite understand the beating after relief from almost dying.
It was meant to teach you not to do it again. To be cautious and also to be respectful. It made me resentful.
My dad rarely beat us but when he did, it was for a major offense. My mum did it often until she outsourced it to her brothers as a single mother. Those dudes were bad!
I still remember being tied up like a hog and almost losing my arms as the blood stopped flowing and they went numb. I was a teenager and can’t even remember what I did but I remembered the punishment and never forgave them for doing it.
Even my mother knew they went too far.
I was whipped within an inch of my life with electric wires. I fainted and was woken up and whipped again.
There is a reason I am not close to any of my maternal uncles. That kind of treatment was the main reason. Plus they never saw good in us except for my late Uncle Tom.
When someone asks me if I will spank my kids, the answer is NO! I don’t want them to resent me the way I resented others.
My wife was never spanked and she turned out better than I did. All of that beating was meaningless. Maybe the only positive thing is learning not to do it.
One can day parents were taking out their frustration in their kids but what of relatives?
I remember a thread @TheVunderkind wrote once about how dehumanizing what our elders called discipline was. How it alters our psychology. It made me distant from older people for very long
I could be in a car with older relatives on a trip for hours and say nothing. I couldn’t even bring myself to be close to those who never hit me at all like my uncle Henry. It manifested itself into rebellion of another kind. It made me decide never to conform to any expectation
Even when advice from them is good, I go all contrarian because of some damage that was done in my childhood.
I suffered in all sorts of ways for that but it was liberating. Doing what they wanted never made me comfortable. It caused only pain.
What they thought was discipline fucked up an entire family. I am not even close to my cousins as I should be. We are all strangers now.
Don’t brutalize your kids. Talk to them like human beings. Withhold gadgets and money. My father made me walk with patched shoes for a year.
Now, I have a whole room full of shoes that I don’t use. The humiliation of having the worst shoes in school can mess up a boy’s confidence in ways you can’t even begin to imagine. Mekwe chances were zero.
Nah! Even depriving kids of money and shoes or clothing is a bad idea.
The concept of African discipline created our dysfunctional societies. I try to check myself when I realize that I am becoming needlessly wicked. Most people were taught wickedness by those who thought they were doing good with discipline. It was all wickedness in the end.
The ironic thing is that those my uncles who practiced wickedness on us became loving parents to their kids. I remember one of them panicking when he hadn’t heard from his son. When they became parents, they changed.
My mum apologized for all that outsourcing later.
Another lesson: Never allow anyone to touch your children. They don’t have the same feelings you have and don’t know any limits.
I make this clear to everyone including domestic staff. The day you beat my child is the day I maim someone. That person is you.
Credit: Twitter | Osaretin