SGR

It's weird, I work with boomers and it still comes up sometimes - like it's a point of pride for them: "Back in my day, I used to get my ass beat for stuff like that" - "parents don't know how to discipline their kids anymore, they're too soft" - "maybe if the parents at home beat their ass, they wouldn't be so misbehaved at school".

Like yeah, there's no way possible to negotiate with young kids and teach them the art of peaceful compromise, nah, no way, better grab the belt - that's what your dad did after all, and you are so well-adjusted nowadays. And yeah, the research is widely available now, so these young parents have less of an excuse today than their parents did. Children are the most vulnerable people around. People are so ****ing dumb, but I do think at some point, society will progress past this kind of behavior being socially acceptable. Perhaps I'm just being naive though.

Weird how different the reactions to the following two statements are:

"I only hit my kids as a last resort" / "I only hit my wife as a last resort"

Reminds me of that old Offspring song, "Way Down the Line"

"There is a chain that's never broken
You know the story it's sad but true
An angry man gets drunk and beats his kids
The same old way his drunken father did
What comes around well it goes around
Nothing changes cause it's all the same
The world you get's the one you give away
It all just happens again
Way down the line
At 17 Shannon is pregnant
As young as her mom when she had her
Her kid is never gonna have a dad
The same old way that Shannon never had
What comes around well it goes around
Nothing changes cause it's all the same
The world you get's the one you give away
It all just happens again
Way down the line
And all the things you learn when you're a kid
You'll **** up just like your parents did
It all just happens again
Way down the line"

That's part of it - it's a difficult conversation to have of course, compounded by the fact that the violence you experienced has messed you up emotionally. Often times, so much so, that you don't realize that something wrong was done to you. People justify it - it's their inner mom or dad, in their head, reinforcing: "I deserved that. I shouldn't have been so misbehaved. I should've listened to them the first time. They only beat me once in a while, etc". Hell, it doesn't help that your average Joe-schmoe has the self-reflective abilities of the average vampire. Once they get to the point where they've beat their kids as well, it becomes even more difficult to acknowledge that their parents did wrong to them, because it would of course lead to acknowledging that they did wrong to their kids as well.