By Rick Kaempfer
Because my dad died twenty years ago and none of my children ever met him, they ask about him a lot.
At first I told them all the great things about him; the obstacles he overcame, the way he genuinely cared about everyone, and the respect he engendered among his peers. But recently I've been completing the picture a little more, and I'm feeling a little guilty about it.
You see, I've been using Dad to scare them straight.
Perhaps you do the same thing. Here's how it works: When the children are misbehaving and my "nice" way of getting them in line is ineffective, it's time to trot out the punishment techniques of my parents. Not use those techniques, just remind them what they were.
It's indisputable that the techniques commonly used a generation ago were harsher than those considered acceptable today. When my father came home from work, my mother would greet him at the door with a laundry list of our offenses along with the punishment she expected him to enforce ("Ricky told his sister to drink toilet water, so he gets five spankings.") He would exhale, take off his hat and tie, and joylessly take care of business before pouring himself a cocktail.
He knew his role as the father. He was the bogeyman on the other end of the "wait 'til your father gets home" threat. If he wasn't dispensing spankings, he was coming up with creative punishments to deal with the really serious stuff. Usually that involved being "grounded", or writing "I will not talk back to my mother" a thousand times, but sometimes it was much worse.
I've taken a slightly different approach with my own kids. I don't spank them because I just don't see the point. In our house the biggest problem is fighting--and somehow hitting them doesn't exactly make the point I'm trying to make (fighting doesn't solve anything). On the other hand, I noticed that when I muttered "maybe my dad's way of doing this was right," they immediately snapped to it.
After I noticed that was working, I began to share more and more stories of Dad's punishment techniques. Each story added to his legend. Even his non-corporal punishments struck fear in their little pampered hearts.
And I kind of like that.
I feel bad for using Dad this way, but if he's watching from heaven, he knows why I'm doing it. After all, the stories he told me (and my siblings) about his own father giving him "the belt" or making him "pick out a stick to be beaten with" were far scarier than anything he actually did to us.
And I'm sure his father did the same thing. And his father before that. And the generation before that took it to another level with those Grimm's Fairy Tales.
"You think I'm bad? Let me tell you a story about a boy and girl named Hansel & Gretel. They were left out in the woods to die by their parents, and you know what happened to them there? They met a cannibal witch who tried to eat them."
Think any of those early 19th century kids misbehaved after hearing one of those stories?
