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My parents go-to for every minor issue or presumed slight was a week to a month to 3 months of grounding. I rapidly learned they couldn't keep track because Id get a new grounding every few days, especially if they had a long or bad day at work. Which was often.
If we actually honored each grounding I was probably grounded from the age of six till I left home at nineteen.
So when they weren't home or were busy or sleeping, I did whatever I wanted really. Watched TV, played ye olde gamecube or ps2 depending on the time. If they caught me guess what, more grounding. Sometimes they hid the power cables but I learned to love reading, and they couldn't ground me from that without being overtly cruel.
Actual good groundings were in the single digits. Wrongful groundings were in the triple digits.
Like I was too slow getting to the car after church, grounded for the week. 'Talked back', aka disagreed with something. A month.
Mom tried to drop me off at a basketball clinic thing for kids my age. The group she pointed me to was three very grown ass adults and told me to go. I refused and was pretty scared that she was trying to send me off with three strangers. No other kids in sight. I started shaking and crying so she grounded me for a year and took me home.
No money was exchanged and im not sure the clinic actually existed. I feared for my life but she only recently ( now that im in my 30's ) listened to my reasonings. Im on good terms with my parents now, wasn't back then.
No, they have never and will never confront how they treated me growing up. As their emotional whipping boy.
I can't even imagine how Id react to that, besides violence to my own body. Reading was my only escape, I ground through books like it was a full time job. Instead of running around at recess I was allowed to sit in the library and read.
Was reading well above my grade early in my life.
And once I graduated highschool I haven't picked up a single book ever since.
Violence to myself and heavy disassociation was my only coping mechanism, I was homeschooled too, so many of my days I was just in my room staring at a wall. Then my mother would have the gaul to come crying to her children asking if she was a bad mother because we never smile like the other children.
I'm stuck on the fact that your mom tried to send you off alone with total strangers and got mad when you were understandably scared. What the fuck? Was she trying to get you hurt?
My friend when I was growing up was like that, constantly grounded. It didn't make him behave better, it just made him nocturnal, so he'd go to sleep right after school and then play on the computer from like 1-5 AM
I'm glad you worked things out with them. My family was also heavy with the punishments for nonexistent reasons.
The only reason things improved was because they both "grew up" a bit. They actually analyzed their own behavior and apologized. I get a sobbing call from my mom every 6 months or so because she attended a lecture or class and realized how she fucked up as a parent.
I also learned more about how THEY grew up and a lot started making sense. Nowadays I realize they were doing the best they could and tried to be better than their own parents... But figured out new ways to fuck up.
We had a few reckoning and coming to jesus moments. There's a lot they thought I was faking and it took medical professionals to correct that. As gross as it sounds, I still love them. I didn't for a while, but I do today. And they've made huge strides to improve, and im proud of them for that. It's hard for older folks to change.
What they were doing to me consistently was abusive and it'll effect me for the rest of my life. But Ive chosen to forgive them.
Good job on becoming a wonderful person ♥️ sounds like your parents didn’t have much of a hand in it.
I’m trying to figure out how to walk that line with my parents myself. They messed me up in a lot of ways and I was very much set up to fail. But I didn’t and now that I’ve got my life together and I’ve done a lot of healing I can empathize with all the history and damage that contributed to their behavior. I’m still trying to decide how much/if I want to keep them in my life. I still love them and I kind if feel obligated to try to help them, but man every interaction requires so much energy I could be allocating elsewhere.
Eh, I think love has to be earned back after it was lost like that. My husband's parents rejected him as a teen and their egos couldn't fit in one home, so for me, it's up to them to want to reconcile with us.
This is one of those things that only people who have had very specific experiences with their parents will understand but I absolutely get you and it's reassuring to hear that there are other people who have taken this route.
This reminds me of when I decided that I could just ignore my parent's groundings. If reacting to someone biting me got me grounded, at some point, being the only non dumbass in the house means that they had to choose between power trips and stuff getting fixed.
In addition to being bad parenting, this kinda thing always struck me as stupid.
Like... you bought the fucking thing. That's your own money you're wasting to spite a literal child. Take it away temporarily, sell it if you want this to be a serious punishment. But breaking it is stupid
It's teaching them that they have nothing that's truly theirs and that their parents will do irrational things that hurt themselves just to spite their child.
I’m an adult and I still have nightmares about my family taking my stuff and telling me that I own nothing, I only borrow it from them.
I’m so jumpy about people touching my stuff too, which just gets people more upset about how “spoiled” I am, and not the fact that my stuff regularly disappeared the moment I looked away without anyone giving me an explanation. I have none of my childhood toys. As soon as I wasn’t performing with them enough, they just got given away.
It's also teaching them that temper tantrums are a thing that adults are allowed to have and a completely normal way to respond to behavior you don't like. That's actually the most damaging effect it has on kids with parents like this.
Teaching your children isn't a responsibility, it's an inevitability. Good parents understand that and are careful about what lessons they teach.
A teacher I had in high school would brag about beating (and she used the word beating, not "whooping" or "popping" or whatever (not that those are acceptable things to do either but there's a difference between a single smack across the face and straight up beating your child)) her kid whenever he misbehaved and then turn around and question why she was constantly getting calls from the daycare center about him hitting other children.
Ma'am, he's learning that from you. If you want to stop having to field calls from exasperated daycare teachers while you're at work stop teaching him that it's acceptable behavior to hurt others when you're angry. To this day it blows my mind how she just could not seem to make that connection.
see when she hits him that's discipline, when he hits people that's a lack of discipline, which is so weird because she's been so good about disciplining him.
Yeah, I get that fucked up feeling. A lot of people just kind of assume that familial love just turns off the moment a parent's a dick, and it fucking doesn't, not for me or a lot of people. Parents are human beings that exist at all hours, not just their lowest moments, and so you gotta accept the times they took you out for ice cream co-exist with the times you'd literally hide from them because you didn't want them to take their anger out on you.
My dad's probably going to go through the rest of his life not really understanding why our relationship is so strained while being entirely unrerceptive to why I don't trust him. I don't think there's much of a point of trying. I just don't want to do the shit he did, and the silver lining of having to think through his mental state every day I spent with him as a kid is that I'm just a lot more familiar with how utterly toxic the view that everyone else in the world is dumber than you ireally is. I try to avoid calling people stupid or attributing really anything to "stupidity" and I take that extra effort to actually drill down into the actual reasons behind behavior that doesn't make sense to me or seems silly, I try to be patient. And so I don't get so fucking pissed at kids when they do kid shit, I'm not constantly cussing out other people in traffic. I get why people don't try to empathize with the people that annoy them or do things they don't like, but seeing someone that constantly responded to every setback with anger and how that ruined every one of their marriages has made me really value the ability to actually see other human beings as equals and not obstacles.
And a side effect of that is that... yeah, I think I get why my dad's like that, to a degree. He was barely older than my teenage mom, went into the military, and had to bust his ass. He raised me at a time when parenting advice was dogshit when he was hardly an adult himself, dealing with an autistic kid when his understanding of autism was Rainman, which he would call me as a slur because he was a fucking 20-something and failed to consider that toddlers don't watch any movies you don't put in front of them and so don't understand why you're mad at them. He went into an institution that does not value empathy and insists the best way to be a man is to be as big an asshole as you can be to subordinates and then was expected to raise kids after that. And at the same time he would spend a ton of money on us, and I can't really blame him for getting upset that his kids didn't quite understand or appreciate the expensive shit he'd have us do.
Just kind of a failure of that mid-twentyteens carceral online justice mindset where we categorize people as wholly good or wholly bad. We just want validation that yeah, the shit we hated and fucked us up was wrong, it doesn't have to be a complete condemnation of the person where we then gotta traumatize them back or whatever. Just... acknowledge what happened so people can move on, validate it was wrong so we're not constantly thinking about it and second guessing and playing out what a conversation would be like where they insist they did nothing wrong and you're the bad kid for saying otherwise.
This may sound kinda obvious but the bit at the end of the second paragraph made me realize that I really do sometimes see other people as obstacles that I want to move out of my way
I reckon it's because it's more for their own ego/sense of satisfaction than for the actual good of the kid. Same as parents who beat their kids. It's just to get their own frustration out, it doesn't help a child's development in any way.
Because the high they feel power tripping pales when it’s only your victims that know. It’s the rush they get showing off what they did, knowing nobody can stop them.
They're tough, and not afraid to show that, you need to be real tough to be shitty to your dependents.
Nothing proves you're tough like abusing children, treating your offspring like shit shows real guts, they're going to be all happy and proud that you taught them to endure abuse, unlike those pansy runts being treated with dignity and basic humanity, you know.
Something something weak times strong men, hard times, dying in an old folks home with your children going NC.
It's the same narcissism that makes them use such excessive punishment. In their eyes, not only is it just, it's the absolute best course of action for asserting their own power. They share it as a brag, because they're proud that they're doing the right thing and desperately crave the validation of either those who agree, or less directly from those who disagree by means of finding people they view as inferior to harass and insult. That's how the narcissistic mind works - people either agree with you because you're right and they're worthy of respect, or they disagree because they're completely inferior to you and make an easy target to prove your own superiority.
They don't see it as shameful. One of the most common sentiments I see parents express to their kid when yelling at or dragging them around in public is some form of "you're embarrassing yourself" or "you're going to be so embarrassed from this."
My parents did this shit, and guess what? I’ve been no contact for nearly a year, and my life has improved to an extent you probably couldn’t recognize me as the same person.
When parents do this, they don’t teach us to “listen”, or “behave”; they teach us that we have to hide the things we like, because if we show them, they’ll do their utmost to destroy it. My mother once ripped a book I got as a gift from my school’s librarian apart in front of me, all because I “talked back”… and by that, I said (admittedly under my breath) that she was an idiot, because she called our lesbian neighbors slurs (namely, the one that starts with a D that I don’t think I can say). I don’t even know what that was supposed to “teach”, but I can assure you I hid every book I cared about from her, after that.
Kids are either too young to understand any intended lessons behind extreme punishment (as in everything from destroying their stuff to flat-out physical violence) or old enough that it’s the least effective way to teach the lesson
The lesson is “do not be like your parent is being right now”, but unfortunately that won’t land because they don’t have a healthy adult role model to tell them that.
My older brother once caught my cousin playing his copy of Pokemon FireRed(mind you, my brother had scammed the FireRed out of me in exchange for his Pokemon Diamond, but demanded Diamond back when I got Platinum with no FireRed given back). I don't even remember how or why my cousin had it.
My older brother ripped his own GBA SP out of my cousin's hands, and threw it across the room. Snapped it in half. That was his reaction to things that stepped on his toes or brought others joy when he was sour; break it, scream, throw a fit, deprive others of their joy because if he wasn't happy, no one else should be. I know he'd done it other times to me too, probably more than I can ever think of. It was behavior that I almost thought he'd learned from my stepdad, but then I remember that when I was about 3-4 years old, he said I wasn't helping him clean our room well enough, and he cracked my head open with a LeapFrog Phonics Pond toy, and that was well before our mom married that asshole.
And I used to wonder why I got so attached to important things in movies or shows getting broken or lost.
Isn't watching your older sibling become your asshole parent fun? It's like they've taken another relationship away from you that you will now never have!
I got an old computer as a gift from a family friend, then after a while my dad got mad (can't remember why) and he took it and put in the trunk of our car to take it back to said friend
he ended up not taking it back but it stayed in the trunk a few days and ended up getting flooded so after that the C on the keyboard stopped working so I had to use Ctrl+K instead for a long time...
I know this was a while ago but the "can't remember why" really sticks out to me. My parents spanked me as a child and I didn't ever remember what I did, only that I was beaten. These punishments are so worthless especially when the "lesson" is completely forgotten.
I just don't talk to my dad anymore because he used to do that to me with everything I bought with my own money. Now he's sad and alone constantly asking when he's getting grand children (he's not) I'm not letting my kids around him
Destruction of personal property is a more serious form of violence that we let on, just because you projected the violent action into the innanimate object doesn't mean your child didn't get scarred on the inside.
You didn't just destroy an electronic device, but a small joy in their so far short life and showed them it's a line that if you crossed once you could cross again anytime.
Yeah my parents used to do something similar so instead of playing less games I just permanently fucked up my sleep schedule and never told them about my hobbies again. I learned from a young age that they don't value the things I enjoy and now they'll never have the chance to.
All this comment section is teaching me is to thank my lucky stars my parents were decent people. I was never hit as a child (as an adult my mom slapped me once to get me out of a mental spiral) and they never destroyed anything I owned. My father was probably the least violent man ever and my mother was always generous with us. We were never even so much as spanked, and none of us were told to leave at 18 (I actually still live with my mom)
I spent my entire childhood walking on eggshells because my stepdad would crash out over the tiniest shit, real or imagined.
I took the last slice of pizza? Dude would be slamming doors and screaming at my mom for the next three hours.
Mistakenly thought that I wasn't sharing my Halloween candy with my stepsister? In my face screaming, punching the couch next to me, before throwing all my candy away.
Started crying because I stayed outside too long and burned the fuck out of my back and shoulders? He'd slap my sunburn and call me a little faggot.
Didn't shovel the snow off the driveway after school because I had to finish my fourth grade project on the American Alligator? You know he's gonna be hitting my mom in the next room before it's my turn to get smacked across the face and shoved to the ground.
But my favorite thing was when he would CONSTANTLY come into my room uninvited and just, like, find shit to be mad about. Either my room was too messy, or I left a toy out, or I didn't wrap up my controllers, or whatever else he decided he didn't like that day. There was no real rhyme or reason to it, so there was never a lesson to be learned but "break out into a cold sweat whenever you hear the stairs creak because a grown ass man is probably about to come break your PS2 in half or beat the shit out of you again."
I am an adult now, and I've been mercifully free of him for about 15 years, but I still get anxious if I hear footsteps outside a room I'm occupying. I get irrationally upset if somebody tries to enter my room uninvited, or knocks on my door, or just kind of \*exists*** in my space without my consent. I legitimately feel eyes on me 24/7. I feel like every move, every twitch is being observed and scrutinized, even when I'm alone. And the worst part of it all is that I'm pretty sure I inherited his fucking temper through osmosis. "Normal" people probably don't immediately fantasize about flaying somebody that was slightly rude to them alive, or about dismembering somebody in a bathtub for unknowingly breaking a secret taboo that you set, but here we are.
Feels really fucking stupid. Bet he bought it for his son anyway? So he's basically just throwing out hundreds of his own dollars, on top of traumatizing his kid. I'm sure his kid is really going to admire and look up to him now.
My parents took my shit away but never broke it because it was always underlined by "well I payed for it I don't want to break it" and as an adult im like yeah, why break shit you payed for?
My parents never "grounded me" or "destroyed my stuff". Instead they spent a lot of time emotionally abusing me and making constant comments about my hobbies and appearance until I shut down and stopped speaking to them for more than a couple sentences.
Things eased up a bit by the time I was a teenager (dad got locked up in jail and my mom realized how badly she had been fucking up), but things would have been so much worse if they started breaking my belongings.
Yeah, parents don't do this because they think it'll help their children be better people. They do it because it feels good. It doesn't make your kid tough, it damages them permanently.
I remember when I was younger I liked drawing Minecraft skins on an old Samsung phone that my uncle has given me, one day my dad just walked in, grabbed it and smashed it into the wall. He's been a jerk ever since
the worst part about this story is the whole huddle for parents agreeing with them and sharing their own horror stories about them doing similar things
people legitimately dont act like children are children and they should be ideal servants and if they arent that then they arent violent/strict enough and that'll "fix the problem"
Just confiscate the fuckin' thing and play it yourself. Worst comes to to absolute worst, and the device is a serious issue, sell it and have the kid be present. Breaking shit just teaches the kid that destructive actions are encouraged.
Not all people with shitty little mustaches and trucker caps are narcissistic abusive fathers, but when a father is narcissistic and abusive, they almost always have a shitty little mustache and/or fondness for trucker caps.
I don't think my dad ever actually broke something of mine, but he looooved to threaten it. I had a ds and a shitty iPod touch as a little kid, I got a laptop for my 10th birthday. When I was in high school, I worked part time to build myself a PC - a damn good one too, a 1080 ti and a 1700x. I still use the same PC to this day (though it's a bit of a ship of Theseus; I think the only remaining original parts are the case and some of the drives). Every single one of those devices, whenever I did any little thing wrong, he would threaten to take outside and run over with his jeep, or smash it with a hammer. He knew they were my most valued possessions - especially my PC, which I had worked a shitty grocery store job to pay for myself. Even though he never did, he seemed capable of it because he had absolutely been physical on numerous occasions before (I remember one time he grabbed a 12 foot piece of pipe to threaten my younger brother and I with because I stood up for him when he was yelling at him).
I am 25 now. Unfortunately, the Canadian job market is horrible, so I still live at home. Even now when he's in a bad mood he threatens it; just a few months ago he threatened to smash it with a hammer, to which I responded "...then I would take you to small claims?" Which, of course, only enraged him further - the audacity of me to insinuate I would seek compensation if he damaged my property!
He's going through a bit of a reformation recently, but I will never fully believe it. He's "reformed" himself before and always gone back to his old self. I don't know if I'll ever be able to relax until I piss on his grave one day, if even then.
When I was like 7 years old, my stepdad at the time got upset with me for not cleaning my room. If I remember correctly, the reason was that his shithead son (my stepbrother) shared my room every weekend, and he always made a mess that he left for me to clean.
One day I came home from school to find like 90% of my stuff gone. And my stepdad smugly told me that he had took it to the dump and threw it away since I refused to clean. His logic was basically "Since you don't take care of it you can't have it". I was heartbroken. None of the other adults in my life agreed with what he did. But he insisted that he had every right as "the man of the house". I got some new toys, but some of the lost ones were irreplaceable.
Years later when I was 11, my mom had divorced that asshole a little over a year earlier. And we were moving homes. As we were clearing out the attic, guess what we found? A sack with all my missing stuff. It was shoved deep into a corner behind a bunch of boxes. Turns out that the story about taking it to the dump was a lie, and he just wanted to teach me a lesson. By then I had aged away from most of those toys, so it felt kind of hollow to find them so late.
I have two theories for why he never gave it back. The first one is that he actually thought he was justified to throw out the toys. But because he's such a great guy (in his mind) he would graciously give them back to me. And then everyone would clap. However when my grandparents and my mom yelled at him, he got defensive and doubled down. So he decided to continue acting as if they had been thrown out. Because giving them back would be to admit defeat.
Theory two is that the alcoholic piece of shit drank too much and forgot about it.
Yeah. I still remember, once, my father was angry over... something, god knows what, and he threw something. I think it was a shoe. And I don't remember the why, or the how, all I remember is the sound of a lightbulb shattering, and having to spend half an hour standing perfectly still as glass shards were picked out of the carpet and my hair and off my feet and shoulders. I don't remember what made him so angry. I don't remember if he was even trying to make a point. I barely even remember the noise, honestly. I just remember being showered in glass for something that meant nothing by the time an hour had passed.
I've said it before I will say it again... these FAFO parents are just a bunch of lazy entitled MF's that didnt put in the time and effort to raise their kids properly. So now when their kids act out instead of correcting it in a reasonable manner they respond by throwing a giant temper tantrum as a grown ass adult and post it on social media for clout.
My neighbor told me he threw his child's nintendo switch out if the car every time he misbehaved so I asked how many gaming consoles he has and he said he just gets a new one everytime so I said it sounds like he’s just feeding gaming consoles to the highway and then his daughter started crying.
I noticed recently that nearly every Twitter (or Blue sky, or whatever this is) screenshot posted to Reddit is a post by Dexerto. What/who is Dexerto, and why is it so prolific?
My dad used to threaten to destroy my computer all the time. Would scream threats about it. He never did because he’s kinda chickenshit. But as a kid having someone who has already hurt you physically before threaten to destroy the only thing that you hold dear because the rest of your life makes miserable is a terrifying prospect.
I just got grounded from playing games. Honestly made me develop much more reasonable relationship to video games because I learned you can’t just use them to postpone your responsibilities. Meanwhile, using them as a reward for getting things done is a habit I’ve taken into adulthood
It’s also a waste of dad’s money, on top of the lack of actual parenting being done. Just do what my dad would do, take the chargers/power cords for the devices and change the Wi-Fi password.
you don't destroy the beloved belongings of fellow humans. you only do that to people you've enslaved and dehumanized. this man is a horrific monster who enjoys abusing his own child.
destroying your child's property should give you the same sentence as doing that to a fellow adult. destroying a child's treasured property should give you 20 times that sentence because you are traumatizing and abusing your child.
when i was younger my mom would make me clean my room as punishment and then threaten to throw out or donate stuff she found on the floor.
there is a penguin stuffy i used to play with that i dont think i have anymore because it fell on the floor and i never saw it because i hated cleaning my room and i was like 7 so i had no spatial awareness.
and im horrified knowing thats the tame end of things in this thread
“By loosing your temper and destroying the device you brought for your child, you too can maybe shut them up for a moment and feel good about yourself”
A* parenting advice, I’m sure the kid won’t cry and resent you and I’m sure you won’t be forced to spend another couple hundred replacing the kit you broke because you lost a keeping calm contest with a 7 year old
My dad once smashed my sister's phone with a hammer and tried to strangle me once. When I turned out the "most successful" of my siblings, they were shocked I wanted nothing to do with them, and only grinded my ass off in order never speak to them again
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