Sparing the Rod

 She gave me a look of deep displeasure, not very atypical of the look most members of the opposite gender gave me.

“You know you can’t do that in Germany?”, she asserted with the same authority my mother used to tell me about not messing around in her kitchen. 

“Yes I am aware”, I meekly responded, knowing well that any kind of argument about this would not end well, so it was better to close off the topic quietly and unlike the kitchen, I could not afford to get kicked out of Germany.

She was not the first to respond with such hostility to what seemed like the most natural of things in my experience. The last one who told me the same was a teacher I had met at a party. When she sounded shocked that I was ok with it and said it was not right, I (with some alcoholic courage) had retorted,

“How would you discipline them then if they do something wrong?”

“I would tell them I am very disappointed with them”.

I almost laughed.

However, that was very much the theory of my new friend to which made me realise how serious they were about this whole thing. Though really? Does telling a kid who did wrong, at an age they barely understand such things, really drill ethics into them? Would some spanking not work better? 

It would leave some trauma on the child and was abuse. That was their argument. However, I had been spanked as a kid, and so had my siblings, cousins, friends and probably almost every other Asian child in my generation. I do not feel the least trauma as a result of this, neither do most of them I might argue. In fact I might argue that at an age when most things did not make sense to me, the sight of the cane certainly did. Was it effective on my mother’s attempts to make me do my schoolwork and get good grades? Definitely not. Was it effective in making me not cheat again in my assessment papers at home? Hell yes. It had zero impact in encouraging good behavior but was pretty effective at discouraging bad ones.

Does that mean I am espousing spanking your kids? Of course not! If memory serves me right, I had seen aunts tie up cousins to window sills and beat them up with a ladle for the tiniest of things. Sometime this ladle was heated on the stove and the kid burned, which when I think about it now, makes me wonder if the perpetrator was somewhat psychotic. This is where I stand with the anti-spanking gang, because there is always a group of adults who takes it too far. However, my own mother was more or less fair when she handed me a good spanking. There was usually a clear wrong, a good thrashing and then she would come and ask me if I knew why she did it (confession under coercion some might say). Somehow, that felt like a fair process in handing out a thrashing and what I had in my mind if I were to ever have a kid myself.

Though, I do recall that at a certain period in my life, when I was performing poorly both academically and morally, I would end up getting caught by my teacher for faking my mother’s signature on my exam paper (in my defense, my mother deserved better). During the following Parent and Teachers meeting, as I stood next to my mother, the teacher read out the most detailed description of the crime (she was never that eloquent during the lessons). I knew I was done when my mother did not speak to me after that session and she drove me home quietly without saying a single word. Reaching home, she told me to go to my room and change. I fearfully awaited her arrival into my room with a cane in what seemed like the longest 10 miinutes ever.

She came in. 

There was no cane.

She held me and opened up how embarrassed she felt when the teacher said it in front of the other parents while I listened with head down. The she simply told me,

“Don’t do it again”.

That was all. 

And that was enough to make me get my shit together and turn my life around, and this time because I wanted to not let her go through that again and not because I feared her.

Do I still think caning works? I don’t know. These Germans are making me think.