Back then, my dad usually had this tiny, long cane he usually put on top of his wardrobe. All of us in this house knew exactly where he placed it. And we don't usually go near it. Just feeling that the cane is over there alone is enough for us to quietly change whatever plan we might be planning to do.
He usually uses it sometimes, and he has used it on me like once or twice; I can't clearly recall. And on others too. But it was what came after that stayed with me, not even the pain from the cane. Because he usually sits down while I am on my knees, he carefully looks at me and gives a detailed explanation of what I did and why it mattered. The beating was just like a punctuation mark, like a comma, while the correction was not only physical. But his conversations, that is actual sentence.
And for a while now, I have been thinking about this, not from the theory aspect. But from looking at what is actually happening around me. A lot of children whose parents never corrected them in any way, I am not even talking about using a cane on them. They were never spoken to to make them obey a clear boundary or something. Those types of children always struggle for long in ways that it might eventually take years to understand. I am not saying all of them, but enough to make one think carefully.
I want to believe that the generation of parents who raised us in this country were also raised by people or parents who explained nothing. Someone did something wrong, and something hurt. I feel that was the whole lesson. No long talk, no context. Just the consequences. And to be honest, a lot of these people still carry damage from them till today. Because the fear was real. And the shame that came with it was also genuine.
But I feel we have been misinterpreting two things recently. There are always two versions of corporal punishment going on inside many homes of a lot of people in this country. But we have confused two separate things. There is always this real discipline given by parents who are trying to correct and put their children on the right path. And we have the other one that I see as violence from an adult who is no longer in control of their emotions. And the young ones can easily tell the difference even though they might not have the correct words for it.
Back then, my parents always explained the reason to me, which I always saw too. But for a lot of people, the cane didn't traumatize them. It was the rage behind it, the long hours of silence with no genuine explanation, and the unpredictability that also did.
The Bible even says they should be corrected. But not in a hard or soft way. What children need is presence, consistency, and that detailed certainty that when someone corrected them, it came from a place of love, from someone who actually sees them. Not from a place of rage. And this is my whole point, which some parents have thrown away.
Thank you for reading.
Images created by Gemini AI
