Gone are the days when we employed the liberal use of spanking and, dare I say, “whippings” as a form of disciplining our children. Some young courageous parents are still holding the line. And I say more power to them. But in today’s permissive society, those who choose to discipline effectively must do so with greater caution.
When I was a boy, if you got a whipping at school, you could expect another one when you got home. And whoever heard of a “time out?” I remember a few times when my father said “time’s up!”
When it comes to disciplining a child, my philosophy finds its foundation in two verses found in the book of Proverbs from the Bible. “Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of correction will drive it far from him.” Proverbs 22:15
“Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you punish him with a rod he will not die.” Proverbs 23:13
Show me all the research that you want to dig up that suggests that corporal punishment is detrimental to a child’s mental and emotional development, and I’ll show you a society that is coming apart at the seams.
I guess you could say I come from a long line of disciplinarians and those who were disciplined.
My grandfather, Will Herod Brim was a character in his own right. As a school boy he was always getting into trouble. His most famous prank involved the Riddleton school house. One winter’s day he climbed up on the roof and stuffed the chimney with wet burlap sacks. Needless to say, that smoked everyone out of the building.
One school year, he received a whipping every single day from the principal, Mr. Huffines. I say every single day; actually, there was one day that he was not whipped.
He was halfway through his two-mile walk home after school when he realized that he had missed his whipping that day. He walked all the way back to school and found the principal and said, “Mr. Huff, did you forget something?”
“What did I forget, Herod?” Mr. Huff asked. The boy who would one day be my grandfather said, “You didn’t whip me today!”
“Well, come here!” barked the principle. Mr. Huff then proceeded to give him “the whipping of my life.” He later admitted that the next time he missed a whipping he “kept his mouth shut and went on home.”
After my grandfather was married, and in his thirties, he came to the house early one morning from working with his father. His face was bloody, all the skin was missing from the bridge of his nose, and one eye was swelling shut. My grandmother, taken back by the sight, exclaimed, “What happened to you?”
“I sassed Pappy, and he hit me with a wagon standard,” he replied
I’ve seen a few wagon standards in my time. Most were rough-hewn 2x4’s made from heavy timber. I wouldn’t want to be hit with one. My great-grandfather was a little man, but evidently, he didn’t “take any lip.”
Herod Brim’s only daughter, my mother, preferred a peach tree limb as her favorite instrument of discipline. When my brothers, my sister and I were growing up my mother came close to killing two peach trees in our yard because of her high demand for limbs. Sometimes she added insult to injury by sending the offender to get the limb which she would use. If we came back with one too small, she would send us back for a bigger one.
My brother Dewey was known for laughing in the face of a whipping. As the old folks might say, “a whipping never did him any good.” On a sunny afternoon when he was a small boy, he was using a stick to hit the clean bed sheets that my mother had just hung out on the clothesline. She told him to stop it because he was getting dirt on her clean sheets. He refused, so my mother proceeded to spank him with her hand. She grabbed him by the right hand and began to dust his bottom with her left hand. As she did, he began to run in a circle, laughing as he ran. The more she spanked, the faster he ran. My mother began to get dizzy. So, she stopped and said, “Ok, Mister, I’ll fix you.”
With that said, she backed Dewey up to a small locust tree. Then she took a wet, cloth diaper, wrapped it around his waist like a belt and tied him to the tree. As she left him to go in the house for another basket of clothes, she said, “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” He cried like a baby. As someone once said, “There are more ways to skin a cat than to choke him on butter.”
When she returned, Dewey promised to never hit her clean sheets again.
I think he would rather have been hit with a wagon standard.
Copyright 2025 by Jack McCall
