No Excuse, No Justification: Violence Has No Place in Parenting

I was born in 1992. That means I was raised by parents whose values, moral beliefs, sense of right and wrong, and ideas about proper behavior had all been shaped by the late 1950s and early 1960s. Is that detail important? From my perspective, absolutely. My parents grew up believing that, depending on the situation, physical or verbal violence was an acceptable way to discipline their children.

Growing up also meant living with two very different versions of my parents. My father was loving, kind, hardworking, and remarkably patient, but he had also been raised believing that a real man wasn't supposed to express his emotions. In his mind, a man's only responsibility was to provide for his family and earn a living. Everything else belonged to women or, as he used to say, to homosexuals. The same man who could be incredibly gentle also had a deeply authoritarian and intimidating side.

My mother was different. My grandmother had raised her to believe that a woman's purpose in life was to become a wife and a mother. According to her, women who couldn't give their husbands children weren't truly complete and would never be fully loved. As a little girl, those conflicting views of the world were simply the reality I grew up with.

If I saw my older brother cry more than four times throughout our entire childhood, that would already be an exaggeration. My father was especially hard on him. He used to tell him, "If I ever catch you crying again, I'll give you a real reason to cry." Eventually, my brother became very much like him. He rarely showed emotion. His face was almost always expressionless. The sweet, curious, creative little boy I once knew slowly turned into a distant adult whose anger poisoned every romantic relationship he ever had.

No one ever held him accountable. No one ever challenged his behavior. To my mother, he was always God's miracle. I suppose it was her way of compensating for something else. She was too afraid to stand up to my father or defend her own son from the cold, cruel, and often violent way he treated him. Instead, she chose another path. She gave my brother unconditional approval and excused almost everything he did, creating a sense of impunity that would shape the way he viewed women for the rest of his life.

As for me, I had to endure my mother's own form of cruelty. She was emotionally distant, demanding, and relentless. She was never affectionate, attentive, or the kind of mother I could confide in. If I failed to do exactly what she expected of me, the emotional consequences were severe. Public humiliation, insults, and constant verbal abuse became part of my childhood. Looking back, that is the world I grew up in. And that is precisely why I want to tell every parent reading this that no child deserves to grow up believing love and fear belong together.

Sadly, I know I wasn't the only child who lived through something like this. Breaking that cycle has been the greatest achievement of my life, second only to bringing my own daughter into this world. I would rather die than put her through anything even remotely similar to what my brother and I experienced. Ironically, now that my parents are grandparents to my daughter and my nieces, they seem to have erased those years from their memories. They live in quiet denial, as though refusing to acknowledge the past somehow makes the damage disappear. Perhaps guilt is easier to carry when it is never spoken aloud. That is their choice.

As for me, I have made mine. Never use violence to raise your children. Never.