If you were never spanked as a kid, consider yourself lucky. When I was growing up, my parents punished me and my brothers in ways that seem, looking back on them today, much too strict. But I'd have to say the way my parents raised us wasn't all that wrong, because we were relatively well-behaved kids, and we all turned out to be model citizens. We're a close family nowadays, and just the other day at a family gathering we were reminiscing about some of the times we got punished when we were boys. My dad brought up the time he washed my mouth out with soap when he heard me using swear words.
I was 12 at the time, and a bunch of us neighborhood kids were playing football on the neighbors' front lawn. The competition was pretty heated that day, and I had a tendency to run my mouth pretty loud when I was playing. Although I knew better than to ever swear or use bad language in the house around my parents, outside the house I liked to make full use of my vocabulary. On this day, my dad happened to be within earshot of our football game, and he heard me yelling a few choice "god_d_a_m_n_s" and "_f_u_c_k_s." Next thing I knew, I saw my dad charging over to where we were playing and yelling at me to get in our house, right then. All the other kids could tell I was in trouble, and it was pretty embarrassing to have my dad pulling me by my ear into our house, in front of everybody like that.
My dad marched me straight into the bathroom, yelling at me the whole time about the language he had heard out of me. He said when he was a kid, he would have gotten his mouth washed out with soap--and that was exactly what he was going to do with me. He then grabbed my jaw and told me to keep my mouth open, while he took a bar of soap and began to scrub my tongue and all around the inside of my mouth. It tasted awful! After a little lecture about my swearing he let me rinse out my mouth, and then he led me to my bedroom. There he told me to bend over the footboard of my bed. Off came his belt.
If any of you ever got whipped with a belt as a kid, you know how much it hurts. Fortunately my dad never made us take down our pants or anything like that, but I can't imagine that it would have stung any more. Due to my bawling, my dad let up on me after five or six good strokes, which in our house was getting off easy. I was told to stand in the corner of my room facing the wall and to think about my language, while my dad went downstairs to discuss with my mom how else I should be punished. I knew I was going to get "grounded" for a while as well.
I stood there with my rear end stinging and the awful taste of that soap beginning to burn my tongue and mouth. I kept spitting into my shirt, but nothing could get rid of that soapy taste. I stood there for a whole hour before my dad finally came back in to lecture me some more. After announcing that I was to spend the next three weeks in my room after school, with no TV, he told me to turn back around and face the wall in the corner to think some more about what I had done wrong. A minute later he was back with a bar of soap in his hand, telling me to open my mouth. In went that bar of soap again, and I was told to keep it there until my dad came back and told me I could take it out.
Well, I stood there for what had to be another hour, probably the most uncomfortable hour in my life! A few times I risked taking the soap out of my mouth, but every time I heard a sound I had to put it back again for fear my dad would come back and discover me without it in. Believe me, by that time I was promising myself to unlearn every swear word I had ever heard.
Finally, my dad returned and took the bar of soap out of my mouth. He gave me another one of those "I hope you've learned your lesson" lectures. I barely listened, since I was dying to get to the bathroom to rinse my mouth out with water. My dad evidently did not think I showed myself to be sorry enough, because the lecture did not end my punishment. Once again I was told to bend over the footboard of my bed, and once again my dad took his belt off.
All the fury that my dad had kept in reserve during the earlier whipping was unleashed that second time around. Again and again that belt came down across my little butt, despite the fact that I was yelling and crying, promising never to swear ever again. After that whipping was over, I was the sorriest 12-year-old boy in the neighborhood, and I thought twice before opening my mouth during football games.