Humiliation as parenting

After posting Thoughts on spanking and respect, I wanted to add to the greater subject of humiliation that I think is key to what's wrong with spanking and how too many people who give up or seriously restrict spanking their children.

In Pop, RIP, I alluded to issues in my relationship with father, things I didn't think my eulogy for him was an appropriate time or place to go into any sort of details about, but were a big enough part of our relationship and my life that I couldn't leave unreferenced.

My father was abused as a child.  I believe that is the way he would - and did - describe it, although certainly he was prone to downplay the importance and impact of it, when confronted directly about it.  That's not only a common thing among abuse victims, but it certainly matched his way of dealing with issues in general, whether because of that or not.

I was only spanked a small number of times, and, as far as I recall, they were all "by the book", not in anger, as a consequence for an action I was warned would lead to that, etc.  I remember all of those details quite well.  I don't, on the other hand, remember my infractions one bit, which could hint at how effective the lesson was.

My father was a big one for humiliation, though.  Humiliation is the key lesson of spanking, probably the only lesson of, truth be told.

Obviously, humiliation can be achieved through any number of means, though.

My father liked to stay on a lecture about something long, long after it was serving a point.  He would twist around and demand answers for obviously rhetorical questions, then make a point of not wanting an answer for questions that would seem necessary to answer and calling it interrupting.  He would dismiss discussion harshly.

I don't remember the details well, only the humiliation, which again speaks to the effectiveness of the lesson, I think.

They would go on for far too long and eventually, my mother, sensing the humiliation and the lack of any useful purpose would try to cut him short, which would just shift the humiliation over to her, which I'm not sure I preferred, except that I felt in some way protected.

There were a number of things that I think damaged our relationship beyond repair, but I think I can point to the point of no return.  When I was an adult and we were trying to mend our relationship, or something of that nature, we were out having beers, playing pool and such, he led the conversation to that topic.

I can guarantee that I didn't.  My part, however pathetic, of the mending fences was to avoid subjects like that that at all costs.

He ended up going on an unsolicited and unnecessary rant again criticizing my mother for interceding in these.

Whatever of my desire to build our relationship or strengthen it or even really to maintain it died at that moment.  He maintained that his right to humiliate me was the foremost point of order.

Or relationship stumbled along awkwardly and, at best, occasionally, for a while after that.  My memories of whatever happened after includes many more things that made the relationship worse than things that made them better.

The tendency to humiliate as a tool of "winning" an argument lives on with me.  I know I've done it in all of my relationships.  I think I've done better with each one, but I know I'm better with Rae than I've ever been before in the past, but it's there, and I'm genuinely terrified of doing it to Conan.

I hope I never do that at all.  It's destructive.  There's no lesson in it, whether it's physical or emotional. I can say that don't have any respect for the people who avoid humiliation through spanking but have no qualms with it when it's done through other means, including - perhaps especially - verbally.

I know for sure that if I ever fail myself and do that to her, I won't defend it to her when she's an adult.  I wouldn't dare.

I know better.

Thoughts on spanking and respect

The mother-in-law - Rae's former stepmother, who remains the major maternal figure in her life, for a variety of reasons - recently called her, offended that they'd posted "so many" anti-spanking memes or articles on her Facebook.

As far as we could tell, that was two of them, but that's us being pedantic.

She thought it reflected badly on her, which she found unfair as she'd never spanked Rae.  This is another demonstration of her world view that everything is about her.  Suffice to say, while the stories are not mine to tell, she did do things I consider worse than spanking - far, far worse, in fact - but it's worth crediting her for being right about that issue.

I have no patience with her, but that's my failing.  Not that she deserves a bit of my patience, but Rae deserves a lot more than I give too much of the time.

The point that the mother-in-law is missing is how often parents of a toddler has pro-spanking messages fed to them.  On social media or in the world.

I read Spanking Your Children is Hitting Your Children by Chuck Wendig to Rae today, a couple of days later. It's a very good article and my feelings on the issue match the ones expressed there, so I won't go into more detail than to highly recommend it.  I also read Spanking is Hitting, Part Two, which gives a more tempered argument that is also important to make.

In Honor thy father and thy mother, I discussed the question of people bending to nearly any length to justify their parents actions.  I think the dialog on corporal punishment largely comes to a standstill because of this one single, stupid problem.

Look at the dumb fucking meme that inspired the original Chuck Wendig post:

The entire thing is predicated on the notion of the person's parents being "right".

I think the implicit contempt expressed in the tone suggests more than a little that their psychological self-evaluation has failed on a massive scale.  Of course, the average person has little concept of what respect is.  It's a modestly complicated concept and most people were trained as children that respecting people was demonstrated by obeying them, which isn't a very good beginning to understanding it.

"Respect for Others" is taught by example.  Period.  There is no other way.

Spanking is not a very good way to demonstrate respect.  In fact, it actively demonstrates the opposite.  It's an act of profound disrespect.

Saying a person can't learn without violence being inflicted upon them is perhaps the ultimate in contemptuous statements.  It's certainly arguable in cases of Nazi Germany and rapists that without violence - or, at least, the threat of violence - one might not be able to stop them from their atrocious actions.  It happens I hold my child in much greater esteem than Nazis and rapists.

I don't remember either way if my parents did this to me, but I've always hated, even as a kid, watching people trying to teach their kids manners through humiliation.  "Hold on, what do you say?"

What a crock.  If you're polite and respectful to the people around you, your child will most likely grow up to be polite and respectful to the people around them.  That humiliation game is just intended to bolster your reputation as someone teaching their kids "manners".

But let's circle back to the world in which there's explicit and implicit messages pushing you to spank, outside of dumb as fuck Facebook memes.

Conan recently took up screaming.  Not screaming in pain or excitement.  Mostly randomly, although frequently it would seem in annoyance, as he'd often follow-up by saying "Annoying."

He'd do this in various public places, but especially on the bus.  I speculate he was annoyed about being in transit and a bit bored with the wait, but he wasn't able to communicate the more complicated point unfortunately.

Rae and I would do our best to gently shush him or tell him to stop in a more commanding tone.  Neither of them got us too far in those moments.

But at the worst it was intermittent, even when it was fairly often.

You could see people stare and glare and mutter that we should obviously be doing something more.  Most likely not everyone thought we should strike him, but you could tell we should be do something more and more aggressive to quell it.

I'm not sure what that would based on.  My experience, although admittedly anecdotal, in witnessing people who tried to physically punish or get into a screaming war with a toddler over making too much noise is that 100% of those escalate into something worse than intermittent screaming.

Now, he seems to be getting over that.  Not completely.  But largely.

And so goes life.

I promise, as soon as I stop seeing people arguing that I should spank my kid, I'll stop talking about why I'm not going to do that.

On the other hand, if you present an argument that isn't awful, I might treat it with respect.  As we can see above, that's not very likely.

And just to  hammer it home, here's Why Shouldn’t You Spank Your Kids? Here’s 9 Reasons.

Honor thy father and thy mother

In my previous post, Bullying, I made a reference to how our parents treated us potentially being a bigger obstacle to our recognizing the systematic problems with compulsory school than how we treat our children.

I confess I have no real data to back that one up, other than anecdotal, but I've come to strongly feel that way.

It's unceasingly amazing to me the lengths people go not only to defend their parents actions but to normalize them.

At various points I've heard dozens, if not hundreds, of people use some form of "My parents did ______ when I was a kid, and I turned out ok."

The near universal truth of those is that, to the outside observer, those people are not "ok" by any of the usual standards on would expect to use to assess "ok-ness".

That applies to drinking and drug use, including while pregnant or breastfeeding, as well as exceptional punishments and probably any number of other things that aren't necessarily looked kindly upon.  These now grown people will not only try not only to defend what their parents did, but endorse it, in many cases.

I think it's one of the major barriers we have to ending corporal punishment in this country.  Again, I've anecdotally found many people who don't "believe in spanking", don't spank their own kids, but can't quite bring themselves to condemn it generally or for others, and I strongly suspect that's involved.

I find myself similarly inclined, in fact, and I was only very rarely spanked as a child and I believe my parents found themselves coming to realize the futility of it as a parenting tool, at the least, so, if anything, I have every reason to agree with the conclusions came to.

And I do really.  I certainly have not, do not and will not spank Conan, but I struggle with condemning it.  If for no other reason than the fact that the vast majority of people spanking their kids mean well and believe it's the best thing and that it in some way hurts them more than their children, as the saying goes.

We grow up watching our parents and processing what they do as "the things people do".  Their behavior, good and bad, is the very definition of how people behave.  It becomes so ingrained into who we are, that it becomes difficult to fully process them, even when we see them...  in fact, even when they are extraordinarily obvious.

I've long believed you can explain the virulence of the rage and hatred you can find in Jim Crow era southerners, in particular.

I think that for a reasonable person, once a separation takes place, it becomes impossible to find a moral justification for slavery that makes any sense at all.  Sure, we can intellectually explain the origins, the tradition and the needs that led to and fueled it, but if you're really thinking about the ins and outs of owning and using human beings, I can't make it make sense.  It's so horrifying to me, I get nauseated just trying to think about it.

I suspect being a child and having the evidence of that utter inhumanity everywhere and your parents and grandparents and everyone around were responsible.  The only possible way to process that would be to create justifying scenario, in this case it would have been to blame the slaves themselves for the unfathomable violence inflicted upon them.

That's the depth to which the vast majority of people will go to justify and normalize the actions of our parents.

It's something that worth remembering when we're repeating the things our parents do as well as the things we do in life, especially around our kids.  I know I do.

T.V. is not the devil.

Well this is actually Rae Sarver posting this but I am not as internet savvy as my wonderful husband. There are several parenting groups that I follow on Facebook that seem to (at least a large majority) follow the belief that T.V. should not only never be turned on around a child but not even used for an adult. I struggled with this for most of my life. When Neil and I met I had a T.V. in the living room but only because that was my roommate's. I did not really watch T.V. Neil is a HUGE movie fan and likes to watch them frequently. I must say since we have had our child he has decreased his movie watching significantly.

The T.V. is on now as I write. I turned it on to play "Blue's Clues" while Conan ate a late breakfast. Conan wakes up at about 11 and I made her oatmeal and cereal and milk but she likes to graze. She doesn't sit and watch it but she does shake her booty to the songs and answer back when they call out.

As far as myself? I may watch a show when she naps but that is about it. On rainy days I have been known to put on a show while he sat in her bedroom and played. She is very independent. This may surprise those people in my life that have warned me of the dangers of co-sleeping and extended breastfeeding and baby wearing as tools to insure a clingy child.

We pretty much go with the flow in this house. She doesn't have a set in stone bedtime yet she goes to sleep between 10:30pm-11:30 pm. Thats when I gets home from my part time job.

When I am at work, Neil may watch something while Conan plays but he never ignores Conan to do so. Conan seems to have little to no interest in T.V. and we have not kept it from her. I think that if you make T.V. a huge forbidden fruit that causes problems when she gets older and gorges herself (so to speak) on T.V.

So ya- T.V. is not the devil.

The other F word

Rae and I watched The Other F Word by Andrea Blaugrund Nevins last night. In fact, we both watched the trailer and rushed home and paid to watch it streaming instead of waiting for a copy to be available from the library.

I considered writing this as a review over at my personal blog, The Bleeding Tree, especially since Rae hasn't taken an opportunity to say anything here yet. but so little of what I want to say is really as much about reviewing it as much as discussing what I wanted from it and what I got.  I suppose that could be a valid review, except it's as a non-conformist/patent that I'm specifically coming to this.

First of all, as a viewer, I enjoyed it a lot.  Seeing Flea wax poetic about how fatherhood has improved his life.  Art Alexakis of Everclear comparing his role as a father to his own fathers failings. Duane Peters of U.S. Bombs discussing the death of his son, Chess.  These are great bits of human drama that are wonderful that Nevins was able to have captured, and I was even weepier than I would have been before becoming a father myself.

I think somewhere I wanted another movie out of it, and maybe that's another example of what I'm working to start here.

The movie focuses on Jim Lindberg of Pennywise, becaue his book Punk Rock Dad was the inspiration for the movie itself, but he's one of the most boring of the dad's frankly.  Perhaps because his conflicts seem much less derived from being a punk rocker and much more from being the lead singer of a rock band of a specific spot on the success ladder.

I was much more interested in Fat Mike of NOFX and Lars Frederiksen of Rancid. They seemed like guys who were struggling with the real questions of what punk rock meant to them and how it affected their role as a parent in a deeper way than the concern over how their lyrics might sound to other members of the PTA.

I don't mean to sound dismissive of Lindberg.  His struggle as the lead singer of a moderate size rock act and where he wants to go with his future in that and how it affects his ability to spend the quality time with his kids is obviously important to him and is actually a compelling story in itself.

On the other hand, everyone was a kid who thought the rules were unfair and for most of us, some form of music and the community and expression of that was how we moved from childhood petulance to forming our own new adult opinions.  For those of us who developed complex views that reinforce the beliefs we had as children that the rules were for crap and the ways they were enforced were even worse, we come to a crossroads with being a parent.

It's fucking easy to say "You did a shit job!"

It's much harder to figure out how to do a good job, or at least a better job.

I'm interested in how they, and others, deal with that. Obviously raising a dick is not kind of solution, and that's what the in-laws and whatever other outside messengers are constantly reinforcing will happen if you don't repeat the same lessons as everyone that came before...  the systems that thankfully managed to, of course, raise only saints, so why would we ever attempt to do better, right?

What does that involve?

How do you raise a kid to be the best, happiest most fulfilled version possible of themselves?  How do you avoid the mistakes of the past?  And how were the mistakes of the past defined by the needs of the past?  How many of those needs are now obsolete?

There's a lot of questions for those of us who want to fight our way into the world of the future.  Maybe the future is here and we need to decide what we really want made of it and our children are our opportunity.

Suffice it to say, that's a subject that I have a lot more to say about in upcoming posts.

For now, I'll just say I wish Nevins had found more of it for the movie.  I think that's what the trailer more or less promises, which suggests that it was what seemed the most interesting hook.

She wrote an article, What Punk Taught Me as a Parent, that I feel like says more about those most basic questions than the movie does. Perhaps there's a sequel in there somewhere. Hell, maybe it's sitting right in the outtakes. What do I know?

Motörhead Mama/Plasmatics Papa

As we suggested in our introduction, Introducing the folks, music played a big part in our thought process in naming this blog.

I noticed, in searching for alternative parenting discussion that veered away from the expected hippie-dippie path, that most alternative parenting discussions find themselves in seem to identify as "punk", to one extent or another.

Before I step too far away from the point, by the way, may I note that while I am, at this point, as guilty as anyone of using hippie as a pejorative, I think a parenting plan that uses the kinds of philosophy Abbie Hoffman and others might have advocated, is very much in line with what I am interested in pursuing. It just seems the people who carry on that image are so fucking precious. They might as well be a bunch of boring religious conservative frankly.

And, for a whole number of reasons, but starting with the fact that Heavy Metal Homesteader played such a role in forming the idea that we need to create a discussion of parenting from our own version of the debate, I'd like to find more parenting discussions that identify as "heavy metal", but so far I haven't had much luck.

Not to mention that I started my days of the teenage version of rebellion, that self-conscious kind of rebellion, with heavy metal. I'm quite sure my basic nature was always rebellious. I can't recall a time my thought-process didn't include a strong inclination to question the hell out of everything.


Perhaps this would be as good a time as any to note that both of us are very eclectic in what music we listen to. We both listen to classical and I have recently expanded the realm of instrumental music that Rae listens to to include movie scores. We both like country, to one degree or another, although Kim is only recently coming out of that closet. We both like hip hop, but I'm much more stuck in my time - being somewhere in the early-to-mid-'90s. I think Brian Wilson is among the world's musical giants. Rae loves Lady Gaga.

And, of course, we both think Alice Cooper is the bee's knees!

Limiting you musical appreciation is just one more way to limit your brain.

But the real problem with identifying this blog by musical style is finding that spot where those two ideas meet.

Motörhead lives there. The Plasmatics hit it at their peak.

It's like the best of both worlds coming together.

Perhaps the word just becomes "headbanging", although that has become too closely associated and branded as "metal", I suspect.

Or perhaps, we come full circle to The MC5 and The Stooges and the same kind of Yippie approach to non-conformity that grew up from the hippie ideas.


As such, Rae's idea of choosing the reference to Mama Weer All Crazee Now seemed was perfect. It doesn't make a direct reference to a musical style, but it evokes Slade and The Runaways, another pair of bands that fit somewhere in that unusual middle zone. Heck, even Quiet Riot feels a little more somewhere in between than they were slotted at back in the day.

Our entire question in reaching out to the world has been not comfortably finding a place, so it seems obvious we should not find a comfortable style of music, one that the general public has no real name for nor any quick, simple associates to make with it. Something that continually dances around the edges of the mainstream to the extent that it has familiar touchstones, but doesn't have its own lifestyle or champions.

I think that's where we are. I'm looking forward to examining it, now that I've gotten to point in a direction and said there.

To move this toward Conan and how she lives and behaves, which I expect to be a bigger part of this blog all the time, right now he's absconded with my phone, which means Rae can't call me, so she can listen to Attention Deficit Domination by Hank 3 in the bedroom. Clearly she's doing all she can to join our world.

We went to Motörhead, as well as The Meat Puppets, Roky Erickson, The Baseball Project and Peelander-Z in the last month she was in utero, so she might just come by it naturally. I'll be back soon, and bring my wonderful spouse with me.

Introducing the folks

Hi, we're Rae and Neil.  That's Conan on the left.  She's almost 2.

Conan Daigoro Levon Sarver.

Named for Conan of Cimmeria, Ogami Daigorō from Lone Wolf and Cub and either Levon by Elton John or the great Levon Helm, depending which of us you ask and on which day. Maybe that tells you something about what kind of parents we are.

Or maybe what it tells you says something about you.

Who knows?

We're new to parenting.  Neil is 42, but is apparently a late-bloomer as that goes.  Rae is 29, so Neil is robbing the cradle.

We're playing most of this by ear, and having a great time.  The three of us have a great time together.   Our instincts seem to be taking us to all the things we want.

Conan is a joy and we find that we naturally gravitate toward decisions that serve that.  Some days are easier than others but we're working together.

But then the others come.  The others have done it better or worse yet have never done it, but are sure  they know better anyway.

And even in a "weird" town like Austin, Texas, where we're making our way, there seems too often to be a dichotomy that we don't find out way into.  We're not hippie enough to join all the granola meetings and be comfortable, but definitely too far out to join the local daycare group.

We're working to be healthier, but we like pizza and cake.

We're trying to be natural, but we're on a budget.

We're co-sleeping and extended breastfeeding.  We're planning to homeschool.

However looking through a lot of Facebook pages on the subject led Neil to throw up his hands and wish there was something like Heavy Metal Homesteader about parenting.  We decided we should just jump in and fill the void for ourselves.

Punk Rock Parents is taken. So is The Kids Are Alright.

Neil suggested "Says Fucking Who?" It has a certain punk rock quality, a little childhood petulance, while also speaking to the most basic question regarding all the advice and counsel a person has foisted upon them as a new parent. So many bits of wisdom are passed along, so just dismal. Others leave you curious, begging the question... "Says fucking who?", even when intended with a generous spirit.

Society likes traditions and strongly encourages us all to follow the traditions that were handed down. We'd like to examine them as we go and see which ones feel useful.

And we'd like to do the same with the new-fangled ideas, the hippie-dippie ideas, the ideas from outside our Western culture.

We don't think the new or the old, the western or the eastern, the established or the crazy is better by its own virtue. We want to find and apply the things that work best for us and that work best for Conan.

We're embracing the madness of all of the possibilities.

In the process, perhaps we'll stir up some thoughts for other people, too.



Or if you prefer:



And we will also accept:


But only under cases of extreme duress.