Democratic Spanking

Japanese doesn't follow English for my reputation.....

I'm always looking for hilarious stories for this blog. One day I remembered what happened to my brother when he was in the third grade.

On that day, he (I'll call him Bob in this post), I and other neighbor kids were playing dodgeball. We all lived in the company's apartment and these kids were mostly our dad subordinates' children. As the tallest, oldest and strongest boy physically and socially because of our dad's position in the company, Bob started to bully other kids for their mistakes, screaming and yelling at them until being grabbed by the neck and taken to home by our dad, who happened to come home earlier than usual.

What followed I could only guess because after coming home, I could only hear Bob screaming for help and being spanked behind closed fusuma panel sliding doors. Dad didn't utter a word. As he hates those bullying on weaker individuals, it must have been his way of disciplining children.

I recalled this a few days ago and was about to start writing when realizing that I didn't know natural English phrases on such an occasion. I can write about his screams and the sound of spanking in Japanese, like "Papa, gomen nasai! Mo shimasen! (Dad, I'm sorry. That won’t happen again.)" and "Pan pan (the sound of spanking in Japanese)," but there must be more usual and colloquial phrases in English.

As a professional translator, I googled for proper phrases using the term of "spanking" or the phrase of "I'll be a good boy," which I happened to know is used colloquially, and found a website.

The story on the website was about a mother spanking his son for inappropriate behavior while eating dinner and was full of conversation between the mother and her son.

But what surprised me was the horizontal and democratic nature of their relationship, in particular, the mother's logical and calm explanation of why she had to spank him, which is completely different from the vertical and authoritarian relationship between my dad and Bob.

Of course, this may be just a single good example and other US mothers may use corporal punishment like my dad or scream or yell at their children. But still, it's amazing that at least one parent calmly and logically explains to her son beforehand the reason why he has to be punished. It is good old America......I thought. It also reminded me of my sister-in-law who went to a high school and a college in the US and has never done corporal punishment or yelled at her kids even though her mother-in-law (i.e., my mom) criticized her for being too soft with them.

I kept skimming the story, looking for words and phrases which could be used for my post until I found almost at the end of the story the mother saying to her son, "Do you want to lick my xxxxx?"