I think this could be useful for some people, I hope so anyway because it sucks when your parents hit you and nobody should go through that.
Anyone reading this though please think about if your parents fit in this category of somewhat/relatively normal. Because there are, sadly, some parents that will not be cowed or stood up to and will dramatically over escalate to anything. Some parents are awful/sadists/dangerous and your priority if that is your parent should be to leave as soon as you can or survive at all costs.
I imagine most parents would.be dissuaded by embarrassment or their kid breaking windows but there also some who will beat their children and not care and might even kill them so think first and act safely
My father was a hunter and a fisherman and had guns around the house. He started to teach me how use them when I was ten. I fired my first handgun at that time. He thought it was funny for me to do it without ear protection. It was not really funny but did teach me respect for the 357 magnum I fired. I do remember that I hit the target the first time I shot as my mother was excited for me. She also grew up in a family with firearms. This sort of thing is typical in rural America.
A couple of years later my father began to be physically abusive to my mother. This upset me but I figured as adults they could work it out. He then hit my brother. At one point he raised his arm to hit me and I stared at him and vowed to myself that if he hit me I would kill him in his sleep. It was a silent vow but I think he understood my expression because he lowered his hand and never threatened me again.
I am 99% sure I would have done it. I knew enough about the law and culture of my community that I would not have been severely punished. I already knew that a woman in my small town had shot and killed her abusive husband and found not guilty by a jury of her peers.
> Call the police, even if the assault didn't cause a visible injury. The police might not take an assault that leaves no marks seriously, might tell you not to call again about normal parental assault …
Laws are different all over the world, but I'd be concerned that this could create a situation where the child is forced into foster care.
I grew up surrounded by kids in foster care. The one thing I can say with a fair amount of certainty, is that unless your home situation is *very* bad, you don't want to end up in foster care.
I know this wasn't written by Aella, but those who know her story going way back, it feels like it easily could be. Violence may be a logical consequence to parents who feel that just by being parents that makes them right about everything by default , let alone a parent who literally feels that they are God's instrument on this Earth.
There's just not much you can do as a young child with abusive parents. It takes so long for child services to do anything, and the very act of involving child services can often lead to an escalation of violence...
There's also some ethnic differences that complicates things. Almost every family of African or Carribbean descent I grew up around (mine included) occasionally beat the shit out of their kids. It was always justified in the name of "spare the rod, spoil the child", as if you don't really love your kids unless you periodically subject them to literal torture. The funniest part is, it's hard to make a case that the beatings accomplished much long-term. Many of those same beaten children are now in jail.
I know kids can be difficult, and rage-inducing, but I can't get into the headspace of harshly beating a child well beyond the point they are screaming in agony. There's a certain inhumanity to that I have no empathy for.
I'm personally touched reading this because my mother was physically (and verbally) abusive to me throughout my childhood and one day as a pre-teen I finally pushed her back when she went to hit me - and she fell down on the floor (sliding along my low dresser taking the doile and porcelain figurines with her, just like a classic bar scene) and looked up at me with respect for the first time. I've just never met anyone else who had a similar experience, so the author's account strikes a cord with me. EVERYTHING changed after that event, and she went from hating me to being my friend. It's almost like I snapped her out of a fever dream where she intuitively immediately understood that she couldn't discharge on me anymore... that I was no longer the powerless receptacle for her discontent, and instead was suddenly a separate person. Shitty rite of passage but now, 35 years later, she's still dear to my heart and we get along well, despite her ongoing mental health issues. Maybe a form of forgiveness actually constellated for me in that moment of defending myself and seeing her response. It was just so clear that the violence that was playing out was somehow in the animal realm, the hind brain, and thus required a direct somatic engagement. It got cleaned up through one occurance of counter violence. So weird.
I don't think this is going to be read by any children, but I do think it's potentially risky advice. Escalating violence and property destruction on the victim's part can also be met with escalation on the part of the parent. Potentially giving rise to serious injury and death. A parent that uses violence may not have appropriate boundaries. Just because it worked in these instances doesn't mean it can't have potentially negative consequences in other families.
Abusive parents worth their salt will never let their child happen upon an article like this.
From my ignorant point of view, everybody seems to grossly underestimate parents’ power. All they have to do to ruin your life is to let you stay isolated, ignorant, helpless (learnedly and otherwise) and completely dependent on them, and wait eighteen years. Their hands will be clean; you’ll know you’d better keep them happy at all costs, since they no longer have to feed you or let you stay on their property, and, not really knowing how the outside world works, you won’t have a realistic chance to survive if you walk away or are forced out.
It helps if you live in a kind of out-of-the-way place and can’t practically move around without asking them for a lift, which you know to do sparingly to save them the inconvenience. It surely helps, too, if you lack normal human inborn social skills.
Even if the society you live in offers some way for people in a situation like yours to get help, you won’t know about it. And, since normal people can’t imagine this degree of dependence, a tale like yours will sound to everyone like nothing more than a load of excuses for your own laziness and cowardice. And eventually they’ll be right.
Yeah, I agree that this won't be found by a lot of kids who're being abused, so obviously the solution is we should make pamphlets and leave them around schools, playgrounds, and shopping malls.
I just read from a popular anthropology book that most power struggles in families occur between mothers and sons and that sons usually win in the end (well, they'll be much stronger, what do you expect). Usually it's more gradual, not such a sharp turn as described above, but still, this is the expected consequence. I'm not sure if it's similar with fathers. It may be more dangerous with violent fathers, especially when the kid is still much weaker.
I think this could be useful for some people, I hope so anyway because it sucks when your parents hit you and nobody should go through that.
Anyone reading this though please think about if your parents fit in this category of somewhat/relatively normal. Because there are, sadly, some parents that will not be cowed or stood up to and will dramatically over escalate to anything. Some parents are awful/sadists/dangerous and your priority if that is your parent should be to leave as soon as you can or survive at all costs.
I imagine most parents would.be dissuaded by embarrassment or their kid breaking windows but there also some who will beat their children and not care and might even kill them so think first and act safely
My father was a hunter and a fisherman and had guns around the house. He started to teach me how use them when I was ten. I fired my first handgun at that time. He thought it was funny for me to do it without ear protection. It was not really funny but did teach me respect for the 357 magnum I fired. I do remember that I hit the target the first time I shot as my mother was excited for me. She also grew up in a family with firearms. This sort of thing is typical in rural America.
A couple of years later my father began to be physically abusive to my mother. This upset me but I figured as adults they could work it out. He then hit my brother. At one point he raised his arm to hit me and I stared at him and vowed to myself that if he hit me I would kill him in his sleep. It was a silent vow but I think he understood my expression because he lowered his hand and never threatened me again.
I am 99% sure I would have done it. I knew enough about the law and culture of my community that I would not have been severely punished. I already knew that a woman in my small town had shot and killed her abusive husband and found not guilty by a jury of her peers.
> Call the police, even if the assault didn't cause a visible injury. The police might not take an assault that leaves no marks seriously, might tell you not to call again about normal parental assault …
Laws are different all over the world, but I'd be concerned that this could create a situation where the child is forced into foster care.
I grew up surrounded by kids in foster care. The one thing I can say with a fair amount of certainty, is that unless your home situation is *very* bad, you don't want to end up in foster care.
I know this wasn't written by Aella, but those who know her story going way back, it feels like it easily could be. Violence may be a logical consequence to parents who feel that just by being parents that makes them right about everything by default , let alone a parent who literally feels that they are God's instrument on this Earth.
There's just not much you can do as a young child with abusive parents. It takes so long for child services to do anything, and the very act of involving child services can often lead to an escalation of violence...
There's also some ethnic differences that complicates things. Almost every family of African or Carribbean descent I grew up around (mine included) occasionally beat the shit out of their kids. It was always justified in the name of "spare the rod, spoil the child", as if you don't really love your kids unless you periodically subject them to literal torture. The funniest part is, it's hard to make a case that the beatings accomplished much long-term. Many of those same beaten children are now in jail.
I know kids can be difficult, and rage-inducing, but I can't get into the headspace of harshly beating a child well beyond the point they are screaming in agony. There's a certain inhumanity to that I have no empathy for.
I'm personally touched reading this because my mother was physically (and verbally) abusive to me throughout my childhood and one day as a pre-teen I finally pushed her back when she went to hit me - and she fell down on the floor (sliding along my low dresser taking the doile and porcelain figurines with her, just like a classic bar scene) and looked up at me with respect for the first time. I've just never met anyone else who had a similar experience, so the author's account strikes a cord with me. EVERYTHING changed after that event, and she went from hating me to being my friend. It's almost like I snapped her out of a fever dream where she intuitively immediately understood that she couldn't discharge on me anymore... that I was no longer the powerless receptacle for her discontent, and instead was suddenly a separate person. Shitty rite of passage but now, 35 years later, she's still dear to my heart and we get along well, despite her ongoing mental health issues. Maybe a form of forgiveness actually constellated for me in that moment of defending myself and seeing her response. It was just so clear that the violence that was playing out was somehow in the animal realm, the hind brain, and thus required a direct somatic engagement. It got cleaned up through one occurance of counter violence. So weird.
I don't think this is going to be read by any children, but I do think it's potentially risky advice. Escalating violence and property destruction on the victim's part can also be met with escalation on the part of the parent. Potentially giving rise to serious injury and death. A parent that uses violence may not have appropriate boundaries. Just because it worked in these instances doesn't mean it can't have potentially negative consequences in other families.
Abusive parents worth their salt will never let their child happen upon an article like this.
From my ignorant point of view, everybody seems to grossly underestimate parents’ power. All they have to do to ruin your life is to let you stay isolated, ignorant, helpless (learnedly and otherwise) and completely dependent on them, and wait eighteen years. Their hands will be clean; you’ll know you’d better keep them happy at all costs, since they no longer have to feed you or let you stay on their property, and, not really knowing how the outside world works, you won’t have a realistic chance to survive if you walk away or are forced out.
It helps if you live in a kind of out-of-the-way place and can’t practically move around without asking them for a lift, which you know to do sparingly to save them the inconvenience. It surely helps, too, if you lack normal human inborn social skills.
Even if the society you live in offers some way for people in a situation like yours to get help, you won’t know about it. And, since normal people can’t imagine this degree of dependence, a tale like yours will sound to everyone like nothing more than a load of excuses for your own laziness and cowardice. And eventually they’ll be right.
I want to weaponize this post, buy ads, "how to fight back against parents who hurt you and make it never happen again".
Yeah, I agree that this won't be found by a lot of kids who're being abused, so obviously the solution is we should make pamphlets and leave them around schools, playgrounds, and shopping malls.
I just read from a popular anthropology book that most power struggles in families occur between mothers and sons and that sons usually win in the end (well, they'll be much stronger, what do you expect). Usually it's more gradual, not such a sharp turn as described above, but still, this is the expected consequence. I'm not sure if it's similar with fathers. It may be more dangerous with violent fathers, especially when the kid is still much weaker.