I will try to preface all of these with saying that as I write them I am 42 years old, I am mentally scarred so badly I do not work outside the home or leave it unless I am with my husband.
How you are raised will mess you up. Abuse will leave scars on a child for life, and may stunt them as they grow older. Don't do this to your kids. Listen to your kids. If they say, "That hurts me, it's not helping", please take it into consideration. Don't simply say you know what's "best" for them, because my family told me all my life they did what was "best" for me.
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This one is another of those "neighbor kids" stories, and this one's actually fairly short.
My family comes from Northern Italy. We were farmers there, and it's in our genes as a lot of us have super green thumbs. Well, the house I grew up on had a half acre in the back that my grandfather had painstakingly mulched and turned the sand into rich, fertile dark soil by hard work and sheer force of will.
I don't really remember much again, all I can recall is the oldest kid suggesting we play farmers and move the hay from one pile to another, spreading it somewhere. I think there was a pile in the compost, and we moved it to cover some of the garden.
Some time later my mother is yelling again. Apparently that was wrong and I was in trouble, although no one had ever told me not to do it. The neighbor kids were sent home - smirking, by the way -- and I was dragged over and over the emotional coals again until I was in tears.
I didn't know I was doing anything wrong. It was the first time I had done this action. Why did I have to be called a bad child for that? Why was it suggested I should have magically "known better"?
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