Did anyone have the same "experiences" growing up as some of us Italians/europeans did?...Of course our culture plays a part of who we have become in our later years and how we treat our children but pointedly im wondering if anyone raised as a Jehovahs witness regularly was hit, smacked, beaten, smashed, in inventive ways that begged u to laugh .....well what I mean is that the intresting thing that stands out is that growing up in this kind of enviornment made you Laugh Your Ass Off whenever we discussed these things privately AS IF they were normal. And they were SO NOT normal. One parent standing on one side smacking you and the other parent sitting on the other side of you ready to smack you when you wanted to get up from the dinner table and retreat to a safe place ..oh like say running OUTSIDE!! Sitting down to do the family bible study and being forced to sit through it getting smacked in the face if we wanted to get up..So many of our parents worked in construction and it seemed they took out their frustrations out on us when they came home from work. It came to the point when it all just seemed normal to get hit for any reason.
.. I remember so many young JW teenagers going thru the same thing at our Hall in our preteen yrs. One elder who was SO very passive all the time and especially on the platform had a wonderful reputation for being understanding. But the "Italian" bastard in him came out soon enough when his daughter came to the meeting with a black eye ...soon the story got out she had been disobedient far too many times and so he had to let her have it !!!..This kind of behaviour was seen in our congregation as NORMAL. Pure and simple when u had enough u just beat ur kid with the belt til he got it right. If you dont "discipline" your child you dont love him/her. Talk is cheap. If you spare the rod you dont love your child. And OMG the Italian parents sure made the best out of those verses! One day a number of us in our early 20's were discussing this and we were all laughing it up as if it was Part of being a JW that being beaten was a rite of passage like the time ".J.Ventura's " father lovingly picked him up by the seat of his pants and threw him into the stove but the stove door wasn't open so after picking his son up from the floor he opened the stove door and then threw him in head first...ha ha ha ..We all laughed at this stuff as if it was normal. It was as if now we could do the same thing to our children IF we needed to because 1)we went thru it and we turned out ok and 2) the bible says its good to discipline ur kids.
We never really heard these stories from our English JW friends. Our parents "disciplined" us cuz they loved us and the English JWs well who knew..but "abuse" was a word never ever used...Our mentality was so screwed up growing up that we made excuses for our parents.
Of course times have changed and generations of parents no longer have the "im working on the farm all day and you better do as i say or else" attiutude our parents had brought over from thier countries.. Poverty bred anger- taken out on our parents from their parents- and was passed along part n parcel with our JW beliefs. Has parenting changed today in Kingdom Halls?.... I can tell you that I swore UP and Down that when i grew up and had children of my own I would never treat them like I was treated by my father. Yet what did I do when my 3 yr old was screaming cuz he couldnt sit still at the Kindgom Hall? I took him to the back and started to hit him. Why? Because it was Normal. You hit your screaming child in private in the back of the hall. After doing this 3 times to my son and looking at him saying but "daddy i love you, i love you" in other words "why r u hitting me?"....It hit me ..WHY was i hitting him? I found no good reason and I stopped hitting him altogether. I was digusted at my behaviour and modified it while I was a JW...So i guess Im wondering if anyone out there can relate to this "normal" upbringing. Did anyone out there see us Italians or other ethnic group as awkward and scary? and did anyone go through the same normal "discipline".?
Frank.L..(formerly FedoreE)