The Corrections: A Three-Generation Roundtable on Punishment in the Home

If the majority of people manage to avoid the experience of punishment in a penal setting, no one is likely to have escaped it at home, where the long arm of parental law inevitably reaches out and touches each of us at some point. From corporal punishment to time-outs, grounding, allowance docking, and other tried-and-true methods, the world of domestic discipline has its own familiar rhythms and codes. Despite the cottage industry of books that propose to new parents various pedagogies of punishment and penalty, chances are that most of us take our cue in such matters (for better or worse) from our own guardians. To further explore the potential lineages of disciplinary techniques, Cabinet’s senior editor Jeffrey Kastner convened a multi-generational roundtable drawn from members of his own family—including his parents, his brother, his wife, and his two children—to discuss their own experiences of being punished, and then punishing in their turn, through the years. The group met at the home of Kastner’s parents, south of Minneapolis, Minnesota, on the day of their fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration.

Jeanne Kastner: I was born in 1939 in a small town called Shawano in northern Wisconsin, and I was the oldest of three children. I grew up in a family where there was a fair amount of violence: not involving the children, but between my mother and father. Going way back, my father’s father was very violent—I recently learned that he once picked up a milk pail and hit his wife on the head with it. I don’t know if this happened with the children. My father came from a family of six boys and one girl, and all his brothers also abused their wives to some extent, from what I understand. As a child, though, I don’t really remember being spanked or even grabbed roughly. There is one instance that comes back: when we were quite young, and my sister and I shared a bed. My father came in after we had been in bed for quite a while—he had probably already told us to settle down a few times—and I remember him grabbing each of us and giving us a little swat. But that’s about it.

Jeffrey Kastner: Punishment is not always physical, though. Can you remember other methods of punishment that your parents used?

Jeanne: I think I was punished verbally, and that would have been mostly by my mother.

Jeffrey: What does it mean to be punished verbally?

Peter Kastner: You once told me she had tones that she would use, that by the way she would say certain things—the way she would say your name—that she was indicating that you had done something wrong.

Jeffrey: Did that feel like punishment to you?

Jeanne: Definitely. It leads to guilt, to feelings of shame.

Jeffrey: Did you ever get grounded?

Jeanne: That was a term I never heard growing up, and I don’t think it was a term I ever used with my children.

Jeffrey: Things taken away or things you expected to get that you didn’t? Things you wanted to do that you were prevented from doing?

Jeanne: You know, I tried to make sure from a very young age that I did what I was supposed to do. I knew I should do what I was supposed to do and I tried to do it. I hate to sound like a goody two-shoes, but that’s the way I conducted my life.

Jeffrey: Did your brother and sister have different experiences?

Jeanne: Yes, they did. They were much more willing to try and test the limits.

Jeffrey: Do you remember them being punished?

Jeanne: No, because often if I caught them doing something they shouldn’t be doing, I would actually conceal it from my folks.

Jeffrey: Because you were concerned they would be punished?

Jeanne: No, because I was more concerned it would cause problems between my mother and father. And I can think of a couple of instances where this happened. One in particular, when I found Diane and Jim smoking in the garage. I was probably about fifteen, so that would have meant that Jim was ten and Diane was thirteen. I never told. And that gave me a little power, I suppose, though I don’t really remember feeling powerful at the time. So I don’t remember any real punishment, but I do remember living in fear—not of being punished myself, but of the destabilizing effects that certain behavior might have on the family as a whole.

Jeffrey: What about you, Dad?

Robert Kastner: I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, also in 1939. We were sort of a lower middle-class family; we lived in a rental property on the north side of the city. When it came to behavior, I’m surprised to say it, but I don’t recall being spanked; I just don’t. The strongest memory of punishment I can conjure up had to do with the unintended consequences of another sort of discipline: I was maybe three years old and was being punished for some minor infraction, and was sent to my room to stare at the clock for ten minutes. Anyway, I decided to look out the window, and so I knelt on a table and pushed up against the screen and it popped out and I fell out of the window, two stories, onto a pile of dirt that was there for doing some minor landscaping. I got up and headed back into the house, and ran into my mother who was running screaming down the stairs. But I don’t recall ever, and I mean ever, getting slapped or hit.

Jeffrey: Was being sent to your room a typical kind of thing?

Robert: That, and going to stand in the corner. Facing the wall. But that was about it.

Jeffrey: This is interesting, because I assume that if you ask most people, they would probably say that we’ve been on a trajectory in our society from more corporal punishment to less. But that’s not what we’re hearing from two people who grew up seventy-odd years ago, in the 1940s. And the demographics are also maybe a bit counterintuitive in terms of preconceptions one might have about the effects of social or economic status: you were both from lower middle-class families; none of your parents had much in the way of formal education—neither of your mothers finished high school, neither of your fathers finished college. And yet there was no corporal punishment in either of your homes growing up. Both of your sets of parents worked, right? So you didn’t always have adults in the house. And you were both eldest children. Did this make you effectively the disciplinarians of your younger siblings?

Robert: I’m seven years older than my brother, and seven years is too big a difference—I just wasn’t really around long enough to “parent” my brother. That was taken care of by others. And you know, it’s still the case that when you walk into a shopping mall and see groups of children, it’s clear that one of the girls is in charge—she’s holding a younger child and disciplining the others or whatever. And she might only be a year or two older than the other kids, but the mother gives her the responsibility. You rarely see the male children given that responsibility, whether in my time or today.

Jeffrey: You guys got married in 1962 and had me the next year and Peter in 1970. Do you remember having conversations between yourselves about how you were going to discipline us, what your philosophy toward punishment was? Or did it just emerge organically? Did you disagree about punishments for us?

Robert: No. I’m sorry, but we’re very dull in the punishment department.

Jeanne: You were pretty good kids.

Audrey Kastner: [To her father] Well, not you.

Jeffrey: I realize I was a troublesome kid. I remember getting in a fair amount of trouble at school, but I only remember getting called into the principal’s office a few times.

Mona Marquardt: And you did things when you were little, like the story of when you had to have a time-out until a certain time.

Jeffrey: And I climbed up on the stove and set the clock forward. I have no idea what I had done. One thing that was a bit unusual about our family is that Dad travelled for business, so we were home with Mom alone a lot. So a lot of the traditional responsibilities for punishment naturally fell to you, Mom. I recall that I used to have to sit in the kitchen fairly frequently for one sort of time-out or another, even if they weren’t called that. I don’t really remember being sent to my room as a punishment. But you do, right Pete?

Peter: It wasn’t uncommon, but it was mostly for minor infractions. Dad, I remember you losing your temper with me two or three times and me thinking you were going to kill me, but you weren’t. I remember you saying “Listen, sucker!”—face full of rage, finger pointed right in my nose, real drill-sergeant type stuff. Last-straw stuff. And that was punishment.

Jeffrey: That’s an interesting point—intimidation as punishment. You’re a big guy, and so you could leverage your physical presence to scare us and warn us off certain kinds of behavior.

Mona: There’s something to be said for having a large male in the house with children.

Sam Kastner: Oh yeah, you were terrifying. I could always deal with having Mom yell at me, because she was Mom. But you were scary. Because you almost never yell, when you do, it’s disturbing.

Peter: I would say that the vast majority of our punishment was verbal. We were talking about the tones. You had tones too, and these tones are also tools that I employ to this day: engendering a feeling of disappointment, or guilt in my own kids at having done something wrong.

Robert: It seems like we didn’t actually have much corporal punishment relative to what is assumed, either when your mother and I were kids or when we were raising you.

Jeffrey: Were you afraid of your father?

Robert: Well, I didn’t like him very much, but I was never worried he was going to hurt me.

Peter: I was never fearful of physical harm. I was afraid I would disappoint you. And as a new parent, I had no idea how to make my own kids feel that way. Because plainly there are children who couldn’t care less and part of my fear as a new parent was that I would not be able to harness that power. But I think I have now.

Jeffrey: I remember being concerned when you said you were going to “tell Dad” when he got home about whatever bad things I had done, but I wasn’t physically concerned. I think you only hit me seriously once. And you, too, Mom—I only recall you hitting me once. I think I swore at you. Mouthing off. My worst punishments probably came out of disrespecting you—which gets back to Pete’s point about how parents need to create and preserve respect in the family.

Robert: I do remember swatting you two, but I never allowed myself more than two swats with a rolled-up newspaper. Because I stopped myself; I’m serious, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t doing something that was going to go haywire. You didn’t realize it, but you could have burned the house down and I wouldn’t have done anything more. I really did watch out; I was concerned about it.

Jeffrey: Why were you concerned about it if it wasn’t part of your own background? Because you were a large person?

Robert: I was aware that that kind of stuff existed and I didn’t want to be part of it.

Mona: It does seem to me that I got spanked by my dad. Open hand, bare bottom—at least that’s what I recall. And very infrequently. I had no idea what I might have done. One kind of punishment I remember very vividly, though, was at dinner; if we served ourselves and we didn’t finish our vegetables, which was generally the thing we didn’t finish, we had to sit at the table until we ate them. And I would sit there all night, because I was stubborn, feeling the injustice in the world. Did you guys have that?

Peter: I only remember it happening once. It was some kind of special occasion, and I had taken a radish and put it on my plate. And I was made to eat the radish after a long time—half an hour—of me refusing to eat the radish. And I threw up all over the table and whatever had been laid out on it at that point. I’m not sure who exactly got punished in that case.

Jeffrey: We did have definite rules about food in our family. You had to try everything once, and you had to eat what you served yourself.

Jeanne: I do remember being very strict about how you ate. Do you remember being reprimanded at the table over and over and over again—hold your fork and knife right, chew with your mouth closed, napkin on your lap? But it got to the point for me where at dinnertime—and Bob was even stricter than I was—I did not like that tension at the table.

Peter: I think it’s a good case of small behavioral modifications that were regularly done.

Jeffrey: And in some sense punishment in the context of a family is really about management. You don’t want to punish, you want to avoid the need to punish physically by using the look, the voice, the threat. And maybe the reason we don’t have much punishment per se in this family is because people are pretty good at mobilizing these other more “pre-emptive” modes of discipline. These little things that are adjustments or modifications turn into habits, and are part of a program of management that helps to ultimately avoid the need for punishment.

Mona: [To Sam and Audrey] Did you guys feel like we were managing you or punishing you?

Sam and Audrey: [Laughing] Punishing.

Sam: It was usually a combination. When we were little, we would get sent to our rooms.

Audrey: [Laughing] Terrible things would happen in those rooms…

Sam: We would scrape at the door, but Mom would sit there in front of it. And laugh.

Mona: We should clarify!

Audrey: What would happen would be that we would get sent to our room, and we couldn’t get out. She would sit inside the room with us, in front of the door. So our mother, who we were supposed to love and who was supposed to be our savior, was not saving us.

Mona: Can I explain? This was not actually a case of punishment. You were having temper tantrums, the terrible twos and threes. And the important thing is to basically ignore the behavior, because if you pay attention to it, it just continues. And all you want is for the child to be in a safe place where they’re not annoying the rest of the world. And so the tantrum would begin, and off you’d go to your room, and I’d sit there with you.

Audrey: But you weren’t ignoring us, you were chuckling.

Mona: That’s because chubby little two-year-old Sam or Audrey would be trying to pull me away from the door with all their strength.

Jeffrey: Was that a concept you got from reading a book?

Mona: Probably.

Jeffrey: [To Bob and Jeanne] Did you guys read books about how to raise and discipline your children? You had Dr. Spock, right.

Jeanne: That was for medical things.

Audrey: Wait, Dr. Spock wrote a book about raising children?!

Jeffrey: Not Mr. Spock from Star Trek. A different guy.

Audrey: Phew.

Robert: There were books like that, but we didn’t read them.

Mona: We read the books, but I thought people were generally overly cautious. With you guys, we threatened hand-smacks. And you got your hand smacked a few times. And since you never got anything else, my impression was always that the smack on the hand was terrifying. And you thought it really, really hurt. And you’d cry and wail about it. And that was the worst you ever had.

Sam: I got into some trouble in middle school. The graffiti.

Mona: What do you remember about the cops picking you up for graffiti?

Sam: You guys were going out to dinner, and you still went out to dinner, and I was so upset that it had happened. What was the punishment again—I was grounded for two weeks, right?

Mona: What did you think about that?

Sam: I actually thought it was pretty good. [Laughing] I remember acting like it was a lot worse than I thought it was, so you wouldn’t make it any worse.

Jeffrey: That’s an interesting thing about punishment in the home—if you act like you’re really being punished, then maybe they go easier on you.

Sam: Yeah, you were like, “You can’t go out for two weeks.” And I was like, “Waaaaah,” but inside I was saying, “Wow, that’s it? Okay, cool.” The worst part of it was actually when you went out for dinner and I was so upset that I had disappointed you.

Mona: We said we were going to talk about your punishment over dinner.

Sam: That was the scary part.

Jeffrey: It was interesting that you guys said you didn’t really actively discuss how you were going to punish me and Pete. Mona and I talk about how we should or shouldn’t punish the kids all the time. And I remember at a certain point, when Sam was younger, we had very different ideas of what punishment should be. You thought I was being too tough on him.

Mona: But not so much in terms of punishment as in terms of management. You were using a very male-on-male approach, you were very in his face, which I wasn’t used to, coming from an all-female household.

Jeffrey: I remember saying to you, “I’m doing this intentionally. I’m trying to scare him.” And I remember actively trying to scare you, Sam.

Sam: I think that’s probably good. You’re big guys, I’m going to be a big guy, and it seems like an effective approach with kids. Using that intimidation seems like a good form of punishment.

Jeffrey: But Dad, even when you were up in my face, I was never afraid you were going to hurt me. [To Sam] Were you ever afraid I was really going to hurt you?

Sam: No.

Jeffrey: So it’s odd, because the fear in that gesture isn’t physical, it’s something else.

Jeanne: The word I keep thinking of is awe—a combination of fear and love. That’s what we’re talking about here. And I think it’s a good thing.

Mona: It’s interesting to hear from you all as fathers. My father died when I was young and so I didn’t have a father as a teenager, and my mother didn’t have that intimidation option. If I was misbehaving or talking back, she didn’t really have anything she could do to scare me. And I dismissed it, because she wasn’t scary. And she would threaten to do things that I knew she didn’t want to carry out.

Jeffrey: Part of what we tried to do with punishment is as much as possible actually do what we said we were going to do—if we said you were grounded for a week, you actually got grounded for a week. [To Sam and Audrey] You always used to say that we were stricter than most of your friends’ parents. Now that you’re older, do you still think that?

Sam: Well, this actually lets me bring up something I wanted to mention anyway in terms of relative strictness: It’s second semester of my senior year and most of my friends don’t have curfews during the week anymore—they can stay out as late as they want.

Mona: On weekends?

Sam: No, on weekdays.

Mona: Well, that’s not going to happen.