[Chewbaccus]

I'm not a parent, but I do remember a couple times when physical discipline was invoked by my mother when I was growing up. I was about eight or nine years old at the time.

-One time, I went to play baseball at a field that I had never gone to before. It wasn't much further away from home than the other ones I'd played at before, but it was never part of my "circuit", so to speak. Well into the game, I remember standing on second, looking out to the outfield during a pop fly, and seeing my mother's car go racing past on the road. I mean, she was cooking, and she rarely sped. Game's over, I get back, and my brother asks me where I was, what I was up to. I tell him, and he tells me that my mother was freaking out because she had no idea where I was or what I was doing. She had actually taken off to a park about half a mile away from the house, thinking I had gone there with some other kids in another parent's car - that was when I saw her flying up the road.

She gets back, sees me sitting on the couch in one piece and calm as milk (totally contrary to her fears that had been escalating every fifteen minutes since last we saw each other), sighs in relief, then goes into discipline-mode. She hauled me upstairs to my room, gave me a few smacks on my backside - flat palm, not a whole lot of force, any pain I felt was more shock than physical damage - and explained in loud and no uncertain terms that I was never to go off somewhere without leaving some kind of note or word with someone as to where I was going. (T-Mobile was a long ways off these days, folks.)

- Second memory I have was the two of us sitting in church. I'm a kid, and no more fond of dogmatically-guided life lessons as any other child. As with any other child my age, one hour is a unit of time that I can only just begin to wrap my head around, and to spend it motionless on a hard wooden pew is a task of Herculean proportions - all the harder to accomplish as I have no wristwatch to calm myself with a countdown to freedom. Ergo, I'm fidgeting.

My mom gets tired of it and grabs my wrist and squeezes it hard to get me to stop. Again, no actual physical damage - any trauma is from the sudden shock of it all. However, given the social obligations of the particular moment, she couldn't explain why she did that to me until after we got out. I got the message, and she took me out to a diner for lunch afterwards to make up for it, but to this day my memory of the event comes with feelings of anger rather than wrong action.

These were the only two times that my mother ever got physical with punishment - she preferred the time-honored methods of toy deprivation and/or a good old-fashioned Scottish guilt trip. However, I think I resent the church incident and not the baseball incident because the explanation for the punishment was delayed. Both levels of force were equal, no lasting physical damage was inflicted, the delay of explanation of wrongdoing was the only difference. That tells me that is the key component of using any physical discipline - closely associating an explanation of what was the offense with the punishment, along with just cause and not going too far.

(if this comes off as rambling rather than a polished argument, i apologize - getting this out before I leave work)