Small Town America Part 2

 DISCIPLINE

My parents acted like "grown-ups", like they knew what they were doing. They never needed my help in making decisions. They told me what to do, and I did it because "they said so."  No, meant no.  Mother hated for me to whine and cry, "That's not fair."  She would always point to the door and say, "I don't see a sign over that door that says, 'life is fair.'”

Disciplining children in the 50s was a high priority and disrespecting elders was unheard of.  I was taught how to use formal introductions and to always say yes maam, yes sir, please and thank you. (Even in my adult years, Mother would always correct me if I said, Yeah.... after a reminder that was a slouchy word, I would change it to Yes.)  When Mother dropped me off for a sleep over at a friend's house, she would always remind me to say thank you to the mom for her hospitality...and the first thing that she would ask when I got into the car the next morning was, "Did you say thank you?". I was taught to look everyone in the eye and I often heard Daddy talk about how important it was to have a firm handshake.  When I talked back to my parents, I would be disciplined immediately.  There was no 'time-out' in some silly chair. A whack on the butt straightened me out. I seldom would repeat the same act, at least not in their vision. And I learned from Bryan and Paula’s mistakes. Because teachers were allowed to discipline children, classrooms were quiet rooms where kids learned and obeyed. The last thing any kid wanted was the principal making a phone call to a parent. That always brought more discipline — not some parent threatening to sue a school.

 Parents paid more attention to one another and the family situation as a whole. Children were not the center of the universe and it was often said that children were meant to be seen, not heard.  This is not to say that children were not loved and cared for, quite the opposite.  We were loved and discipline and taught our responsibilities and given the freedom to make right and wrong decisions. I also had more freedom in my day to day life than children have today, and I learned how to fill my time, mostly in an imaginary world during solitary play time. It gave me the ability to discover for myself many things, and it taught me to put myself into perspective compared to other lives around me. This afforded me the ability in my college years to see that my parents were pretty smart after all.  I can honestly say that during my married years, my mother was my best friend, and she held that position until she died. But she was a mother to me when I was growing up, not my best friend.