Parents who were beaten become numb to their children’s beatings

Evidence

Augustine is describing is something almost every survivor of corporal punishment, across cultures, across centuries, recognizes immediately: the parental dismissal. The grown adults who themselves were beaten as children, treating the new beatings as not a big deal — because they remember their own as not a big deal — unable to see the present child’s terror because they have spent forty years repressing the memory of their own. Augustine sees this. He names it. He writes it down. In 397 CE. It is, as a piece of insight into the intergenerational dynamics of corporal punishment, not improved on for sixteen hundred years. — , The Rod and the Child, 689

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: modern psychological work on how adult memory suppression enables ongoing corporal punishment transmission.
• XREF: connects to: Traumatic combat loss triggered uncontrolled firing and emotional numbness in child soldiers — Farrar, Straus and Giroux Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone- Memoirs of a Boy…, 460; Jim Crow terror produced a protective rationale for beating children — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 5182

Related

• Child beating is enabled by structural conditions, not just individual choices (similarity 0.79)
• The harms of hitting children were invisible to traditional frameworks (similarity 0.78)
• Adult childhood memory is an unreliable substitute for asking children directly. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Traumatic combat loss triggered uncontrolled firing and emotional numbness in child soldiers #expands (0.50) — Farrar, Straus and Giroux Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone- Memoirs of a Boy…, 460