Smack my kids up
I'm not one of these lilly-livered liberals who thinks you shouldn't smack kids. In fact I think smacking a kid once in a while would probably do them some good.

Anyway...

I was in the supermarket one day doing my shopping, when I see a mother a bit ahead of me in the aisle. She was pushing a pram, and had a toddler loitering around her.
As she was taking something from the shelf she knocked a can over. She glanced up to see if anyone had seen and noticed that I had.
So she grabs the kid, about four feet away from the incident, smacks him and screams (and I mean screams) "I told you not to touch anything!".

Seemed a little odd. If she was trying to cover up what she'd done (hardly a hanging offence), thinking I'd seen her do it, would she not think that I may also have seen that the kid was nowhere near it?

The kid promptly burst intotears and got the old "stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about" bollocks.

I went home feeling guilty because I hadn't said anything to her, for fear of the same treatment.

Also: my parents had a visit from social services when I was 3 because I ended up in hospital twice in a week as a result of 'falls'... I was a clumsy child, honest.
( Joe Scaramanga with a G-double-O-D vibration, Thu 16 Aug 2007, 10:57, Reply)