The "towel discipline"

When I was a kid, parents were encouraged to hit their kids; “Spare the rod and spoil the child” as it were. Now that I’m a parent, I look back on those days as Camelot. This was a beautiful time, when a parent neither knew nor cared to know, who started what? Any noise or commotion resulting from sibling rivalry resulted in an immediate whooping with the ‘belt’. This must be where the term “fashion and function” originated. Unfortunately for my father, my brothers and sisters were the last five of his ten children, and much younger and faster than he. We would scatter and hide (faster than cockroaches in a lit room) whenever we heard a belt unbuckled. Subsequently, the “towel punishment” ensued: A new method in the 80’S of disciplining your children more effectively, without hitting. My mother read an article about this new method and decided we were in desperate need of a more effective discipline, as dad could never catch us with his belt. The basic premise of this method of discipline was as follows: each time a child misbehaved he or she would incur 15 minutes of standing on a 1’ X 2’ towel, until you reached an hour. Once you hit an hour on the towel, and you still didn’t behave, it became 2 hours, 3 hours, 4 hours, etc. By the end of the first week of this new discipline, my brothers and sisters and I, each had in excess of 36 hours on the towel. Therefore, at any given time during the course of each day there would be anywhere from 1 to 5 kids standing on various towels scattered about the living room. Basically, we were a live version of sibling rivalry, in surround sound. When we learned that any time used for bathroom breaks was deducted from our “towel time, we rebelled by taking our bathroom breaks on the towel. Fortunately, our united urination did end our “towel punishment” in the living room… Unfortunately, we lived in Florida, and were now all standing on our respective towels, for each hour of punishment owed, plus a few more… outside, on the front lawn. Suffice it to say, we were not known as the coolest kids on our block.