I grew up in the late 1950s – a time when things were much different from how they are now. Parents still believed in the old adage of ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’. No-one dared question whether a parent had the right to spank their children. To the contrary, in the 50s, spanking a misbehaving child was considered a parental duty.
Mom did most of the spanking in our household. We were a military family and, like a lot of the other kids in our neighbourhood, dad was away at sea most of the time.