The following are all posts from an internet forum set up to support a BBC project called ‘Scotland on Film’ in 2003. Here, several posters recount their memories of childhood discipline from the 1950s onwards… Sarah Forsyth from Edinburgh My father was quite a disciplinarian and as the head of the household, his word was law. […]

I was not used to being spanked when I was a young kid. On those rare occasions, my mother would grab my arm and place one or two mild swats on the seat of my pants. It wasn’t a painful experience but I would cry a lot, because I didn’t like my mom being so […]

I grew up in the 1950s, when Britain’s canal network was still a place of work rather than a holiday destination. A canal ran close to the back of my home and I would often play next to ‘the cut’, watching the barges go past with loads of coal, ceramics and steel. To make things […]

My mother was not a pet lover, and my brother Jeff and I wanted a pet so badly that we would have done just about anything. Each time we talked about it, mother would say: “No, we have discussed this and there will be no animals in this house. That’s the end of it!” So […]

In our house, mom used the belt for the more serious offences committed by my siblings and I. While I received plenty of whippings in my childhood, I can remember one in particular that stands out in my memory. I was 15 and decided to experiment with alcohol with my best friend Julie. Her parents […]

This incident happened when I was nine years old. My mom had hired a sitter for me for two weeks – our nanny was on vacation. Anyway, the sitter came to watch me and my sister for a few days. I was making life hard for the sitter – everything she told me to do, I […]

When I was nine years old, my mother took me and my younger brother and sister to a department store where my grandmother worked. We needed school clothes and my grandma was able to help clothe us and provide my mom with a much-needed discount. Naturally, us kids quickly got extremely bored with the process […]