Abuse Is Not Accountability: Hitting Your Kids Will Not Prepare Them For The “Real World”

Milo Santamaria | September 2024

It’s no secret that Gen Zs and Millennials are advocates for therapy and addressing their childhood trauma. However, parents from older generations do not seem happy about their children distancing themselves and forming their own beliefs.

Many social media creators have started making videos where they pretend to be their parents, exaggerating their traits for comedic effect. At first glance these seem like lighthearted comedy videos, however they also point to this trend of Gen Zs and Millennials understanding how their parents’ behavior may have impacted them in negative ways. These videos take verbal, and physical abuse, and manipulative behaviors and turn them into entertainment.

I don’t see these videos as a form of minimizing the abuse and harm, (though this can become a problem) that these creators may have experienced, I see them as a way of bringing the widespread mistreatment of children to light. These video skits show how abuse is a systemic issue that many children are experiencing, rather than an individual problem by a few “bad apples.”

A common defense to some of the criticisms of physical punishment online is that hitting or berating children is a form of discipline that helps teach children a lesson, however in my own experiences I’ve been able to see how this is not the case.

For example, I dated someone in college who I related to a lot because we both grew up in abusive families. I ignored a lot of their harmful behavior towards me because I understood the environment they grew up in to some degree, but when I was breaking up with them because they were lying to me, being coercive, and refusing to talk things out they seemed genuinely surprised that I called them out and defended myself.

And I did not do it in a mean way. I was just direct in saying if you can’t meet my needs I can’t be in this relationship. And he became really defensive and mean and passive aggressive after I broke up with him.

I remember thinking “Has no one ever held this guy accountable or told him his behavior is harmful?”

I understood his behavioral patterns and I knew I couldn’t be the only one harmed by his behavior.

But this relationship taught me that abuse doesn’t teach people to be better, it just destroys our self esteem and makes us scared of conflict and making mistakes. Because we were taught if we do something bad we deserve to be hurt and so we run from accountability and admitting when we’ve messed up. It’s a protective measure, but it still causes immense harm.

In some ways being abused pushed me to learn to be better because I didn’t want to be in the same dysfunctional situations I grew up in forever, but we can learn and grow without being abused or mistreated and no one deserves to be abused.

We make better choices when we feel good about ourselves and trust ourselves to make good decisions, but abuse completely destroys our trust in ourselves and other people.

Raising kids isn’t just about meeting their physical needs or putting a roof over their head. “Preparing your children for the real world” means giving them the emotional skills needed to be in relationships with people. It means creating an environment where they feel safe and cared for.

Abuse will never teach your child to hold themselves accountable, it will only make them feel like they deserve to be mistreated and abused, or worse teach them that it is acceptable to mistreat other people.