Kids today don’t understand how their parents might have been punished for poor behavior back in their day, and it makes sense why. There is no denying that adults who grew up in the ’80s, ’90s, and even early 2000s were given different kinds of punishments, many of which verged on abusive. And after a user on TikTok shared a video urging other parents to share the “most unhinged” punishments they received as kids, adults chimed in to share their own stories.
While some aren’t as bad as others (one user commented that their mom fed them “truth salsa” to determine if they were lying, but it was just regular salsa), others shared stories of verbal and even physical abuse they received.
Some of the stories are a lot more lighthearted than others, but most of the adults in the comments under the TikTok are in agreement that things were much different once upon a time.
Some of the punishments would never be accepted today, and for good reason.
In the caption under the user’s TikTok video, she wrote, “Louisiana discipline hits different…y’all ever have some unhinged punishments too?” In the text on the screen, which features a closeup image of the user and nothing more, it says that she was forced to kneel on rice as a form of punishment. At what age that occurred is unclear, but her reveal set off tons of comments from adults, some of whom are parents now themselves, and what they went through as kids.
One adult listed off the punishments they received as a kid: “Forced to take cold showers. Locked in dark rooms. Withholding food. Throwing all of my things away.”
Another commented that, after she cleaned the bathroom as a chore, she would be forced to do what they called the “bread test” for her dad. “My bio dad would make me clean my bathroom and he would use a piece of bread to wipe the toilet down and make me eat it to be sure it was ‘clean enough,'” she wrote.
Someone else shared their own story about being forced to kneel on rice. “Kneeling on rice in a corner while balancing a Bible in my head for 30 minutes to an hour,” she wrote in the comment section. “Every time the Bible fell or I wasn’t kneeling properly, my time would restart.”
One user shared that her mother would force her to wear the same outfit to school every day so she would be bullied. In order to get more clothes from her mother, she had to “earn pieces of clothing back” to atone for whatever she did that was seen as wrong.
Not all of the “unhinged” punishments were so harsh, though. Someone shared that they were forced to write a five-page essay about how they might get a felony because they used a fake ID. Another less harsh form of punishment someone commented was that they were simply grounded.
By comparison, being grounded and forced to “go to your room” is a cakewalk. Some of the users who commented on the video without stories of their own shared that they believe most of the adults with their “unhinged” punishment stories were actually abused. One even commented to wonder why CPS wasn’t involved in the lives of some of the adults when they were kids.
It can be hard to figure out what the right punishment is as a parent. What most understand now, though, is that it is more important than ever to do better than many of our parents did when we were growing up. These punishments prove that.
