RICHARDSON: A switch and a tree branch

I found out last week that my dear mother, gone but not forgotten, was a serial child abuser. Yep, she was the abuser and I was the abusee.

Adrian Peterson, the Minnesota Vikings star running back, turned himself in after a Texas grand jury filed charges against him for whipping his son with a switch (sometimes called a tree branch in the media). Now he’s out of the line- up for an indefinite period of time while the charges are sorted out. Bad timing coming after the domestic violence case with Ray Rice. Teams, I think, now may overreact.

Peterson admits to whipping his son. On his Twitter page he said, “I have to live with the fact that when I disciplined my son the way I was disciplined as a child, I caused an injury that I never intended or thought would happen.”

My mom never said she was sorry. When the time came for a whipping, my Ma Dear would send me outside to retrieve an appropriate switch. If I brought back one too small, I’d have to go get a bigger one. Did she leave marks? You bet she did. However, in my thought bubble I was hoping she would just get it over with. I’d rather her whip me than lecture me. And please don’t say, “I’m so disappointed in you.”

And oh, do not act out in church. She would grab an ear and off we’d go and no amount of pleading could save me. It was on and she always won.

I was trained and trained well. I hated it when she’d say, “Don’t back talk me, boy.” That was her way of telling me to “shut up.” I always knew who was boss. Did I like it? Of course not. I didn’t get my way, but I got something much more valuable: Control. I knew what I could do and when I could do it. And I knew what not to do. Did I test those limits? Read the third paragraph. I know I grew up in a different time, but Dr. Spock wasn’t big around my house.

Did I whip my sons? Yep, but I used a belt. Good switches were too hard to find. Could DFACS have been called? Certainly, but as I wrote more than 20 years ago, I am the king of my castle. It was my responsibility to discipline my children and I was willing to stand before a judge and tell him just that if I had needed to.

I don’t mean to sound like a hard ass, but raising two boys isn’t easy, and if you don’t start disciplining them early in their lives they will grow like an uncontrollable weed. And that’s what we see too much of today. That’s why we have parents heading up to the school acting like idiots because a teacher told little Johnny to sit and he refused. They don’t have to mind at home, so why should they have to obey in school?

I am far from the perfect parent. I made a lot of mistakes. I have apologized to my children on any number of occasions. They know I love them. And one of the reasons they know I love them is because I cared enough to discipline them. Like me and my mother, I hope they came to understand that I was preparing them for the world they would have to face as men.

There are studies that point to the opposite. That say spanking is detrimental, particularly to black boys. Read Steven Holmes’ take at www.cnn.com/2014/09/18/opinion/holmes-spanking-black-community/index.html?hpt=hp_t3.

Ben Parks was one of my high school coaches. He was a legend. He made more men during his career than most people have hairs on their heads. At the time we thought he was the meanest man on Earth, but it was all a mind game to form us into men.

Parks used to walk the halls with a black plastic bat. If you were in the halls and you should not have been, we all thought he would use it. Come to think about it, I never saw him use that bat. Parks was a master motivator in the same mold as “Duck” Richardson.

I don’t know how the case with Peterson will work out. He’s got to accept responsibility for his actions as a father and admit, which he has, that he went too far. Should he face the wrath of the fans for trying to do something many fathers fail to do? We see the havoc undisciplined children cause every day, and if we continue to spare the rod, we will reap what we sow. The Proverbs say, “For the Lord corrects those he loves, just as a father corrects a child in whom he delights.”

Charles E. Richardson is The Telegraph’s editorial page editor. He can be reached at 478-744-4342 or via email at crichardson@macon.com. Tweet@crichard1020.

This story was originally published September 21, 2014 at 12:00 AM with the headline "RICHARDSON: A switch and a tree branch ."