Author:
Jeff D
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Date Posted: 15:40:39 04/12/25 Sat
Hi Laura,
I experienced much the same thing growing up. My sisters and I were all born in the 70's and most of our cousins too. I got my last parental spanking at the age of 10 and it was the same for my male cousins give or take a couple years. But in those younger years I probably got around three spankings for every one that my sisters received. However my sisters continued getting spankings long after mine stopped. From about 13 to 17 they seemed to get a spanking every two to three months. Sometimes more often, sometimes less. This pattern was the same with our cousins.
Many years ago this conversation came up during a family reunion. The overall consensus was that the typical boy engages in much more problematic behaviors when younger compared to girls of the same age. Things like fighting, breaking stuff, and outright disobedience. On the flip side, the typical girl becomes more of a problem as a teenager. Issues like disobedience- often in the form of a negative attitude, backtalk, or word games / technicalities- testing boundaries from acceptable outfits to missing curfew with incredulous excuses and selfish or rude behaviors that leave everyone else in the household irritated- such as hogging the bathroom, using all the hot water, constantly being on the phone (much more of an issue in the pre-cellphone era of landlines) and not doing their chores or doing them so poorly they've made more work.
I was definitely not a perfectly behaved teenager myself, but with two sisters close to me in age causing our parents more trouble, I came off looking like an angel. I know this is a lot of stereotyping, but the stereotypes exist for a reason and while there are plenty of exceptions, there are also a lot of people who fall right in line with them. I also think things have changed or are changing for many because I didn't have anywhere near the trouble with my daughters when they were teens. But I also didn't try to control them as much. Which I think is the more unspoken part of this; parents have often been more strict and controlling with their teenager daughters as compared to their sons.
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