Heard on the net - The ol’ soap in the mouth trick
Posted
January 4, 2008 at
3:06 pm by
Jessica
I remember, when I was a kid, a neighbor boy had the mouth of drunken sailor and at age 6, his fundamentally religious mother was not amused. It was the first time I witnessed somebody punishing another human with a cleanser. This was the 70s, so I believed she used Zest bar soap. It wasn’t pretty and it didn’t stop the kid from cursing up a storm at any given moment outside his home. It was gross, but he lived to tell the tale and continue to be a little jerk. I actually wish his mother did the soap punishment more often, because the kid was bad news and he was super creepy. His mother was really nice, but I think he was screwed up because his mom was too busy praying and making him read the Bible than because of the soap in the mouth.
…but I digress. On MotheringDotCommune, I read about an instance where Mother A was at Mother B’s house, picking up Mother A’s child from a play date. Mother A asked her kid to pick up and she said no. Mother A then marches the child into Mother B’s kitchen and squirts soap in her mouth.
Whoa! That mutha means business!!
This got the mothers on the forum into a tizzy. From the preponderance of deciding whether or not you can dictate what punishments parents are allowed to use in your home to the suggestion to call family services on the mother and whether or not that constituted child abuse and potentially removing the child from the mother’s care. As if they don’t have anything better to worry about.
Tags: child-abuse, child-behavior, DCFS, department-of-children-and-family-services, MDC, motheringdotcommune, Parenting, picking-up, playdates, putting-soap-in-a-childs-mouth |
7 Responses to “Heard on the net - The ol’ soap in the mouth trick”
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1. Allison said:
January 6, 2008 @ 7:00 pm
I don’t see a problem with the soap in the mouth. It’s better than backhanding the tot in his face at the lady’s house. That, I’d be uncomfortable with.
And the CPS comment was way overboard!
**Now, on an off-subject side-note: Holy crap! That community board is nuts! It’s chock-full of anti-vaccing, anti-circing, anti-formula, community-bed-sharing hippies! I don’t think I’d be welcome there at all. One person even had it in her signature that she ate her own placenta, “and you can too”. Where’s Rod Serling when you need him?**
2. Leta said:
January 21, 2008 @ 9:25 pm
Yes, that community board is a little nuts. I stopped going there when the admin stopped lactating women from organizing a breast milk donation for a member who had *just* had a baby and had to have a masectomy due to cancer. That woman has since passed away.
3. Preesi said:
January 24, 2008 @ 8:58 pm
JESSICA!!!!
I think I broke the Jon & Kate thread!
I posted a rather large post and POOF! I think I killed it…
Help!
4. Allison said:
January 24, 2008 @ 10:10 pm
Oh. Thank. God.
That Jon and Kate thread was getting looooooong.
I was honestly astonished that it surpassed the Pit Bull topic in the number of replies.
It took the Pit Bull thread over a year and a half to reach 200 comments, and only 3 months to reach 300 comments at Jon and Kate.
zzzzzzz…………
5. prescott said:
January 24, 2008 @ 10:41 pm
Hey, Allison, can it. Those rabid fans help pay the bills around here.
6. preesi said:
January 25, 2008 @ 9:55 am
Jessica?
The Kate Board is broken again!
It wasnt my fault this time…
7. Sally said:
January 26, 2008 @ 9:29 am
I put soap in my mouth twice a day. It is called TOOTHPASTE. Seriously, I do not think the soap would really hurt the child, but I would never do this to any child. I think it is completely without dignity, kindness or any other excusable description. I would try to think of some other form of teaching this lesson.