Parentingis a skillset all to itself. Caring for, educating and just keeping a child alive are not the easiest things in the world. It goes without saying that knowing how todisciplinea child has been and remains a hot topic.We gathered the best examples ofweird,unusualandcreativepunishments that people experienced as children. So get comfortable as you scroll through, consider taking some notes, upvote your favorites and be sure to comment your own thoughts and stories below.This post may includeaffiliate links.
Parentingis a skillset all to itself. Caring for, educating and just keeping a child alive are not the easiest things in the world. It goes without saying that knowing how todisciplinea child has been and remains a hot topic.
We gathered the best examples ofweird,unusualandcreativepunishments that people experienced as children. So get comfortable as you scroll through, consider taking some notes, upvote your favorites and be sure to comment your own thoughts and stories below.
This post may includeaffiliate links.
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When my father was disappointed with my grades, I was forced to wear hawaiian shirts to school.
When I was 4, my mother was fed up with my stubborn refusal to eat my sandwich at lunch one day. She picked it up, separated the two slices, and stuck it to my face. There was a moment of complete silence as I stopped whining and evaluated what she’d done. After that we were both too collapsed with laughter to be mad at each other.
I was still in the primary grades, when I heard a four letter word at school. Naturally, I actually spoke that word…at home…in front of Mom. I was simply amazed at how quickly a little boy can be picked up, upside down, carried to the kitchen sink…and introduced to the savory flavor of Dove bar soap. Needless to say, I never spoke that word…in front of Mom…again. Mom had a goodly supply of bars of soap…And, she knew how to use them, too.
I had a serious door slamming issue as a teenager when I would fight with my parents. One night we were fighting per usual and I stormed off and slammed my bedroom door behind me.Two minutes later my dad showed up with a screwdriver and took my bedroom door off its hinges. Three weeks as a teenage girl having a doorless bedroom taught me to never ever slam that door again.
Essay writing.My dad is a graduate school professor and he made us write essays about what we had done wrong, why it was wrong, and what we should have done instead. We had to cite sources and use outside information/research. My dad would then read and correct the content and grammar of the essays until they were deemed satisfactory.We were basically grounded until the essay was complete and considered good enough. The worse the punishment, the longer the essay and the harder he critiqued it.For example, you left the dishes in the sink after being told way too many times? Pretty soon you were writing a short essay about germs and proper food handling, etc.
My dad made us all go to the back of a 45minute line at the theme park because i was being impatient and bratty.Would do similar things, if anyone complained about dinner or how long it took to cook they would eat after everyone else.
Being forced to wear my mother’s clothes.From the time I was 11, until I moved out of my parent’s house, I had the fortune of wearing the exact same size as my mother. Great for those “I need something that looks professional/adult” moments, horrible for my own personal fashion sense. One Christmas, we were going over to one of their friends houses for a Christmas party.As a 14 year old, I wanted to wear jeans, one because they were comfy, and two because they were the last clean bottoms I had left. My father refused to let me wear jeans because it wasn’t such a casual event and we should dress nice for the occasion, since I had no “proper” clean clothes of my own, I had to wear one of my mother’s outfits.We get to the party, and everyone but my family is wearing jeans.I promptly tell my father that I wasn’t speaking to him for the rest of the night, and set about mingling with the other guests and end up having a thought provoking conversation with someone who seemed close to my age, until they said something that just clicked in my head so I asked how old they were. They responded that they were a Freshman in College. I was both happy and proud that I was able to hold a conversation with someone 4–5 years my senior, until i asked how old they thought I was…“Forty-four.” came the first reply as my ego took a huge hit. My Mother was 49 at the time, and I was 14!“Married.” Another arrow straight in my wounded ego.“Two kids.” My ego now thoroughly deflated, I politely excused myself from the conversation to go over to my father and tell him that I would not be speaking to him again for-ev-er. It didn’t last forever, but I never let him live it down.
Forced to smell dog breath. Because “If we have to deal with the filth from your mouth, you have to deal with the filth from its mouth"It sounds funny, and it is funny looking back on it…but good god it was not funny then. I begged for almost anything else.
When I was about 12 and my brother was 10, we got in trouble for something, I can’t even remember. We lived in Washington state and it was wet and rainy. We had a bug woodpile in the back yard.My dad told us to move the entire woodpile about 15 feet away. Lots of slugs and bugs were in it. When we were done he came to look at it.He said, “I don’t like it here, move it back.” We were so pissed. It took us all day.
My parents would make my older brother and sister chose one of the Encyclopedias, turn to a random page, and start copying everything down until my parents told them to stop.
I had to write an apology letter for destroying a neighbor’s mailbox, then I had to ‘help’ them fix it. All i did was dig a hole and our other neighbor did the rest and I had to watch to see how much of a pain it would be to fix breaking something.
So, my mom would make me write sentences. Yep. Sentences in cursive saying “I will not do blah blah blah ever again” in cursive in the smallest writing I could muster at my young age and I would have to fill out an entire 80 page college ruled notebook for my groundation to be complete. Now mind you, the things I did were minor things. Like I made too much cake for a birthday party, Sentences. Made slime in the bathroom and it went well? Sentences. Got locked out of car? SENTENCES. No matter what I did, I had to write a whole goddamn notebook’s worth of sentences. It’s a wonder on how I passed English class without screaming out “If I need to write an entire god dang notebook’s worth of sentences, I swear to whatever god there is… Someone is dying and it most likely won’t be me!”I honestly can’t look at a number 2 pencil and a notebook the same again.
My father was newly married to my stepmom, so I must have been 12 or 13 at the time. She was always running to my dad with ‘stories’ to get me into trouble, so I honestly can’t remember what I was supposedly being punished for. Back in those days, 78rpm records were still in vogue. I had quite a large collection, mainly of Elvis.My punishment was, I was to stand with my hands raised at my sides until they were horizontal. Every time I lowered my arms, my dad would break one of the records. I stood, without lowering my arms for almost 3 hours. Eventually my dad took pity on me (or admired my stamina) and just took the top record to break, then said the punishment was over. Thanks for the A2A, Allamdas.
My sisters and I would have to memorize passages from Shakespeare together. It was horrible to be fighting and then sit together for half an hour or more memorizing and reciting until my dad returned. One wrong word and he’d leave us for a while. Probably the worst part is it made me hate Shakespeare. I’ve had corporal punishment and all that but this stuck out.
When my dad was a teenager, if he didn’t clean his room when his mother told him to, she would empty the contents of his room on to the front lawn for him to discover when he would get home from school.
I hate this one so much. So i think i was in fourth grade at the time and i had a little brother it was around Christmas time and we were wrapping presents. i saw a paper on the table with nothing on it so i drew a Christmas drawing. i showed my parents and they liked it at first until my brother (he was 6 at the time) and he came running and said that it was his paper and i drew on it. we had many other pieces of paper in the house so i said id go grab him one.instead my parents stopped me and put one of my Christmas presents in the fire. They also forced me to watch it burn. All for drawing on a blank piece of paper.
My mum kicked me out when I was 15 for using her cup to make a drink.Myself & my brother were painting our room and I went downstairs, made myself a drink, didn’t wash the cup & went back upstairs. When my mum came in from work she asked who had used her cup. I owned up and she smacked me round the head and then (through gritted teeth) told me that I should never NEVER do that again.Later that evening when I was eating she jumped across the room shouted that I was muttering about her, pulled her arm back as far as she could and let fly. I jumped up, called her a psycho and asked what was wrong with her - to which she told me to get out. I slept on friends floors, in a greenhouse for 3 months, in a car and on the streets until An older friend let me stay at his. In the 25 years since I still haven’t really worked out what went on that evening.
I was “off privacy”. No electronics allowed. When i went home from school i had to sit in a chair in the corner. I wasn’t allowed to speak or move and i could go to sleep only when told to. I had a specific time for the shower/bathroom and if i took longer they would bust in. I had a tracker so they made sure all i did was home->school->home. For a month all I was allowed to do was sit in a chair, that was REAL weird lmao.
Not sure how unique it was. But we would always be grounded from our rooms not to our rooms. It was the worst, you dont realise how much is in your room until you arent allowed to go in it.
My father hated me, and was an alcoholic. ( really hated himself)at about 10 yeas old I had a problem with spelling at school and my father found the report from school of my failed grade. My mother was out shopping that morning.my father was drinking early that morning and told me to get a roll of toilet paper. Had me strip to underwear. Made me get on the floor and ,he would say the words from my test. I was given a pencil to write the words on the toilet paper. If I ripped the paper I got a strap across my back. If I miss spelled a word I was strapped. So, of course I was beat for a couple of hours on and off. My mother finally came home and dropped the groceries picking me up. In those days some cruel parents got away with mrder.I received years of abse, The only one of 5 children that got beat, the selected one. At 15 yrs old my father smacked my mom across the face and was yelling. I stood up and told him this is it. You will never touch my mother again. I was punched in the stomach and hit with his belt across the face after standing back up again. I grabbed the belt and said this is done. If you touch my mother o brothers I will stab you in your sleep many times.( of course I would neve do that but he didn’t know that).I made the choice to break the cycle of ab*se.
My mom did not have patience to keep telling us the same thing too many times. If she had to tell us about 3 times to clean our room—three strikes we’re out. She would clean it. But what that meant was that she would bring in several, large black trash bags and gather up a huge portion of our toys which were on the floor out of place (with the exception of books and the stuffed animals we slept with). The only toys that remained were the ones put away. She would put all our toys she’d gathered in the attic for the month. It was like Christmas when she finally brought them down—and we knew next time that we’d better keep our room clean. She only had to do this maybe 2–3 times in our whole childhood.
I threw a ton of glitter on my brother when he was in the bath tub. My parents bought a giant bag of glitter and dumped it on my bed. They made me count it and would not give me my phone or laptop back until I did.
My parents didn’t know what to do with me bc I was being a prick, so they took literally everything out of my room including my bed, it was weird and I remember sitting in the corner with my teddy. I was hiding it so they wouldn’t take that too. I was the first born so they’ve learned.
When I was in second or third grade (my brother was a year younger) my brother and I were walking around the house with the big pretzel rods hanging out of our mouths and pretending we were smoking. My dad came home from work while we were doing this and as soon as he saw us turned right around and left the house.In minutes he was back with a pack of cigarettes. He sat us both down in the kitchen and put a cigarette in each of in our mouths. He said, “You wanna smoke? Go ahead and smoke!” And he lit them. I was bawling. “No, I’m sorry!” But it was smoke or get a spanking. So I exhaled through the cigarette.He said, “No, you have to breathe in first!” Through my tears and sobbing I inhaled. My lungs were on fire! 🔥 It hurt sooooooooooo bad. That was all it took.He asked, “Are you ever going to smoke again?” I cried, “Noooooooo!”
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I’ll never forget this one.When I was about 11–12 my mother thought I’d eaten one of her lollies, so she made me throw everything up so she could search my vomit for them.She had a jar of sweets for Christmas, and one day she gathered me and my 2 siblings around it. “There was a chocolate on the very top. Where is it? Which one of you ate it?” Each of us denied eating such a thing. At first she made us all sit in seperate rooms and face the corners for 40 minutes, until someone could confess that they did it. We never did.So she moved onto something else, she made us all sit in a row, and gave us each a large cup of salt water. “Drink it. Drink it all”. We each nailed down the disgusting, dehydrating, sodium filled cup, untill we started gagging and feeling ill. My sister vomited first. Absolutely everywhere. The immense amount of salt made her throat hurt, absolutely agonising pain, she was crying as my mum searched through her vomit scattered all over the floor. My sister hadn’t eaten the lolly. Next came my brother, also projectile vomited. She did the same, search through his vomit, to find absolutely nothing.I rarely vomit, its very hard for me to do so. She forced me to down another bottle of salt water. Still no vomiting. While I was drinking the second glass, my dad came home to see what was taking place in his home. My parents got in an argument, and we found out it was my FATHER who took the chocolate. I eventually vomitted, and was consistently doing so for 2 days, absolutely dehydrated and bedridden.Never got an apology from my mother, none of my siblings did.
When I was 5 or 6 (def old enough to know better) I bit my older sister directly on the stomach. Left top and bottom teeth imprints it wasn’t something minor. Mom grabbed a dog collar and leash then tied me to a doorknob for several hours. “If you act like a dog you get treated like a dog”.
When I reach my teen years, my mom dropped a lot of the spanking issues. Now that does not mean the spanking stopped completely but got a whole lot fewer of them. My mom created a new form of punishments, and she called it the Mirror punishments.The concept of these punishments was, whatever you did to someone that is consider wrong, she would do it back to you in way that a person could only imagine. I was caught stealing once, she went in and took a few items I at the time consider valuable. To make that point that stealing was a bad idea. Now my siblings and I were always doing stuff to each other. So as a joke, my next oldest sister was sleeping in a chair decide to tie her feet to that chair and left. Well my mom found out about that, and she was mad! So when I got home from school, she put me in a chair for 3 hours and was told not to moved. She used a strapped to keep me there. Not a fun event but I did not do that again!!
I am one of five siblings, I can only imagine what it was like for my parents to load us up, along with the dog, to go anywhere. This punishment was referred to as road work. When my father couldn’t take the mayhem any longer he would ask if we wanted to do road work. I’ve heard of parents threatening this but Dad did it.On the way home from church I was misbehaving and Dad kicked me out at the bottom of the hill leading to our home. I was and am stubborn as a mule and was not about to walk home. I sat on a large rock and waited. After some time my Mum came down, mortified, to retrieve me. A neighbor had called asking if she knew her little girl was sitting on a rock at the end of the road. I was about five at the time, and this was the end of road work for me.One of my brothers and darling sister misbehaved several months later and were both given the boot. We were out in the country and Dad drove until I couldn’t see them anymore. Big mistake Dadio! I honestly thought they were lost to me. The noise that I made put my siblings misbehavior to shame. Let me just leave it at screaming and tears, please use your imagination. When I couldn’t be shut up, Dad turned around and we picked them up. This was the end of road work. The rest of our punishments were the norm, spanking when we were really little (for major infractions-I can’t help it playing with matches is fun) restriction etc. For any wonderers, yes, road work was brought up years later in therapy.
Washing wall corners with tiny brushes and old tooth brushes because we were playing football kicking the ball to the wall. We deserved it and we loved it.
My a**hole step father used to make my sister and I write sentences when we got in trouble. I remember I hardly even knew him and he showed up at our apartment one day and said “you’re on restriction”. I was MAYBE 10 years old. I kind of laughed because I had no idea what he meant, I had never been told that before, using those words. He would sit there and watch to make sure we didn’t write one word down the page at a time, that we actually wrote the entire sentence instead. I mean we had to write thousands at a time. He was a horrible person and mean to us and my mom, their fighting kept us up most nights. But that’s definitely a whole other story.
I was grounded for six months for bringing home a “D” in math in 4th Grade. The consequence was that I had to come home from school, go to my room, and study each day. Unfortunately, it didn’t really help my math.I do remember my Dad working with me once on my times tables. He got so frustrated that he sent me to my room and that was the last time he helped me with my school work.Reading was also a challenge but I found that if I divided words into pieces/sections, they would stay straight in my mind. If you asked me my left from my right, I could not tell you, without some familiar orienting device, until I was thirteen.The thing I did do in my room over those six months was to read the entire set of World Book Encyclopedias and the entire Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. When I was tested at the end of fourth grade, I was at a twelfth grade reading level.In seventh grade we had a read-a-thon. In a month, I read and wrote reports on over a hundred books and thirteen thousand pages.Fourth grade was a tough year. I went through a custody battle with my parents. I had to memorize all fifty states and multiplication tables. I learned that memorizing numbers is not my thing. I still have trouble keeping a phone number in my head. In fifth grade, I had a teacher pull out plastic cubes and show me how multiplication actually worked. After that it was easy.My school career was spent day dreaming. My teacher would say something and then my imagination would fly off finding connections between the information the teacher had just given and all these other pieces of information I had in my mental bank. Math led to thoughts on history, then that would lead to science, then geography. Everything seemed like an inter-connected web to me and I REALLY struggled to stay in the present topic being lectured on.My six month grounding was a blessing in disguise. It ignited a love of reading and a thirst for knowledge that has stayed with me until today.
Mom used to put Tabasco on her finger then paint my gums and tounge for swearing when in Grade School. Now, I love hot sauce and once when I was in my early thirties, I got a free Reuben Sandwich for drinking a jigger full of Tabasco. Thanks MOM ! Miss You.
My sister and I stole our mom’s car one night but didn’t know it was leaking oil. We were kids, 13 & 14, and that car we went joy-riding in literally dropped its engine. It was our mom’s ONLY means of transportation to work from a rural town. A single mother, she hung our missing dad’s wide belt on the door-hook and said: “It’s gonna take me a long time to figure this out, but when I do: Expect an a**-whooping. Could be tomorrow, could be a few weeks from now, but you girls will learn to never burn me again.”That was way worse than any grounding we’d ever had. But it was effective: her not knowing how she was going to make it to work to care for us, and us not knowing when she might decide on the whooping day kept us on our toes and our best behavior. And nope: we didn’t, despite our best efforts, get out of the punishment. But it was less harsh, I believe, because she waited. She also garnered the effect of insecurity, thus empathy. Eggshells are hell.
I would say when I got caught going outside instead of bathroom (#1).I got my a** whipped with a orange plastic hot wheels racetrack piece and put in a diaper and ground to house rest of the day (step-mom).
When I was about 7, I was in the gymnastics school team in my school. I wasn’t naturally flexible but my parents wanted me to be more flexible so I could be better at the sport. I failed my math test and for my punishment, my parents overstretched me to the point where I was crying. It was one of the most painful moments in my life.
I had to kneel facing a wall while pulling my ears and if my ears weren’t red enough when they came to check on me then I had to stay there even longer.
Not me, but if my wife or her sister slammed the door, their mom would make them close it softly ten times. They say that was the hardest thing for them to do when mad. Neither her nor her sister slams doors shut today.
I was in a ‘stay in my room all the time because hanging out with my mom sucked’ stage. So when I did something wrong, my mom grounded me to the living room. I was only allowed in my room to change clothes and sleep, and I couldn’t go to bed before 9. My mother is an evil genius. It worked like a charm, she only had to do it twice and I straightened right up!
I have always loved music. When cds were still relevant, ipods were barely known, Pandora and Spotify didn’t exist, the time when it was Napster vs. Limewire. My mother took all my music away for a month. On the third week, she gave me one cd back. Deftones' White Pony. After she gave everything back, I got to rediscover all my favorites. It was an interesting punishment and the best reward for enduring.
It didn’t actually end up happening, but it was threatened. When I was 12, I got in a fight with my parents. My mom told me that if I didn’t go to my room, she would open the window and yell that I liked this celebrity that I was obsessed with at the time. (You know, 12 year olds). 😂I still think this was the strangest punishment idea ever. As a side note, my mom got a little bit too involved in this (which was ridiculous of me in the first place) and one time literally bought me Valentine’s Day gifts “from that celebrity.” I don’t blame her though. She just wanted to make me happy. :) Still, thinking back on this, I’m glad that my awkward preteen stage is in the past…just cringe. 😬
Here’s one I never forgot.When I was 15/16, I was doing homework for my APUSH on laptop while listening to music. Keep in mind, I need music to concentrate because I live in a loud household.It was a Saturday morning, 8 AM, then my mother woke up. She complained how I couldn’t listen to music while I was doing homework because it was distracting for me. (My volume wasn’t even loud, it was like 20–30%) I just put back my headphones because I needed to concentrate more on my academics since the APUSH test was coming up. But when she saw me put my headphones on, she yanked my headphones out of my laptop, cut up my earphones and took my laptop. Then it escalated to the point when I said (and regret saying): “You’re more distracting than the music that I’m listening to”. Then she proceeded to take my phone away and then following this, it was when I ran away from home for the first time. She called the cops, but I returned home after sleeping in parks and train tracks four days later. I would had stayed out longer if I brought more money (I only had $50). I didn’t get back my laptop for 2 weeks and my phone back for 3 months.I am 18 now, I am able to listen to music while doing homework. But after this event, I have lost my trust on my mother, as I think it showed her character. We are on speaking terms, but not enough to become closer. Although things have gotten better, my mother still restricts me from doing certain things like driving (I had a permit for 3 years, yet I never taken the driving test) and I can’t invite my friends over to my house because I fear what my mother would act or say. I’m also gay and she’s extremely homophobic and I haven’t came out because I fear her reaction.In my eyes I can’t cut her off because she needs money (I work a part time job at UC Berkeley) and I have a brother with special needs. I can’t leave my brother because my mother has forced him to hate me for leaving to college, it was hard to gain back his trust. But once I graduate from Cal, I never going back to that place. I’m paying for her community college classes for her to become an accountant, so she can get an opportunity to join the workforce. But if she continues relying on me for financially support, I will have to cut her off once I start paying loans, bills and rent.
My parents mostly punished me through time-outs, taking away priviledges, washing my mouth out with soap or the occasional spanking when I needed it.One weird punishment was when I was a little kid. Sometimes when I was throwing a tantrum, I would start biting people. My mother’s response was to bite me back (unorthadox, yet effective!) I learned to stop doing that pretty quickly!
When I was a young child, pre-kindergarten, my brother and I found a pack of cigarettes in a kitchen drawer. They had come in the mail as a free promotion, which was not uncommon 50 years ago. My parents didn’t smoke, and my brother and I certainly didn’t like yucky smoke, so we broke them up into little pieces. My mother had been saving them for a friend who smoked, and she was upset about us taking her things. She didn’t know what we were doing with them, and presumed we wanted to smoke them. So she made us stick our heads in the fireplace, lit up a broken piece of cigarette, and made us smoke it. Besides the smoke and coughing, all the little pieces of tobacco flakes got into our mouths. She said “that will teach you”. Well, it sure did. Because to this day 55+ years later, I have never smoked, can’t stand smoking, and still remember the taste of all those little pieces of tobacco.
My parents told me that they were gonna make me go to jail because I wasn’t obedient enough or some sh*t. Think they had said something along the lines of “Hmmmm… Not listening to parents,” then listed things people go to fuing Jail for.I was maybe 14 at the youngest, it was like a month or 2 ago.sent a great fking message. “If you don’t obey us you will go to jail.”also they accused me of shoplifting from Sephora because I ordered something online and the wrong thing came in, and it happened to be a foundation or concealer or something makeup related that apparently ONLY Sephora carried and then threatened to take me to jail at 12 am (this was right before telling me being disobedient was highly illegal)So my punishment was being threatened with jail time for being a fking teenager.I think it was cuz I bought a phone WITH MY OWN FKING MONEY.
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