Spanked!

Link Nicoll recounts her trauma:

Last week on our summer vacation, my husband and I did the unthinkable: We spanked our three-year-old son. We are baby boomers. We are not supposed to spank. That was something our parents did to us. No, we, the enlightened generation, are supposed to nurture our child's inner desires. We're supposed to allow him to get in touch with his true self.

The problem is our son has been getting a little too wild...

We got back on the highway and for the first time in hours, our child was still. Two hours later, when we reached our destination, we realized that the rest of our trip had been unusually cheerful. The spanking had not hurt him, and it had not hurt us. The hard part was realizing that maybe, just maybe, a type of discipline once used by our parents had actually worked.