Why being smacked as a child can still affect you decades later

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Having brought up three now-adult sons, the closest I got to reprimanding them was putting them on a “naughty step” when they were young, sending them to their rooms, grounding them and banning them from the Xbox.

The mere thought of hitting them is alien to me, and I’m glad that physical punishment such as a smacked bottom or slap on the thigh is a lot less socially accepted than it once was.

However, for some adults who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, being smacked by their parents was sadly quite common. And while it can be tempting to dismiss it with the explanation that “smacking was something everyone did then”, therapists say the fact that something was socially accepted does not necessarily mean it had no emotional impact.

Why saying “everyone did it then” doesn’t tell the whole story

“I have difficulty with ‘everyone did it then’ as an answer to why people used to smack their children,” explains psychotherapist Alex Iga Golabek, founder of the Ego Therapy psychotherapy company.

“Social norms can give us context, but they don’t make an individual child’s experience disappear. Adults didn’t need twenty-first-century neuroscience to notice that children cried, recoiled or became frightened when they were threatened with being hit. Good parenting reaches towards the child, not away from them towards social norms.

“It is also possible for a parent to feel genuinely powerless in the moment. They may be overwhelmed by their own anger, fear, frustration or helplessness and temporarily lose sight of the child as a separate, vulnerable human being for whom they are responsible. But feeling powerless isn’t the same as being powerless. The adult still holds the power and has access to choices the child doesn’t.”

Although parents may have excused their actions by believing they were simply using harmless discipline, Golabek points out that the power imbalance between an adult and child is important.

Why being hit by a parent can be so confusing for a child

“Smacking is hitting. It’s physical violence, and because the parent holds all of the power in that relationship, I see it as an abuse of that power,” she says.

“A child can’t meaningfully defend themselves, hit back, leave the relationship or decide they’ll find somewhere else to live. That powerlessness matters when we think about why somebody can still be affected by being smacked decades later.

“For a child, the person who is supposed to provide safety is also the person causing pain and fear. That’s an incredibly confusing position to occupy.”

A child may also be told that the punishment is an expression of love or that it was somehow their own fault.

“The child may be told, ‘I’m doing this because I love you’, ‘it’s for your own good’ or ‘you made me do it’, while their lived, bodily experience is telling them: this hurts; I’m frightened; I’m not safe,” she explains.

“A child can’t afford to interpret that contradiction in quite the same way an adult can. An adult who is hit can think, ‘You hurt me, what you did was wrong and I can leave.’ A child is dependent on the person who hurt them for food, shelter, love, belonging and safety.”

Sometimes, she says, it can therefore feel psychologically safer for a child to distrust their own response rather than distrust the people they depend upon.

Why your body can still react decades later

So why can an experience from childhood continue to affect someone 30, 40 or even 50 years later?

Psychologist Rachel Needle explains that the body can retain responses to experiences from the past, even when we consciously understand what happened.

“Someone can be 55, understand exactly what happened and why, and still feel their stomach drop when someone raises their voice, or gets angry, or makes a sudden movement toward them. Their adult brain may know they’re safe, but their body can react before they’ve even had time to think about it,” she explains.

People may also minimise their experiences because physical punishment was so normalised for previous generations.

“They might think everyone got hit back then, and it wasn’t abuse, I turned out fine. But something being common doesn’t mean it left no mark. Two children raised in the same household by the same parent can come away from the same kind of discipline feeling very differently about it.”

Importantly, this doesn’t mean that every adult who was smacked as a child will experience lasting trauma.

Why the emotional memory can outlast the physical pain

Needle explains that when physical punishment was frightening, unpredictable, humiliating or part of a wider pattern of harshness, its emotional impact can potentially last much longer than the physical pain itself.

“What stays with someone 30 or 40 years later usually isn’t always the physical pain of being smacked but what that moment meant to them, especially when it came from a parent who was also supposed to be the person who made them feel safe,” she says.

“Children don’t experience discipline the way adults do. They don’t think, oh my parent was overwhelmed and lost their temper, or this is just how people raised kids back then. What lands instead is fear, humiliation, rejection, or the belief that they must have done something really bad to deserve it.”

That belief, she says, can outlast the memory of the physical pain itself.

Why some people remember what happened so vividly

Psychotherapist Giulia Davis, founder of Mycelia Therapy, regularly hears from adult clients who can vividly remember things that happened to them as children, even decades later.

“What people remember most often isn’t always the physical pain. It’s what happens afterward,” she explains.

“People remember the smack, but sometimes what still hurts is the silence that followed. Dinner continued. Everyone acted normal. And as a child, you understood that you were expected to act normal too.”

There can be another layer of confusion when the person who caused the fear is also the person the child depends on for safety.

“Normally, when a child is scared, they run toward the parent. But what happens when