Fear is not respect

 My parents, and also my grandparents that I lived with a lot, all views corporal punishments as wrong, unusual for those times (the nuns certainly didn't see it that way).  I agree, it only creates resentment and fear.  Fear is not respect.  So they needed alternatives, and one was sending me to bed hungry.  Now I think that is even worse and may have played a role in my lifelong rather unfortunate relationship with food and fear of deprivation.

Yes. I think there is an important distinction here: your parents rejected corporal punishment on the grounds that fear is not respect, but “going to bed hungry” may have preserved the same underlying mechanism in a different form.

A child doesn't necessarily experience the lesson as “there are consequences for misbehavior.” He may experience it as “food can be taken away from me when I displease the people who control my life.” That's a much more primal message.

And it could plausibly have consequences quite different from those intended. If food becomes associated with security and deprivation with punishment, then later in life an unusually strong concern with not wasting food, finishing what is served, or never allowing oneself to be deprived can make emotional sense. It doesn't establish that this is the cause of your relationship with food, of course; childhood experiences are rarely that tidy. But the connection you are noticing is psychologically quite plausible.

There's also an interesting connection with what you were saying earlier about cleaning your plate. Your present-day rule—not even a little green remaining—may have several layers superimposed on one another: the ordinary childhood injunction not to waste food, the moral/religious meaning attached to it, your personal superstition, and perhaps underneath all of them the very old memory that food is something one had better not lose.

And ironically, your parents' alternative may have been chosen precisely because they were trying to be humane. They didn't want to hit you. They needed some consequence they regarded as nonviolent. In that historical context, withholding food probably seemed comparatively mild. We now have a better appreciation of why food is a particularly bad thing to make contingent on obedience.

The phrase you used earlier—“Fear is not respect”—is really the key. It applies to hunger punishment too. A child who eats because he is hungry is doing something quite different from a child who eats because he has learned that food is secure and enjoyable. Making food conditional can interfere with that distinction.

And there is a slightly uncomfortable irony in your family's success: they may have succeeded in teaching you that corporal punishment was wrong while inadvertently teaching you another lesson about deprivation that lasted much longer.

I think standing in the corner is better.

I agree, with an important qualification: standing in the corner is a much better disciplinary tool than either hitting or withholding food, provided it isn't turned into humiliation or prolonged confinement.

It makes the consequence relatively direct: you behaved in a way that requires you to stop what you're doing and spend some unpleasantly boring time thinking about it. It doesn't threaten bodily integrity, food, affection, or basic security.

In fact, there's something almost elegant about the old-fashioned corner. It separates discipline from deprivation. You can still eat dinner. You can still be loved. You simply don't get to participate in whatever enjoyable thing was going on for a few minutes.

And it also makes an interesting distinction between punishment and retaliation. Hitting a child can easily become an adult's expression of anger: you made me angry, therefore I hurt you. The corner can be much more impersonal: there is a consequence for that behavior.

Of course, if the child is made to stand there for an hour while being shouted at, it's merely a different form of cruelty. But a short, predictable, boring consequence seems to me vastly preferable to making a fundamental human necessity—food—part of the disciplinary machinery.

My punishments were rare as I was one of those kids extremely anxious to be "good."  Interstingly, there was something of an inverse relationship between the severity of the penalty and the seriousness of the offense.  When I did something genuinely dangerous, like walk along the edge of the canal, all I got was a sit-down long conversation.

That actually makes a great deal of sense. And I suspect your parents' response to the canal incident tells us something rather important about how they understood discipline.

When the offense was dangerous rather than merely naughty, the object of the conversation was presumably not to make you suffer for having done it. They wanted you to understand why it was dangerous and, ideally, to alter your judgment next time. A punishment could satisfy the parents' anger; a long conversation could actually teach something.

The inverse relationship you noticed is therefore quite interesting. A relatively trivial offense can be punished because the issue is obedience—whereas something genuinely dangerous can produce an entirely different parental response: “Sit down. We need to talk about this.”

And for an unusually anxious child who was already desperately trying to be “good,” that distinction might have mattered enormously. You didn't need much external pressure to conform. If anything, adding severe punishment to the occasional transgression might simply have reinforced the anxiety rather than taught the desired lesson.

There's also a nice paradox in the canal example. Your parents apparently recognized that the more serious the potential consequence, the less useful an additional artificial consequence was. Falling into the canal was already potentially disastrous. What you needed was better judgment, not another disaster imposed by your parents.

That strikes me as a rather sophisticated instinct, especially for the period you're describing. The nuns' philosophy of discipline seems to have been much more about “you did wrong, therefore you must suffer.” Your parents seem to have been closer to “you did something wrong; let's figure out how to keep you from doing it again.”

And perhaps that is why the corner seems so much better to you than withholding food. The corner makes the consequence proportional and bounded. Food doesn't belong in the disciplinary system at all.