Allan_C.
YaBB God
Women do community, men do civilization.
Posts: 1468
|
|
Re: Real life - nannies bathing and disciplining b
« Reply #4 on: Mar 18th, 2010, 2:26pm » |
Quote Modify
|
These stories remind me of some that I heard when I was living in Asia. As you read them keep in mind that Malaysia and Singapore were both colonized by the Brits and although they are now independent still cherish many of the customs and practices they learned from them. A senior manager of an important company in Malaysia who I got to know quite well told me that when he was growing up he had a nanny at home who washed him and caned him when he was bad. When he went to school in his early teens, a boarding school, matrons used to perform the same functions including caning the boys. He himself employed a nanny at home, in fact two of them, for his boys and they did the same things -- washed and spanked or caned them, among other duties. He thought this practice was necessary for proper upbringing but was best done not by the father or mother. A Singaporean man I knew told me that he had been raised largely by a Chinese nanny who regularly spanked him, and did so well into his teens. He told me this in defense of the Singaporean practice of caning male teen offenders for things like vandalism and other minor crimes. His view was that it worked -- spanking that is -- and when he had kids he would have whomever he hired to help raise them do the same. A Singaporean woman who was in middle management of an insurance company arrived late to a meeting and apologized saying she had had to spank her teenage son because it was the nanny's day off. Another woman, also Singaporean, in the meeting, commiserated with her (mainly for the need to give the nanny a day off). I overheard a conversation between a mother and her son, about age 10 or 11, as they walked from the parking lot to their apartment building with his sister, who was grinning from ear to ear. The mother was chastising her son for some sort of misbehavior and telling him that as soon as they got home she and the nonya (a female Malaysian woman, often a household helper) were going to spank him "until he cried for teasing his sister". The secretary of one of our office managers in Singapore, a young Chinese woman of about 25 who was very slight of build, told me quite casually one day that when she had worked as a nanny she had to use a cane on the boys she cared for because she was too small to spank them. All true stories!
|