So, picture this: a parent trying to lay down the law but realizing the usual tricks just ain’t cutting it. What follows is a bunch of stories that play out like scenes from a sitcom, revealing the weirder, wackier side of parenting. From tackling everyday madness with unconventional tactics to surprising tales of lessons learned, get ready for a crazy ride through the realm of parental creativity. Because when it comes to discipline, turns out a bit of quirkiness might just be the secret sauce.
My dad used to punish me and my sister by taking us to Home Depot and very slowly and meticulously explaining what all the different nuts and bolts were for.
For some reason, my parents allowed my brother and I to have a very basic bow and arrow which we were allowed to shoot at a cardboard box in the backyard. I, being very young and very dumb, crawled into the box while my brother was firing. My parents were not pleased and to demonstrate how dangerous what I had done was, they made me lay on the couch for the whole day and pretend I was in a hospital bed.
I desperately wanted to order WrestleMania. I was a massive Hulk Hogan fan. Well, I was acting like a little sh*t and wouldn’t stop. So, my dad ordered the WrestleMania Pay Per-View. He sat in the living room and watched it and made me sit in the other room where I could just barely hear it but couldn’t see it. He watched the whole d*mn thing and didn’t let me move or ever see the screen. It was just effing brutal.
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.
My father had a unique and effective method of punishment, and I’ve thanked him for it at every opportunity.
If we misbehaved, the default punishment was no TV or computer privileges for a week. This could be anything from name-calling to lying to refusing to walk the dog. A week without entertainment.
But here’s the cool part. We would be absolved of our crimes if we created some work of art for him. He’d accept drawings, or songs, or even dance routines, as long as they weren’t half-a**ed. They all started out terrible, but over time all of us kids developed a real interest in our endeavors and went on to become pretty d*mn decent. I’ve been going to school on a piano scholarship for two years and my sister is a talented ballet dancer.
But the best part is that my dad saved all the work we did over the years and has folders and folders of paintings and drawings along with hours of videotaped performances. My mom says he goes through his collection many times a year.
I was standing in line at a major supermarket and in front of me was a woman and a small girl (about 4), and in front of them was a young mother, with a small boy (about 3). The little boy asked his mother for a candy bar, and was told ‘No’. The little boy then asked for a candy bar again, and he was told ‘No’, again. So at this point, he decided to have a temper tantrum. He threw himself on the ground, cried, screamed, and called his mother a ‘stupid head’, amongst all of the classic tantrum behaviour. So his mother then whispered to the mother standing behind her and they smiled, all while this little boy was hysterical about being denied a candy bar. His mother then took a candy bar from the shelf and put it in her cart. The boy was happy upon witnessing this and his tantrum stopped.
The mother and son then went through the checkout and paid. The mother then turned around and handed the candy bar to the little girl behind her in line. She looked directly at her son and said ‘Children who behave are rewarded, and children who throw tantrums and embarrass their mothers get nothing’. She turned around on her heels and walked away from the boy who was left silent with his jaw lying on the floor. A bunch of us broke out in applause. It was brilliant.
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
I remember specifically getting caught drinking in the garage when I was 16. My dad was PISSED and I had to write a 20-page essay about what the consequences of teenage drinking were to my 16-year-old brain, how much legal trouble I could have gotten into, and how much legal trouble my parents could have gotten into for allowing teenage drinking.
Huge pain, but it got us thinking about topics we usually didn’t think too in-depth about, and it was better than having my parents yell and scream. Usually, by the end of the essay writing process, both parties would have chilled out and a calm discussion would follow.
When I got in trouble, my mom sent me to my grandpa.
He made me go fishing, walking in the woods, and hunting with him. And he made me learn about the outdoors: what to eat and not to eat, how to tie knots, how to throw a knife and tomahawk, how to shoot a gun, how to make fire, how to make shelter.
He would never yell at me or directly berate me about what I did. He just told me what good things were, and gave examples of good behavior that were vaguely like what I had done wrong. So it was like he was telling me a story, but instead, he was telling me what the right thing to do was.
For example, I got caught shoplifting. I fell in with some bad kids in the 7th grade. The only thing he said to me was that he was disappointed in me for doing that. Then, the next morning he woke me up before dawn to go fishing and mushroom hunting. While we were fishing, he told me about why/how laws work, why they’re important, and why we should follow them.
I feel like it was the most effective punishment. To this day I’m grateful that I had my grandpa to deal with me when I was bad. He made me want to be a good person, told me how to do it, and then at the end of the summer or weekend or whatever, he sent me back to my mom’s to work on what he told me. And I think I turned out to be a pretty good person.
When I was a kid anytime my grandfather heard me say I was bored he’d make me read the newspaper next to him. After an hour or so of that, I would no longer be bored. I miss him every time I see a newspaper.
When I was growing up my mother was the queen of weird and unusual punishments. I swear she got a kick out of it.
One time she removed all my clothing from my possession. Every day, she would pick out an outfit for me and that’s what I had to wear. People called me “Jolly Green Giant” because she was particularly fond of nasty shades of neon.
I had a small party at my parent’s house back in high school and they found out.
It was late November and that next weekend my dad woke me up at 5 am and said “You know those rocks by the fence? I want them moved behind the greenhouse”.
Well, these were huge flagstone rocks, 2-5 ft long and easily over 100 lbs a piece. The stack was about 15ft x 4ft and two rows deep. It was around 20 degrees that day.
I finished around 7 pm, my hands were beat up, my arms and legs cramped and basically ate and went straight to bed.
The next morning, he wakes me up at 5 am again and says “Now move them back!”
I loved reading as a kid, my father realized sending me to my room wasn’t a punishment. My father is an English professor. He got good.
After a while, my punishment wasn’t to go to my room, it was to watch C-span, I would have to watch politics for hours, and we would talk about it. I was one of the few if only 12-year-olds who could talk about the Senate, the House, who is trying to push through what…
As a grown-up now, I’m thankful, as a kid, I was stunned – how did he come up with something so anti-useful?
I spent too much time in my room reading and was punished by being forced to go outside, including at night. I started drinking with the weirdos at a nearby graveyard. Parents knew, approved of me making friends, and ignored my drunkenness and hangovers. They were thankful I was becoming “normal”.
When my dad gets angry, he gets very flustered and starts stuttering a bit and usually, he would ground me from whatever I was doing. For example, if I was watching TV, no TV for a week, etc. Well, one day a few years ago I did something to make him angry, I don’t really remember what. He came into my room all red-faced and stuttering and saw me just lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling. He quickly looked around the room and the first thing he saw was my lamp. He unplugged it and took it with him. I was grounded from my lamp for a month.
I fell asleep at my boyfriend’s house when we were in high school. I woke up, panicked and went straight downstairs to my car. Only the car wasn’t there. I called my mother to tell her my car was stolen. She says back to me very dramatically, “I took your car and parked it down the street. I wanted you to know what it felt like to not know where something you love is”
My dad caught me playing with matches, so he told me I had to burn the garbage every night in the steel drum at the end of the backyard. So I got to play with matches every night.
I thought I was a bada** at 15 and snuck a bottle of Hennessy into my room. I hid it in the closet and would drink some with my friends after school. Well, my mom decided to clean my room randomly and found the bottle. When I got home my dad made me sit down and put the bottle in front of him. He then put out three glasses and called my little sister(13) and brother (11) and told them to sit with me. He then poured three glasses of Henny and told me to serve it to my siblings. I said no way! And he asked why not and I replied “Because they’re too young” to which he replied “YOU ARE TOO” so he made me pour everything down the sink. To this day I never bring alcohol to my father’s house. That psychological punishment stuck with me for life.
My parents would lock the computer with a password that required me to go to the library and research random bits of information. Such as, “The password is the capital of Kazakhstan.” It mainly made me waste hours each day before I could even do my homework. I don’t remember any of the passwords they made me look up.
Mom always told us not to use too much ketchup because we always ended up wasting a lot. One day I went overboard with the ketchup, again, and she made me eat all the ketchup I didn’t use with a spoon. Very effective
I was short (at the age of 8?) my guardian told me that I needed to grow taller (but since I couldn’t bc I mean I don’t think I can grow taller just by thinking about it?), she made me jump every day and reach for the doorframe. She justified it because NBA players are tall, and they jump, so if I jumped (and pretended to dunk a basketball?), I will grow taller.
When I was a kid and at my grandparent’s place, whenever I was sick I had to swallow a tablespoon full of whiskey. Made me throw up every time. It didn’t matter what the medical problem was. I got a tablespoon of whiskey. Poison Ivy? Whiskey. Flu? Whiskey. Food poisoning? Whiskey. Fell out of a tree and scrapped myself up really bad? Whiskey.
I think I was punished for being weak. There was no winning. If Grandma or Grandpa suspected that I wasn’t feeling 100%, they’d straight out ask me what was wrong, and I had to say something or risk worse punishments.
I threw a ton of glitter on my brother when he was in the bathtub. 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.
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. In 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.
He and his brother shared a small room near their parents’ bedroom and they would often talk at night. After repeated warnings, their dad would show up, outlined in the doorway and point a finger.
“YOU.” was the single word. Sometimes it was my husband. Sometimes his brother. But whichever child was at the end of that finger would dutifully get out of bed, slide on slippers and follow his dad down the steep basement stairs into the cellar.
The house was small, too small for a living room time out. Or perhaps not. Perhaps their dad believed that using the cellar for a time-out space would scare them into silence.
Whatever the reason, the boy was led to a swivel chair at the back of the dark chamber.
“SIT.” The boy would clamber up onto the chair, feet dangling.
“I’ll be back when you’re ready to sleep,” came the low growl, and the shape of the dad would retreat into the gray walls, and then up the stairs, footfalls loud.
Then silence. The drip of the laundry sink. The change and clank, momentary of the furnace. Then silence.
A slight, cold waft of air hit the back of his neck. His shoulder blades started to twitch. There was someone behind him. He had never been so sure of anything. Silent stillness offered no protection. It knew he was there. It was right behind him.
He could just barely reach the ring on the chair if he extended his foot all the way down. It took every bit of courage he had to break his paralyzed silence, but he flexed his toe and pushed off the ring. The chair started to spin. Another push and he was around, facing his attacker.
Nothing.
But now the prickly feeling and cold gust was there again. Did he move behind me? Another push with the just-barely reaching toe. Another spin.
Stairs. Furnace. Tool room. Laundry area. Around the chair went, every squeak of the springs drowning out the intense silence, every movement of the air a distraction from the cold presence the boy could not see, but could feel, always right behind.
Stairs. Furnace. Tool room. Laundry area.
Finally, the echo of steps. One, two, three. Thirteen and his father was there.
“Are you ready to be quiet and go to sleep now?”
The boy could not speak, but his father understood the wide eyes and pale face to mean yes. The boy slid from the chair and quickly ran to get ahead of his father. Let him be the one to get grabbed, the boy thought mutinously.
Twenty steps and they were back in the small bedroom. No words exchanged, no goodnight kiss. Just silence.
The hiss of a whisper, loud as a bell after the silence. Was it bad?
The boy couldn’t speak, relief and terror equal in his heart.
It must have been bad, his brother sighed. But the boy was already asleep.
Once I remember as a kid my mate and I were playing with fire in the council domain, the wind kicked up and it blew into the long grass. Our house was across the road from the domain and my mate and I ran home.
We had our faces pressed against the window watching the fire and the fire brigade turn up. My dad asked us if we had lit the fire, and we both said no no no.
He knew we had. He took me into the shed and put some newspaper down on the ground and told me to stand on it. He said, if you lie, your feet will sweat and I will be able to see your footprints on the newspaper…. He asked me the question again. Did you light the fire boy? Yesss.ssss.sss.
It got me good. Can’t remember what the punishment was but it was prob a cold shower and the loss of a TV or something.
My brother would have his young son pick up sticks around the yard. As the son walked around the yard picking up sticks and putting them in piles, my brother would take a few sticks off the pile and scatter them around again. His son wouldn’t see him do this and continue to pick up sticks for a while. My brother explained his reasoning as ‘it keeps the young son busy and out of trouble.’ After a while, my brother would tell son his was finished and good job picking up the sticks. The son would have gotten rid of some energy and completed his ‘punishment’ at the same time.
Not really a strange punishment, but it turned out strangely I think. When I was probably 5 or 6, something happened (literally can’t remember what I did to deserve the punishment) that caused my parents to send me to my room with no lights allowed on and the door closed. I’d never been able to sleep with the door closed and at least a light on in the hall or something til then. This time? I just went to sleep after a while in there with no lights, and that was the last time I needed lights on or the door open when I went to bed. Worked out well from my point of view in my opinion.
I had been trying to grow it out in middle school and he had warned me that if I got anything below a C on a report card/progress report he would shave my head. Didn’t care to do homework at the time. So to be honest I totally deserved it and seeing as he is a hairdresser it wasn’t an impossible threat.
One time when I was ~ 16, I got caught sneaking out. I was anticipating some crazy punishment, but my Mom ended up taking my curfew away; I was then allowed to stay out as late as I wanted as long as I told her where I would be. She said she would rather know where I was than have me sneaking around in case I got hurt or into some trouble.
We were on a skiing vacation and I did something to peeve my dad off. But instead of forcing me to stay home for a day, he took away one of my poles which made that day of skiing one of the most exhausting, awkward experiences ever.
I fell a couple of times leaning into a turn and not being able to plant, and when I tried to catch up to everyone else I’d be digging in the snow with my single ski pole like a three-year-old trying to catch them.
As punishment, she would make me sit in time out under an office desk with a slat back chair turned upside down on top so the back covered the opening like bars.
Come dinner time she fed me hard rolls and water because “That’s what they serve in prison.”
I found out years later, that while not good food, prison food is much better than hard rolls and water.
Early-teens me used to be very into Diablo 2. I would eagerly run home each day after school to hop on and play, as much as I could (and was allowed) at the time. It consumed every thought I had most days. I had multiple 99’s on ladder and NL, and after playing for a few years I had a lot of items worth trading for.
Well back then, scamming people in Diablo was disturbingly easy if you knew the right method, or had a victim that didn’t know any better. One such method was called a “drop scam”. To know why it was possible, I’ll explain a little bit about how trading worked in the game (for those who don’t know).
Essentially, when trading with a player normally, one player would initiate a trade with the other, and a trade window would pop up, with a space for each player to put items in to trade. Now, some very rare items were un-tradable by this method, and instead, a player would have to actually “drop” the item on the ground, for another player to then pick it up.
How the drop scam worked was this: both players involved would stand on either side of a barrier (like a fence in town) and drop the item they were trading to the other player on the ground simultaneously, and then run to the other side and pick up the other item.
Young Lozor quickly saw an opportunity to take advantage, and once, did. I successfully scammed someone out of an Annihilus charm this way and got so excited that I’d pulled it off that I immediately went and told my mom and dad about how I’d done it.
My mother of course realized that I had essentially stolen from someone (and that I was bragging about it), so she set in motion the worst, and strangest punishment I ever endured.
I was banned from playing Diablo for an entire year (she stuck to it too), and over the course of that year, I was to read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, writing a detailed summary of each chapter as I went. This was supposed to teach me why what I did was wrong and more.
What ended up happening after a couple of months was great though. My super cool uncle heard about my punishment (as all my family and friends had) and told me about CLIFFNOTES. All of a sudden I had detailed chapter summaries for the entire book, and it made the rest of the punishment a million times easier (though I was careful to re-write it in my own words).
To this day, my mom still thinks she taught me a really good lesson and “got me good”. One day I might break it to her. Who knows.
My first cellphone was super crappy. All I could do on it was call people. I couldn’t even text. This was in 2011. I didn’t have anybody on my phone besides my parents and maybe a few family members. I constantly left it at home. I never had a need for it. I rarely used it.
One day I couldn’t find it. I asked my mom if she had seen it. She said I was grounded from it. I don’t know what I did to get grounded. I didn’t bother asking. It’s not I was gonna miss my phone. I don’t know what my mom thought she was going to accomplish by grounding me from my phone.
MY CRIME: I was 8 years old and decided to go on a corn field to hunt foxes with a hammer and homemade shurikens. I didn’t tell anyone and I was gone several hours. When they found me… MY PUNISHMENT: I had to run home barefoot on a dusty road in front of my father who was on a bicycle. While I was running he was telling me a story about a boy who also went on a fox hunt.. I didn’t mind the running, but that story gave me creeps for several years.
When my sister was 5 she was handing out invitations for her birthday, around this time she had a fetish for long hair and she passed out an invite to one of her short-haired friends. Then she turned around and yanked it out of her hands and said “You aren’t invited, you don’t have long hair,” and just walked away.
When the short-haired girl got home she cried to her parents about what happened, the parents of the short-haired girl called my parents and told them what happened. They interrogated my sister and when she confessed my parents cut her hair, she was balling all the way home.
When I was 6 or 7 years old I had been taking my own showers for about a year. One night after bathing I found out I could reach the shower curtain rod and that it made a great monkey bar. So I started swinging on it and I had no idea that it was not mounted into the wall and was only held on by its own pressure (it was spring loaded, you know what I mean).
So all of a sudden this thing obviously comes tumbling down as I was swinging on it. My already suspicious mother (due to how long I was in there for) heard the crash and came up to see what in the heck was wrong.
She came in to see me lying on the floor n*ked with nothing but a wet curtain over me and the shower rod in the tub. She knew exactly what was happening and if I wasn’t under the curtain I would have seen the lightbulb go off in her head right before she said, “Fix it, finish toweling off and then go see your father.
I was terrified.
I went down to the basement where my dad was working on his mountain bike and he said, “Now, Nicholas (my first name) I’m not mad but I just want to tell you a story.” A wave of confused relief came over me. I had no idea what the heck was going on. Here’s the story he told:
“There was a monkey who loved to swing in a big tree in the jungle. It was a beautiful tree. However, there was a problem! The tree was also the favorite resting place of a ferocious lion. One day the lion got angry with the monkey because he began to make too much noise. The lion scared the monkey out of the tree and said never to come back with a big loud ROAR! The monkey did not learn however and he came back the next day. The lion was dumbfounded but impressed by the monkey’s bravery so instead of killing him he gave him an option. He asked the monkey, ‘Okay I gave you a warning but I have to respect your courage. I can either bite your tail off or your head off.’ After thinking about it the monkey replied, ‘Definitely bite my head off!’ The lion was confused and said, ‘Okay but I have to ask why. You could live a normal life without a tail.’ and the monkey said, ‘Yeah but if you bite off my tail I’ll look like that ugly human child Nicholas.'”
During freshman year of high school aka my “nice guy” days, I kept DMing girls from my school on my old Facebook account in hopes that one of them would be my girlfriend. My parents caught wind of this and my mom deactivated my Facebook account (she was the one who made an account for me). Around that time, which was 2012, I was new to social media and had no idea how to use it.
That wasn’t the strange part. The strange part was that my dad rearranged my desk so that the monitor of my PC was facing the doorway of my bedroom. Prior to that day, my PC was facing the wall. Both my mom and dad did this so they could keep tabs on my online activity and made sure I wasn’t on Facebook (which is funny because I secretly made a new Facebook account a year later aka the one I currently have although my mom found out and she actually let me keep it).
When I came home from school that day, I saw that everything from my desk was lying on the floor. I was pissed because A) my desk was really cluttered and I had to rearrange everything AND do homework on top of that, and B) I was confused as to why my desk was moved. Like I understood what my parents were trying to do, but rearranging my desk was a bit too much.
When I was young and had a new puppy, I played with it outside by turning the hose on and laughing as he tried to “catch” the water. Well, he got all wet in the process. It became night time and I went inside.
My dad came home and saw I left the dog outside all wet in the cold.
He brought the dog in, watered me down with the hose, and left me outside in the dark and cold. I was too stubborn to apologize so I stayed out there until my mom realized what happened (15 min)
My dad desperately wanted me to be an attorney so starting at something like six my dad would occasionally give me a set of options when I got caught doing something wrong. The first option was to attempt to “plea bargain” i.e. accept responsibility but describe why I thought leniency should be applied. The second option was to plead my case in which he would give me a set amount of time to try and find a loophole or prepare an argument, find witnesses, whatever to show why I should not be punished at all and then present my case to him with the understanding that I would be punished more severely if I “wasted his time”.
When I was a kid, my house had two giant rocks (more like small boulders) in the backyard that had been excavated when digging the foundation. They were about 30-40 feet apart.
When my brother and I were fighting, our parents would send us out to “sit on the rocks”. We were allowed to yell at each other all we wanted, but we weren’t allowed to leave our respective rocks until we reached some sort of consensus. One party couldn’t just get up and leave, because the other one would complain to our parents and get them in trouble. So the only way to end the punishment was to legitimately come to an arrangement that both of us were satisfied with.
When I was about 10 I got in a yelling match with my mom, then told her I hated her. My dad overheard me and I was pretty sure I was going to get belted half to death.
Nope. He told me to get in the truck and off we drove, to the hardware store. He made a deal with the guy for all the cracked, cut or broken bricks they couldn’t sell and had me load the bed of the truck neatly so they all fit. It rode pretty low on the way home and I was really confused as to what was going on.
Then when we got home he had me stack the bricks in one corner of the yard all by hand, no wheelbarrow or anything, no gloves. Took half an hour and my hands were raw. Then he said to move them to the other back corner.
I told him I was sorry and that I’d tell Mom I was sorry. Then he said something that stuck with me, “You’re going to move them back and forth until I’m sorry, or I’ll make you really sorry.” 4 hours later, hands blustered and bleeding, chest and inner arms a mess of scratches and cuts and the worst back pain ever…he said, “I’m sorry.” Then stood up and went into the house. That shut me up for quite a while.
Any time after that, if I messed up really bad, he’d just point at the back yard and I knew it was going to be a rough day. This went to high school, and with every new house, we moved to. I’d help him build a patio or a garden trail or something and he’d get extra bricks on top of the leftover cuts for the old “I’m sorry” drill. This actually helped me in wrestling later when we’d do grinding drills like a circle of pain (wrestle each other teammate full-strength for a minute each, regardless of weight class).
Until I was about 16 years old I was socially awkward and I didn’t like talking to people much, so I would always sit and read in my room. One day I accidentally ripped a page of my mom’s Lord Of The Rings hardback box set. Her idea of punishment was to make me go shopping with her the next day, and go in with a list of things to buy with her card while she sat out in the car. I had no idea where anything was and people kept trying to sell me warranties on electronics and other appliances. It wouldn’t faze me now but back then I was so perturbed by it that after we got back home I don’t think I left my room for a full 24 hours. I brought food into my room so I wouldn’t have to speak with anyone. Last Christmas I bought her a replacement boxset because she lost hers in a move. She still laughs at the memory. I more or less try not to think about how cringey I must have been.
