Do you think you're parents enjoy doing these things?

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I have seen a lot of posts here about people being yelled at by their parents for lots of stuff they didn't think was wrong. Well, I have a question for all of you. When you're parents yelled at you, did you think they were doing it just for their enjoyment at your expense? Because that is exactly how I started feeling starting around my senior year of high school. I even tried to guilt trip them into laying off the complaining by muttering "You enjoy doing this, don't you."

Can anyone else here relate to this scenario?

(Heads up: long post.)

Yes, of course!! ! To me, it was a given that my parents enjoyed yelling at me and punishing me. I knew that they wouldn't do at random moments, but they sure enjoyed looking for every little opportunity to yell at me, spank me, or threated to destroy my favorite toy right in front of me. The opportunities could be anything: reaching for sweets before dinner, touching their possessions (while they'd tear up my drawings just because I left them out), coming home 15 minutes late, losing my notebook at school, getting bad grades, and many more. Knowing that my parents enjoyed punishing me was the only explanation I could come up with; otherwise they simply wouldn't be doing it so often. I know it'll sound morbid, but for most of my childhood, I wondered: "Do orphans get yelled at and punished too, and who actually does it to them?"

I think parenting is about power. Power is what separates the strong from the weak, whether physically or psychologically. In families, parents are the ones with power, and kids are the ones without power, and the power imbalance drives the family relationship. Nietzsche once said that all of human history is about power, and whoever had the most power at some point was the one who made history. So since the parents are the ones with most power in the family, they're the ones who decide what's what.

Now, I know I'll get ragged about this. People will tell me: "You're not a parent! What do you know about family relationships?" With this statement alone, you're telling me that parents are more important than kids. Also, I think most, if not all, parents get something I call "childhood amnesia". In other words, as soon as their first child is born, they completely forget what it's really like to be a child. What it's like to be told what to do; what it's like to come to a store, and see thing you can never have (to most kids, in my opinion, "no" = never); what it's like to have to do your homework every day; what it's like not to be able to decide what to eat for dinner; what it's like to be told to clean your room; what it's like to have limits on your TV time; and so on, and so on, and so on. Parents forget how those horrible those things really feel. So they don't realize how unpleasant even simple punishments can be.

I read this article once. In a Russian city (don't remember which one), they opened a restaurant, where all furniture, dishes, and decorations were huge from an adult perspective. Everything was the same size that regular things seem to a 5-year-old child. Tables were up to people's shoulders, chairs were up to people's chests, plates were 30 inches wide, and cups were big enough to be held with both hands. People described the place as "eerie", "intimidating", and "tension-inducing". The business was good during the first few weeks, then went bankrupt within three months.

This goes to show you: people forget how unpleasant childhood can be, and that restaurant drove the point home! Its customers had a glaring reminder about how intimidating the world seemed when they were kids, so of course they felt uncomfortable there. It probably brought back some unpleasant memories for a lot of people.