Well, yes, a time. Your (and my) mama also knew when to quit. Today, my mother can still get my attention with a word off her 'back teeth' 
No spoon needed.
Well sure - But that's because your behavior is already made and set in stone... But don't think for a minute that if I were to act out like that this very day (which I would not either), Mamma would surely be coming at me... And the only thing that would matter to me at that point would be fending her off. And she's well into her 80's. You just don't act like that - And you don't mess with mamma.
And she ain't really the threat - I swear, if she said ever to me, 'You wait till I tell your daddy about this..." I do believe he would be so pissed off to hear it out of her that he would be obliged to raise himself up out of his grave just to whoop my ass.
And on my mamma's account, God would let him do it.
There was a time when yelling at, spanking, 'switching', and even a few cracks with the belt (not the buckle) were considered discipline, even in the middle of the grocery store, and not "child abuse" punishable by all sorts of stuff, from criminal charges to the kids being hauled away.
Granted, those things not applied with some discipline by the parents can be abusive, but they were all employed at one time or another in order to impart the need for meeting certain standards of behaviour, without being excessive in doing so.
(In all honesty, I probably deserved much more...and my father couldn't figure out why all the trees were stripped of low, smaller branches but there was no other deer sign around the farm.) 
Don't get me wrong now. I would never mean to imply that my mamma ever abused me. I can't say whether she ever laid a bruise on me, but never one of mention, may Yah bless her ever-loving heart. Nor my daddy, by and large - Though a time or two he did - treated me hard, man to man, and boy did I have it coming. But that was all when I was in my late teens and thought myself the cock of the walk... With a subsequent lesson a'comin, a time or two to reassert, very plainly and in no uncertain terms that I most certainly was not...
I had the cajones to call him on it, and he anted up, each and every time. with more than my sparrow ass could cash. And may Yah bless him for it, because he had it to do, and I had it coming.
Unfortunately, we are in a second or third generation of folks who have not had that discipline imposed (and in all honesty, some didn't need that as much as the rest of us), but as such, many cannot discipline themselves enough to discipline their children without overdoing it, or don't seek to impose on them that which was not imposed on themselves, and the least intimation of doing so provides opportunity for the authorities to become involved.
That's what you get when you have social worker types instead of cops.
Yeah, I know. Not up in here though. My own children will testify, as will most all the kids of the kind I hang with. There ain't such a thing as discipline without, well, discipline. It's what its for. It's like trying to make a kinder, gentler gun - The purpose of its existence is already complete in what it is. If mamma had not been who she is, she would not have been able to raise up tall sons. And without the threat of daddy she would have had no ultimate say over me.
Now that ain't to say that kept me on the straight and narrow.... I ain't that kind... But it surely taught me right from wrong, and when the time came that I finally start to figure things out, it gave me a hard line to come back to. And that, outside of relationship with Yah, is very likely the most valuable thing I was ever freely given.
