One time I did hurt my son, by accident. I was trying to get him and his baby sister ready for the pool; it was hot and I was tired; he was running around with his shorts around his knees, not co-operating at all, and I took him by his arms and sat him down hard.
He couldn’t bear weight on his ankle so we ended up not going to the pool but the doctor’s. An x-ray showed a sprain only. The doctor never reported me or showed any hint whatsoever of thinking about it - I suppose because I was a concerned white middle-class suburban mother with no suspicious history and made no attempt to hush my son’s tale.
If I had tried to hush him I know just what he would have said: “Mommy said not to tell you but I want to tell you...”
My guess is every parent has, at some point, to a certain degree. All the stories on this thread sound so familiar because either I've heard another parent tell a version of it, or I have my own version.
For example, years ago, I knew someone who was tossing his toddler up in the air and catching him, and suddenly the child started crying in pain. It turns out, the child's shoulder was dislocated. The child told the doctor: "Daddy threw me up in the air and hurt my arm." The doctor gave the father a suspicious look.
One of my sons was injured tripping backward off a swing, but my husband didn't think the injury was serious, and we let him play a whole baseball game. The next day, he was in serious pain; it turned out his collarbone was broken. :-0 I know so many parents with a similar story. There are so many more stories I'm sure we all could tell.
When my one son's arm was in a sling, another got a black eye when he was hit by a swing. At that time, there was a huge protest for homeschoolers against a bill that would've brought us all under suspicion of child abuse. Two thousand people attended the protest with their families, but I couldn't go. To explain why to the other moms, I pointed to my children, one of whom had his arm in a sling and the other with a black eye. They agreed my children would've been the front page photo for the news story. ;-)