When I was a teenager, my mother was as dumb as a rock.

That statement probably doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has ever been a teenager. In our teen years, we know everything, and it shocks us to discover just how little our parents actually know.

Fortunately for my mother, it was just a phase and she grew out of it. By the time I was in my 20s, my mother had gotten much smarter, and to her credit, she gets smarter by the year.

Of course, to be fair, by comparison to some parents today, Joan Crawford looks like Mother of the Year.

You’ve no doubt heard about the tanning-addicted mom who took her 5-year-old daughter to a tanning salon where she promptly got a bad sunburn.

The mother reportedly had been a fan of tanning since her teen years and was a regular at her local tanning salon. As a result, her skin now looks like Hoss Cartwright’s saddle.

Apparently, all that tanning also baked her brains because she can’t understand why people are outraged that she took a 5-year-old to a tanning salon.

And she’s not alone in the Crazy Mother Olympics.

There’s the mom in West Virginia who disciplined her children by shooting them with BBs and bottle rockets. And the mother who tried to sell her infant for $10,000 so she could get a new apartment.

In Little Rock, a mother attacked and choked a teacher for disciplining her child. In Atlanta, a mother let her 10-year-old son get a tattoo.

In Florida, a mother was accused of using her SUV to tow her child down a street in her toy car.

And — my personal favorite — a mother and father in Fort Wayne, Ind., were arrested for strapping their four children to the hood of their car with bungee cords before driving off from a liquor store.

The mother told a local TV station that they were only driving around the corner.

“I thought they would like it,” she said.

Fortunately for Marvin and me, my mother never did any of those things. She does joke — usually when one of us has been particularly annoying — that she should have drowned us in the bathtub when she had the chance.

At least I think she was joking. I don’t take chances. I always lock the bathroom door when I’m bathing at her house.

My mother did spank us as children. She had a wooden paddle, emblazoned with the words “Board of Education,” which she kept on top of the refrigerator. It didn’t come out often, but when it did, my brother and I knew she meant business.

“Do you want a whipping, young man?” she’d ask.

I always wanted to reply, “Why, of course. I’d love for you to smack me across my behind with that skinny paddle of yours. Sounds like fun.” I never did say it, though. I’m a smart aleck, but I ain’t crazy.

I’m willing to say now, since surely the statute of limitations on my past transgressions has surely lapsed, that every one of the whippings I got as a child was well deserved. In fact, I probably deserved a few I didn’t get.

I could go on and on about the things she did to us. She’d make us clean our rooms, hang up our own clothes and trim our toenails. She’d make us eat broccoli and sometimes she’d let the supply of chocolate chip cookies run out.

But looking back, I realize how good we had it, especially when compared to some of today’s parenting geniuses. So I’d like to take this Mother’s Day to thank my mother for the wonderful job she did.

Oh, and for not strapping me to the hood of the car.

Mitch Clarke is executive editor of The Times. His column appears Sundays. Read previous columns at gainesvilletimes.com/mitch. Follow him on Twitter @MitchTimes.