kiss the rod
To accept punishment passively. As a child, I always found it best to just kiss the rod—arguing with my parents always made the situation worse.
kiss the rod
accept punishment meekly or submissively. This idiom refers to a former practice of making a child kiss the rod with which it was beaten. It is used by Shakespeare in Two Gentlemen of Verona: ‘How wayward is this foolish love That, like a testy babe, will scratch the nurse And presently all humbled kiss the rod’.