Quote:
Originally Posted by Urban Hatemonger
I didn't do it again after that. It wasn't because it hurt, it wasn't because I was psychologically traumatised. It was because I knew that I was wrong and ashamed that I'd let my parents down for them to have to go to those lengths to get the message across to me.
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This -- getting a child to understand emotionally why the behavior he chose was wrong and to wish not to disappoint his parents -- can be achieved without the parents' resorting to using physical methods.
Most children love their parents and want to please them on some level even though the desire for independence and freedom from rules kicks in at a young age. I feel that children's love and desire to please their parents is the basis of the efficacy of discipline methods. Threatening children physically is a harmful and unnecessarily severe way to achieve the goal of children's changing their behavior due to their guilt over disappointing the parents.
Making sure parents have an "arsenal" of graded discipline methods to use that never resort to physical ones is a good way to help parents learn to avoid leaping to spanking because they are at their wit's end.
If kids
don't love their parents and don't wish to please them at all, then that *would* be a very difficult situation for parents...but hitting such children will only make discipline problems worse by causing the children to hate the parents. If my dad had smacked me more than once, I probably would have wanted to slit his throat or stab him in his sleep. Luckily, he loved me enough not to physically hurt me again, and I loved him enough to forgive him.