^ I meant to say that he stopped using spankings as punishment by that age. By that time kids are developing different priorities. He just felt that an 11 year old should no longer be spanked, due to the developing priorities and maturities of a pre-teen. At that point, spanking is rather irrelevant, considering.
And yes, I do believe that spankings reinforced the concept of consequence, in our case. We were taught right from wrong, believe me. We even had a life of religion to back it up. But kids will be kids, and when we got mischievous and willingly dissented, we got punished. If those punishments didn't work, the end of the line was a spanking.
Knowing that was a pretty good deterrent. It's not like we wanted to be horrible kids or anything, but we respected the laws of the house because we knew the consequence of breaking them.
As for the CFED quote, that highlighted part and the following sentence is clearly biased.
If you can never know that you could have turned out better without spankings, then what about the inverse? Is that known? No, Neither is.
Trying to predict whether your parental skills are going to produce the highest quality version of what you wished your child could achieve is less of trying to raise a child and more of trying to feel adequate as a parent. It's selfish.
A parent should do the best they can and do what works. The statistical spanking vs. punishing argument is completely irrelevant. The force behind how a kid turns out lies solely on the parent's shoulders and their ability to know what's best for their children, and applying that knowledge with love and wisdom.
The more you start relying on society to tell you how to raise your child, the less you're going to be satisfied with how your child turns out.
My parents raised us the best they knew how, and they did it with love. Every one of my siblings and myself included can tell you they did a great job.
The only thing statistics can prove is that there are a lot of inadequate parents out there and I'm glad I didn't get stuck with any of them.
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