VEGANGELICA

And if you slap the child's hand and the child still persists in doing the dangerous behavior again, then what are you going to do? Punch her??

Young children (under 3, for example) *do* need to be supervised very closely to prevent them from hurting themselves, and this means you hover and remove them from dangerous locations, or remove the dangers (best option).

Little ones don't understand dangers as well as adults do. Rather than using pain and startling children to try to cause greater fear of dangers, just pick up the child or distract him away from the danger, while explaining what the danger is and saying "No" firmly. Repeat this as often as necessary. Eventually kids grow up and learn not to do obvious dangerous stuff...without ever having to be swatted.

Exactly what are these dangerous situations from which you need to protect children?

Worried about kids touching the stove? Use the back burners; put safety protectors on the dials; use a safety gate to keep the child out of the kitchen while cooking. Worried about the kids running into the street? Accompany them outside; hold their hands while on the sidewalk so they don't dart into the street. Want the child to stay away from the stairs to avoid falls? Close the door to the stairwell; install a solid safety gate.

What I thought was awful, too, Ribbons, was the *reason* the judge and wife were punishing their 16-year-old daughter so violently: she had downloaded something illegally on the computer. Half of MusicBanter would be subjected to the belt, if that judge had his way!

More seriously, the hitting of a child is *always* worse than any behavior I've ever seen kids do that make adults feel "justified" in spanking/hitting them.

Is the child crying or fussing? Spanking is worse than that.

Did the child lie? Hitting someone is worse than lying.

Did the child use a foul word? Again, hitting is worse.

Did the child call the parent a mean name, showing "disrespect?" Hitting is worse than mean names.

Basically I think spanking kids just comes down to adults being bullies because they are bigger and they can get away with it, and they are impatient. I think some parents believe they are supposed to be dominant over their kids and never have their authority questioned. Treating their children respectfully is beneath them, so they resort to inflicting pain.

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Urban Hat€monger ?

I wasn't talking about children that young. I agree with you children that young can be moved away or protected against that sort of thing. I was thinking of children aged maybe 5 to 9 years old who are capable of reasoning and still do dangerous things despite being told not to.

I can only remember being slapped a couple of times as a kid, both between the ages that I mentioned. Once for messing around on a busy road when I persistently ignored my mothers warnings and once for playing with a box of matches I found in an alleyway outside the house. Both times I knew I was wrong, both times I was told I would be slapped if I did anything that dangerous, yet I did them.

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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Stephen

Not a big fan of smacking. Parents who use it may justify it to themselves but from what I've seen it is not so much a form of controlled discipline as the parent losing their **** and taking it out on the kid.

FETCHER.

My dad skelped my arse when I was much younger and if anything it made me realise not to do **** like that again, I respected his authority and never stepped out of line in that way again. Anytime my dad skelped me he had very good reason, if that's considered bad parenting, then you can go **** yourself. My dad is the best.

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My Journal.
Last.Fm if your interested...

VEGANGELICA

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.

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Urban Hat€monger ?

I could have sworn I just said in my case that it did.
Only a couple of times, but it still did.

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VEGANGELICA

Yes, you said that your parents' slapping you got through to you and made you feel ashamed that you had disappointed them.

My point was that parents can get through to kids without slapping them.

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Guybrush

This meta-study surfaced and so I thought I'd reflog this dead horse / bump this old thing.

If you are interested in the subject at all, it's an interesting read:

Risks of Harm from Spanking Confirmed by Analysis of Five Decades of Research | UT News | The University of Texas at Austin

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Something Completely Different

Lucem Ferre

I used to support beating the living **** out of kids until my sister showed how nice her kids are with out hitting them at all.

Cuthbert

I used to get it all the time as a kid, belts and slippers etc, it did keep me from misbehaving but also made me scared of my dad and I don't want my child to feel like that toward me.

Probably go with no but I think there's a line, though many would probably argue the only way to not cross it is to not hit your kids at all which is fair enough.