Were you too young to understand English? Could this not have been explained to you?

It is violence :confused:

Absolute mess of a post.

Just gonna leave this here for an unrelated reason.

5 Reasons Why Anecdotes Are Totally Worthless

I'm a believer in the efficacy of corporal punishment, and yet I don't practice it on my children.

can we get back to the pressing topic of people thinking it's okay to smack their children?

What's your opinion Q-Man?

it's unnecessary and in most cases just lazy parenting. it's essentially just a short cut to getting your child to stop doing whatever is upsetting you so much. rather than explain to them what they did and how bad it is, they know a quick smack on the bottom will do all the work for them.

Agree, like I said up until recently (1-2 years) I'd have said smacking is OK, but only because I know so many people who got smacked so it just felt normal.

I think people defend it cos they don't want to feel bad either doing it or because their parents did it to them. Like I was smacked and I don't hate my dad for it but I don't think it was right.

Good post mate.

Somewhere at the core biology trumps constructs. I'll cooperate and call you a she even if you have a dick, if that's what you want. If shapes could think and talk I'd call a triangle a square if it wanted me to. But it's really just absurdity that I don't want to combat. A shape with three sides is a triangle. Everyone knows it. A person with a dick is male. You can do all the gender bending you want. I don't care. It doesn't hurt me none. I'll call you whatever you want. None of that changes the fact that dicks make you male, by design and definition.

What elph said.

In the eyes of gender essentialists, should gender really depend solely upon external genitalia (rather than sex chromosomes, or their internal reproductive organs, things which none of us can know for sure about anyone else) even though there are people who have chromosomes and gonads which do not "match," making them intersex, despite having been declared to be male or female at birth based on their genitals? There are many different kinds of intersex conditions; there are people who might have both a vagina (so, externally, they'd appear to be a woman), breasts and testes. Some don't even learn until later in life that they're intersex, maybe not until getting their chromosomes tested. I don't imagine many of them should feel as though they're less of a man or woman solely because they learn they have different chromosomes than they thought.

I don't know, I just think we're a bit too obsessed with genitalia as a society, and it doesn't make sense to me that such a large part of one's identity should be dictated by (or forced upon us for our entire life, rather) a doctor who assigns it to us based on our genitals as infants before we even have any self-awareness.


I agree. There are better ways to diffuse tantrums and such. I can see why some think hitting a kid will be more immediately effective; it makes the kid afraid of you, and momentarily shocks them out of their tantrum or whatever. But that does not solve any actual behavioral problems. Children are just small humans with poor emotional regulation skills; of course they can be huge brats, but I don't think they should be hit for acting like children.

Except for two things, one explaining what they did and why it is bad can still be done as a follow up after the spank. Two there is a certain age range where explaining doesn't even work. Explaining just gets ignored because they can't fully process that yet.

I agree with this quote

Spanking Can Be an Appropriate Form of Child Discipline | Time.com