meritocrat

Is such a thing generally unethical?

One of the primary reasons I hear for it being 'bad' is that it causes psychological damage in children. Well I know many people who were smacked as children, yet have not developed any mental trauma or problem as a direcy result of being smacked.

Another reason is that it is wrong in inflict pain on someone. In a general sense I would agree with that, but in this instance isn't the pain meant to 'deter' future 'wrongdoing'?

So is it wrong to smack children when you believe they are naughty?

Loren Pechtel

My observation: Parents I know who spanked, 100% of them raised at least one bad kid. Parents I know didn't spank, no bad kids.

What I see is parents who resort to spanking don't understand proper punishment. Spanking is too big a punishment, so they threaten and threaten with nothing happening most of the time. That's awfully similar to a way of making a neurotic monkey my father described long ago.

catalyst

While I do not feel free to comment on anyone else's style of parenting, having no childredn of my own, I was paddled as a child. Rather thoroughly on a few occasions. I deserved every one of them, and it was often the only thing that would work.

I was a rotten kid.

openeyes

I say that if a parent is resorting to spanking to discipline their child he/she should take a step back and re-evaluate the circumstances that led to the situation. I don't think spanking is a good idea or that it works well. (I'm a parent of two boys, now 12 and 16. I only spanked with a swat on the butt in frustration a couple times each and didn't think it helped.)

I also say that we've discussed this topic many times and many will disagree with me, which I initially found surprising. I think most studies show that overall spanking is an ineffectual form of discipline and I figured posters to this board generally based their conclusions on good evidence.

Odemus

Sometimes the best evidence is real life experience.

MollyMac

This is something I feel strongly about but we discussed it a couple of months ago in this thread. This is what I said at the time and I haven't changed my mind since:

"Is hitting children really necessary? Does it actually achieve anything positive? Off the top of my head I can think of several categories of behaviour in children that it is common to punish them for:

The first is emotional: throwing an almighty tantrum, perhaps, or assaulting another child in anger. Is hitting the child as a punishment likely to make them better at controlling their emotions?

The second is ‘stupidity’ – or at least something that is obviously stupid to us but not necessarily so to the child who simply acted without thinking e.g. opening the door of the car while it was in motion. So hitting them is going to make them carefully consider the consequences of all their actions in future?

Disobedience. To some extent this overlaps with the first two: “I told you not to do that but you did it!” Whack! But why did they do it? Because they’d forgotten, weren’t thinking, were tired/hungry/angry or it just seemed like a damn silly rule which had been imposed without explanation in the first place. In these circumstances, why is hitting better than some non physical kind of punishment or a simple explanation of why the rule had been made and the consequences of it being broken?

Finally, behaviour which involves dishonesty, such as taking something that wasn’t theirs to take or telling lies. I have extensive personal experience of this – as a child I had no option but to become an extremely convincing liar as this was the only way to avoid being hit whenever I gave into temptation and stole from my mother’s purse, went somewhere I’d been forbidden to go etc etc. The only thing hitting ever did for me was to make me more devious, more accomplished at whatever I’d been hit for in the first place. I wasn’t surprised, many years later, to realise my own son was beginning to repeat this behaviour pattern. Although come to think of it, this isn’t just about physical punishment but about any sort of punishment. My son grew out of his dishonest behaviour mercifully quickly – a lot quicker than I did. I think what helped him do this was that I stopped thinking in terms of punishment and more about how to help him to develop a conscience and consider the feelings of others. But perhaps that’s a subject for a different thread."

openeyes

So are you saying that spanking is effective from your experience or not? I'm basing my conclusion that it's not effective from researching different discipline methods when my kids were young AND from real life experience, including families other than my own.

(Thanks to MollyMac for taking the time to elucidate the sort of reasoning that is part of my anti-spanking stance.)

Odemus

As far as my own experience is concerned, yes. To my knowledge I have grown to be a fairly well adjusted individual, and I was spanked occasionally as a child.As I grew up, I learned that all my actions had consequences, spanking was certainly a part of that learning process.

MollyMac

But you could presumably have said the same thing if your parents had chosen some other, non-physical, form of punishment?

Alonzo Fyfe

As a rebuttal against the harm done by spanking, this type of annecdotal evidence counts for nothing. I know of a person with Obsessive/Compulsive disorder who tried to kill himself by shooting himself in the head. The shot not only failed to kill him, it seems to have 'cured' his obsessive/compulsive disorder (apparently affecting the right sort of change to the right part of the brain).

Yet, this does not disprove the fact that shooting people in the head is generally harmful.

The unreliability of personal testimony is exactly the type of fact that snake-oil salesmen (e.g., those who sell quack medicine, weight-loss programs, and the like) prey upon. Whatever you do to somebody, you will always find a few who will think they experience some sort of benefit. Then, they use the testimony of those who think they experienced a benefit to lure in others.

It is an entirely unreliable way of determining the facts of the matter. The reliable way is to take two groups of people and examine them over time, and measure the effects.

Those studies show that, after regression analysis removes all other factors that might be relevant -- people who were spanked as children tend to be more violent with others and less happy with themselves.

This leaves a great deal of room for exceptions. There is nothing in this that denies the possibility of the best of those in the "spanked" group ending up better than the average of those in the "not spanked" group. But it does say, if you want to go with the odds, do not spank children.