renaissance poisson

I think that the message that you must never strike a child leads to more cases of badly raised children than sensible use of spanking ever did in the days before anyone questioned whether it was a bad idea.

no flames. just -- try to think outside the box with which you grew up. i am not trying to condemn your mother as a child abuser. i claim that hitting another human in any cause other than self-defense is abusive in its meaning of "misuse causing harm" -- i once got so drunk that i fell down; i was abusing alcohol. it doesn't make me into an alcoholic -- that would require an overall pattern. i have empathy for parents -- i took care of my younger brothers for several years largely on my own, and i am pretty aware of how difficult it is to raise children. i don't want to condemn, i want people to be better educated, to have better options.

and i strongly believe people must think much harder about the things they do to children if we are to stop the cycle of violence in which we are mired.

how about some evidence about what you said above? first off, the vast majority of parents still hit their children, so how do "badly raised" children (how is that defined, and who measures it, and how -- cites?) mean anything? would you concede an argument that states the worst-raised children are those who turn criminal? have you had a look at the statistics for their childhoods and how they were treated? do that some time. it might be an eye opener.

there is oodles of research about the harmful effects of hitting children, your anecdotal evidence notwithstanding (in fact it doesn't necessarily withstand it at all, as you yourself note; yeah, maybe you have too much of a respect for authority). we're also not talking about simplistic A->B causation. of course not every spanked child turns into a violent offender. some of us turn rather strongly away from violence. i don't hit people in large part because i hated being hit. but i can tell you in detail what hitting taught me, and it wasn't anything that my parents actually wanted to teach me. it was ineffectual for those things. me, i like to use the right tool for the job, not a jury-rigged one. i'm all about elegance as a programmer too. :)

thirdly, abuse is a continuum, not an on/off switch. breaking your child's bones is worse than causing bruising is worse than raising welts. but we don't cotton to hitting at all from other adults anymore; slave whipping went out of fashion a while ago -- should i give you a good slap to the face if you behave truculently? it won't even hurt you much; it'll just get your attention. if that's not ok with you, then ask yourself why it is ok for a 150 lb adult to hit a 30 lb child.

the fact that so many parents don't know any better is a sorry excuse, not a rational justification. they should learn better parenting! why does anyone assume one sucks in those capabilities automatically? we get training for any other difficult thing we do, but oh, parenting, that's all done the "natural" way. how silly is that? human society isn't about what's natural. if it were, we'd still be hitting each other over the head with stone axes and drag women, the spoils of battle, to our caves by their matted hair.

do you hit your dog? i doubt it. i've never hit mine. why not? because it isn't necessary. surely if you can make your authority understood to an animal who doesn't even have language, people can learn to do so towards a human child. and since there are other parents who can do it, why not learn from them how? that would seem to me to be the sensible approach.

spanking is quick, easy, requires no thinking, and parents can still get away with it while society slowly wakes up to how garbage in produces garbage out. there is no good reason to do it.