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Originally Posted by Man like Monkey
lol that's even worse. Hitting a child when they are so young they can't even understand language is just disturbing to me.
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Actually, this raises a good point. A child that young is not going to understand the consequences of the behaviour--smacking them is not going to teach them how to not be a little **** and be a good adult, it's just going to teach them not to do one behaviour.
In fact research demonstrates that when you punish children with corporal punishment, it teaches them how to
get around punishment in the future. That is, they find ways to hide the bad behaviour and do it anyways, because they don't understand that it's the
consequences of the behaviour that are bad--they associate "bad" with getting caught.
Further, the greater the length of time that passes between the bad behaviour and the punishment, the less effective the punishment is. If you come home from work, your kid has painted on the walls, and you smack them hours after it happened, that's just ****ing confusing for them because the punishment is not temporally related to the behaviour.
Finally, kids are waaaaaaaay more cognizant than we give them credit for, even at two or three years old. Just talk to them like you'd talk to a grown-up. They're more likely to listen, they're more likely to learn something, and they've got a much bigger receptive understanding of the world than we give them credit for.