VEGANGELICA

Hi FD,

Strap on the reading glasses, if you want to get through my long reply.

I agree with you that every child is different. However, I still feel that physical punishment is the wrong choice because it hurts the child and there are always discipline options that do not involve causing the child physical pain.

When a parent resorts to punishing a child using physical punishment (and by that I mean the intentional infliction of pain on the body for purposes of punishment or controlling behavior, such as slapping, spanking, hitting with objects, pinching, shaking, and forcing to stand for long periods of time), I would argue this shows the parent has run out of patience, not options.

Public preschools and elementary schools where I have volunteered as well as the domestic violence shelter where I worked always had a series of non-painful methods for dealing with children's undesired behavior. These methods do not involve causing children pain and instead respect their body's boundaries and strive to be nurturing.

I agree that physical punishment will rapidly (although not necessarily permanently) cause a child to stop doing a behavior you don't like, because people, like other animals, hate pain and will usually do whatever they need to in order to avoid pain. Yet I still argue that there are always other discipline methods that do not involve physically harming someone to steer her behavior in the direction you want.

And, there are many good reasons for avoiding physical punishment. The Center for Effective Discipline lists many of these reasons, so I won't go into them here, but I found their website very interesting and thorough and think you may, too (The Center for Effective Discipline).

FD, I did not mean to imply that your mother didn't love you because she disciplined you physically when you were a child, and I did not mean that physically disciplining a child will necessarily cause the family to grow up fractured with seething hostilities and rifts (although it can). What I meant is that in my view the physical discipline and the fear it causes...fear of the hitter, fear of the pain being repeated...are not love, even if the physical punishment is meant with good intentions. And, the action of hitting someone to punish her or him is not love.

Also, since a parent never knows in advance how his child will look back on his physically hurting her, I feel it is wise for parents not to hurt their children physically. Your child may grow up to be like you, content and supportive of the parent's choices, or she may react to you having hit her as a child by feeling distant from you and feeling bad about herself, since she may feel you believed she was so worthless as to be "hittable," even if you told her you loved her after you hit her. She may respond by treating herself and others more dangerously, and she may perpetuate the mentality that when we don't like people's behavior, we should hit them. She may accept others, including adults, hitting *her* because she was told (by you) that "people who love you can (and should) hit you" if they feel you are bad enough.

One thing I was ignorant of in my last post is that some U.S. schools actually *do* still allow physical punishment. I didn't know this until I did some online investigating. Although physical punishment of children in schools is forbidden in my state, Iowa, and "most urban public school systems in the United States have banned all forms of corporal punishment," Wikipedia says that:

"As of August 2008, 21 states allow corporal punishment in schools. Some private schools, again largely in the South, also still use corporal punishment, especially Christian schools, 'historically black' schools and military-style boarding schools. Statistics show that black and Hispanic students are more likely to be paddled than white students, possibly because minority-race parents are more inclined to approve of it. Statistics collected by the federal government show that the use of the paddle has been declining consistently, in all states where it is used, over at least the past 20 years."

My general observation of physical punishment is that the child's behavior for which an adult is physically punishing her is always less severe than the badness of the action of a big person hitting a little one. Also, even if one does subscribe to physical punishment of children, as some stated earlier, physical punishment only "works" when you use it against a defenseless young child...not when that child grows up to be big enough to defend himself.

I do feel it is always wrong to hit a child, whether she or he is young and defenseless or older and bigger. I would not have hit/spanked you if you had been my child, regardless what you were doing (and I am curious now, what *were* you up to so persistently that led your mom to feel at her wit's end!). More generally, what behaviors do you feel warrant physically punishing a child?

JayJamJah, I'm glad you thought they were thoughtful and laid out well. Thanks for telling me!

--Erica

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