I’m in the “don’t beat your kids” camp, but I can also recognize that a corrective swat on the butt is a very different thing from a beating. I think it’s disingenuous to use the term “spanking” to encompass all forms of corporeal punishment, and personally prefer to break it out into degrees of severity, “swat”, “spank”, “smack”, “belt”, “hit”, “beat,” etc. I was never spanked.
Beyond that, all I have is rambling personal anecdote.
When I was a kid, “spankings” involved getting beaten with a thick leather belt: for my older siblings it would sometimes get worse, say, beaten with an electrical cord or a broomstick over the back or boxed about the head. Beltings might not have occurred as frequently as I remember, but from my child memory I’d wager it was a weekly event for me, and likely some kid in my family got it almost daily. They stopped pretty much when I was 8 and my parents divorced and my older siblings split; I suspect my parents worried which side we’d come down on if there were to be a custody battle and started playing it sweeter.
I don’t think I ever learned a useful lesson from a beating, since they were administered arbitrarily and usually in anger or frustration, often stemming from things completely unrelated: my mom had 5 kids, was widowed young, her new husband was an alcoholic who she had a poor relationship with, and her oldest son was indeed a bit of a hellion. She grew up in an abusive family herself in the deep south, and old ways is right ways, i guess. What I did learn from the beltings was to feel very conflicted about my mother: I loved her in the way that a kid always loves her mother, the memory of some infant kindness, but I was also constantly terrified, since the beatings were so erratic, non-causal, angry and brutal. Sometimes she’d make our dad administer them, he was usually gentler about it though.
When I was nine or ten, we were helping to clean up the playroom where we had grown up: as we were painting over the walls which had been our canvas as toddlers, I was shocked to come across a message I had written when I was perhaps four years old, tiny words in crayon which said plainly “I HATE DAD.” I felt instantly the frustrated and perplexed rage I had written it in years before, and also remembered that when I wrote it I was actually angry at my mother, but so fearful of her that I didn’t dare scrawl her own name, and substituted my dad’s even in that private act of catharsis, petrified that she’d catch me expressing the emotion. The helpless fury and despair that another poster mentioned before really rings true to me.
Later on in my childhood I realized what other kids were experiencing when they got a “spanking” from their parents, and it was very different from the beltings around my house. It felt almost quaint, and I realized I wasn’t from one of the good families. In my teens I learned that other kids had it a lot worse, but it was hard to feel grateful, given the psychological trauma was done when I was too little to know better. I think Charles Dickens said something about how you spend the rest of your entire life trying to recover from the things that happened to you before you turned seven?
At this stage in my life, at 36 years old, I still feel complete conflict, resentment, and the pent-up rage of a 4-year old toward my mother. we “get along” nicely enough, since she’s moved on in life and developed the strange revisionist history that so many parents do as they grow older, and I’ve decided it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie. But I will still never trust her, cannot ever be frank with her, am still completely on edge whenever I have even the most casual of dealings with her, and SO don’t intend to ever discuss these things with her. I just feel lucky that I was young enough to avoid the worst of it: my older siblings are much more damaged than i am.
I also remember ways in which my mom hurt my feelings terribly as a kid, just making tiny little comments that she would never remember and probably thought nothing of at the time, but which were utterly soul-crushing to me.
Now I have a little kid of my own, and I think about these things more often, and hope to do my damnedest not to fuck up this kid the same way me and my siblings got fucked up. I’m glad that I waited until I was older to have a kid, since I’ve had more time than most to try and process through my damage instead of having it well up from inside and manifest itself in bad ways for me to rationalize as well as I can… I see younger parents doing that a lot (not necessarily younger in age, if that makes any sense), hitting or yelling at their kids because they’re angry or distracted or impatient or somehow otherwise feels “appropriate” in ways I’m not sure they have considered from a rational perspective. I’m trying to parent from a self-aware place, and part of that means I hope never to hit my kid or otherwise react in an unjust or unduly negative or irrational way, and heaven forbid it scale into a pattern if I ever do. I’m also trying to remember that kids are sensitive systems, and that even if something doesn’t feel like a big deal to me, there’s no telling how that little mind is going to integrate it.
Anyway, while I can respect those of you who use a mild spanking as a calm instructional tool to capture a child’s wandering attention when a lesson is urgently needed, I also believe that there is a vast continuum both in the character/severity of the spanking itself as well as the scope of motivations behind it.