Then the dog licks the kid’s hair, making kid giggle, and stopping the tantrum in its tracks ;).
My husband and I reserved spanking for those limited situations that involved danger, ie, when our boys ran out into the street without looking, or when they grabbed things off a hot stove. The intent was not to inflict pain so much as it was to make an unmistakable point.
Spanking a diapered child is useless - they don’t understand at that age and the sting of the spank doesn’t penetrate the diaper. But a willful pre-schooler who is told not to do something dangerous and does it anyway can benefit by the punctuation mark to a parent’s spoken “No” provided by a short, appropriate spanking.
(bolding mine) So is the intent to inflict pain or not?
Not really. Pain implies an event that hurts for more than an instant or so. A proper spanking shouldn’t do more than sting a bit. Just enough of an impact to be memorable without lingering afterwards.
If you are hitting your child enough to cause pain that lingers, you are not spanking, you are beating.
For those that spanked their kids, how would you describe your emotional state at the time?
Because everyone knows stinging isn’t pain.
How long is afterwards? If the first “afterwards” doesn’t take, would the next be painless stinging for a longer “afterwards?”
Have you the official rulebook on how long “lingers” is after a “proper” painless spanking?
“I’ll give you a proper spanking!”
Shouldn’t hurt a bit.
Of course I don’t have a rulebook. Don’t be ludicrous. What I DO have are two well-adjusted boys who grew up SAFE because they were deterred from running into traffic without looking first and from pulling hot pans down off the stove.
So did I, and I was never spanked.
I think most of the time I gave a spanking I was fighting not to laugh at the situation. Trying very hard to look serious.
I am okay with the idea of a parent spanking their child.
My mom made me write lines. I remember writing over and over again: “I will not destroy the pool floats.”
I must have used 5 sheets of paper, front and back.
Backstory: I pulled apart and chewed up one of those colorful Styrofoam floats called “noodles.”
The line-writing was ineffective because I still bit chunks off of the noodles whenever the opportunity presented itself. Still do to this day, matter of fact.
In grade school I hated art class. I had no natural ability and thought it was a waste of time. So, the teacher made people like me write, “The art room is a workshop, not a playground” when she caught us goofing off.
I believed in being prepared. One day she told me to write “the sentence” two hundred times. She was pissed off! I opened my notebook and pulled out four sheets, pre-written, twenty five lines to a side and put them on her desk. She was livid!!
I was taken to the office, but acted totally confused. She gave me an assignment and I completed it, only more quickly then she expected. Eventually the principal saw things my way and took me back to class.
Growing up in our home, the punishment for disobedience was spanking on the bare buttocks with a belt, hairbrush, or paddle to the point of sobbing. Occasionally it left marks. Sometimes it was deserved, sometimes not at all.
The only lesson I learned is that when you get angry at someone, even for minor reasons, you can really gin up your rage and shut down your empathy so as to deliver a severe punishment. I cannot tolerate conflict, and react to it with avoidance, freezing people out, and harboring legendary grudges. I have trouble forming and keeping good personal relationships, and I feel poorer for it.
I can imagine a protocol of a couple of gentle-but-startling swats might be appropriate for some families. But I’ve never spanked my kids and I don’t think I ever will.