Pain is a good teacher for things like not sticking your fingers into light sockets or skateboarding after dark. Pain isn’t so good for teaching morality. Spanking is pretty much useless as a discipline tool. I’m not saying I know the right road to perfect parenting, just that hurting someone has never taught a person the lesson the one inflicting pain intended to teach.
I agree with this. You shouldn’t hurt a kid during the course of disciplining them, but sometimes words aren’t enough to get a kid’s attention, and you need to do something physical to get their attention, like turn them around to face you when they aren’t paying attention, or drag them kicking and screaming out of a store while they’re throwing a tantrum.
Making hard and fast decisions on principle before you have children is simply the equivalent of begging the universe to demonstrate unto you you just how little you really understand about the subject at some future date. Usually on the date that Little Darling decides to throw a pot of purple paint stright up into the air in your already freshly painted living room (which was not previously purple). Or possibly when you wake up to hear Little Darling yelling “I can skate!” in the kitchen, whereupon you discover him gleefully doing so in what was formerly a five pound bag of flour and a two pound bag of sugar and a gallon of vegetable oil and the leftovers of the Ovaltine powder. In short, it attracts bad mojo.
Judging from my own experience, though, it does have an upside: it guarantees that your mother’s most fervent prayer will be answered, that is, you will get a kid who is just like you were. And you won’t have any idea how to handle them either.
I now believe in beating kids to a bloody pulp, then throwing them into a pit of very hungry crocodiles followed by attack by swarming wasps when they misbehave or give cheek. 
I just wish I’d followed this credo when my mob were little tackers. My really-nice-awfully-liberal-and-just-let-them-do-their-own-creative-thing philosophy backfired bigtime with a couple of them.
Bring back the lash I say! 
I can’t tell you whether you should spank your kids. All I know, with any certainty, is that I should not spank my kids. My mother could not distinguish between “useful, instructional spanking” and “hitting wildly with any available object out of frustration and rage”, or really, anything in the in-between areas. She did not seem to have the ability to stop herself, either, once she was in motion.
A lot of the families I used to work with seemed to have parents who suffered from the same inability to control themselves. For all of those reasons, I am against spanking, but, again, I can only truly determine how I should approach my children.
I’m 99.999999999% certain I will never have any children, but I would have no problem with spanking them. There’s nothing wrong with using spanking as one of the tools in your ‘how do I turn these little monsters into reasonable human beings in only 18 years’ arsenal.
It depends on the kid and it depends on you. My goal is to never, ever hit my kid. His response to screaming is to scream back; I imagine it would be equally hard to administer a spanking without teaching him that hitting is ok.
Additionally, if I were to hit him in the heat of the moment, I’m terrified that I’d snap and would do it too hard or not stop at one whack. I don’t ever, ever, ever want that to happen. For me, it’s better to walk away from such a heightened situation. And I know that, given time to think about it more calmly, I would manage to talk myself out of it anyway - and I think that’s a good thing for me.
You are misinterpreting what I did. (I also think you are vastly overestimating the parents who don’t spank but who vent rage at their children by “jacking up” or screaming in their faces.) On one occasion, I was driving with Chloe, and she wanted to get my attention. I didn’t respond fast enough for her, so she threw a full sippy cup at my head (she missed, thankfully). I would describe my tone as astonished, urgent, and stern, when I responded. I also immediately pulled the car over and parked on the shoulder. I said you NEVER do anything like that and why it’s dangerous.
Similarly, a week or two ago, she picked up a pair of scissors and went to cut the power cord to my laptop. Again, I used that tone, and said, “you could have died.” No screaming or rage required, just communicating the seriousness of the situation.
Oh, and FWIW, I have known a few children IRL who are, ahem, challenging personalities, and therefore might be more in need of spanking according to some in this thread. And such children are actually the least affected by spanking - it either makes them even crazier and wilder, or they deem it worth a spanking to do what they want. And it’s not just my opinion - the experts at the public agency I sent my friend to because she was treading the line with her child told her the same thing - the more spirited/challenging/wild a kid is, the more counterproductive spanking is.
Why the assumption that they will be “little monsters”? I see/hear that a lot, and it baffles me (i.e., I’m not singling you out, per se, but asking about that attitude in general).
My kids are not perfect, and they have the monster-ish moments. There have been times when I’ve had to go into another room and count to 10. There have been times when I’ve cried with frustration. But many of those situations were actually in response to some fairly normal situations that would not have benefited from a spanking, and might have had more to do with my mindset and distress tolerance at that moment than their behavior—something that enrages me on one day might be something I can approach more creatively and calmly another. So, a decision to spank would be more a measure of how I’m feeling than what they did, and I don’t think that’s fair.
All kids are little monsters, it’s genetic. 
My main point was that the general job of a parent is to turn their kids into useful productive adults. I will also note that I don’t personally feel equipped to do that job, hence the virtual certainty that I will never have any kids.
This is exactly why Hallowe’en isn’t the only day I offer candy on my porch.
Well, that and all the butt sex with other men.
OK, thanks. I think I am still feeling a little miffed from reading a thread earlier in which someone stated that parents should not travel at all until their kids are at least 8, because they inconvenience other travelers. Maybe I was reading too much into what you said, based on my irritation at the other thread.
Ok, I’m not a parent, and I’ll never be one because I’ve had the surgery to prevent it, and I don’t like small children. Correction, I don’t like children of any size.
First you must decide what your goal is, and then decide the optimum training methodology. My goal for my children, if I had them would be to get them to STFU untill age 18. At which point they would be ejected from my home and could make all the noise wanted, somewhere else.
Beating, as a form of negative reinforcement conditioning, seems a fine idea. With positive reinforcement, you have to keep buying cookies, or kibble, or some kind of reward. Beating is free, and probably good exercise for you. Just remember to switch arms so you don’t overdevelop one.
If you want your kids trembling silently, and keeping entirely out of sight whenever possible, beating seems the best possible solution.
Beating… spanking… whatever.
We’ve managed to raise two kids to the ages of 17 and 12 and so far neither one of them is personally aware of the true definition of a spanking. Both of them appear to be normal and sociable with no pathological tendencies as of yet. My opinion is, no, you shouldn’t hit your kids. It serves no practical value and is more likely to be detrimental. Besides, if it is emotionally possible for you to strike your children, then you are the one that is lacking and not your child.
Before I became a parent, I wondered if not spanking would be difficult. But as my first child got old enough to consider spanking, I began to wonder what parents want to accomplish with spanking?
I was determined to raise my daughter not to cry like it was the end of the world at every little bump and bruise. This was an issue because it seemed to be instinct to run to her and console her for every little thing. Instead, we took to asking her if she had broke whatever she had bumped into. Usually this broke her concentration enough she would stop crying to examine the object. Pretty soon many bumps did not even warrant any exclamation. Running full speed into the corner of the dining room table hard enough to knock her flat resulted in her getting up re-aiming and continuing full speed.
So the question of spanking raised, just what would I be trying to accomplish? Causing her pain enough to pay attention? That was not going to safely happen. Humiliate her enough for her to pay attention? Well that doesn’t require spanking even did seem like a good idea. So, it really hasn’t been a issue here.
Once you’d said this, it’s safe to say everything that follows is ignorance. Please bear in mind the board’s mission statement.
I’ve always felt the the need to spank or not to spank depends on the individual kid. For some it’s effective, for others it’s not.
It was effective on me. I was a kid in the days before the Internet, videogame systems, and kids having their own TVs & telephones. I wasn’t a super-social kid, and the playing I did with my neighborhood friends was mostly imagination-based, not toy-based. Taking away my stuff would have been pointless because I didn’t have anything worth taking away. Grounding me was pointless because my highly-developed imagination allowed me to keep myself entertained even by myself. What were my parents going to do, tell me “No reading books for you, young man!” But dangit, I sure hated getting spanked!
Spanking was completely ineffective with my younger sister. She’d get spanked, refused to cry, shrugged it off like “yeah, whatever”, and went back to doing whatever she’d been doing. But she was the little social butterfly. Give her a week of “no hanging out with your friends” and she’d be devastated.
What was damaging, I believe, were those times when both of us got spanked at the same time for the same misbehavior, and I’d be bawling while my sister stubbornly refused to “give Mom the satisfaction”, and my Mom would make fun of me for crying so loud by pointing to my sister and saying, “I spanked her harder, and she’s not crying!”
My sister has done a better job in that regard. She has two daughters who are as different from each other as she and I were, and she handles their discipline completely differently. It’s probably significant that our mom had us in her early 20s, while my sister waited until she was 30 to start having kids. The decade probably made a difference as well - my sister and I were born in the '60s; my nieces were born in '98 and '01.
This was actually the next-to-nuclear option in our house. If I was moderately bad, I had to do extra chores. Pretty bad, and I was grounded. If I got *really *out of line, Mom took my books away. That was a bitch.
But, obviously, depends on the kid.
If they took my books away, I’d write my own! <nelson>HA-ha!</nelson>
Erm, actually there was quite a scene when I was 16 or 17 and my mom discovered the S&M stories I’d written …
Reminds me of the joke about the mother finding an S&M magazine under her son’s mattress. She shows it to her husband and says, “What should we do?” Her husband replies, “Well, we probably shouldn’t spank him …”