I had a strict upbringing and deserved the willow switch or the leather strap, I had my ass tanned a few time by the leather or wooden paddle in school. Are you telling me Kevin that's domestic violence? if so, I call ********, we call that discipline, pleading and negotiating with kids for misdeeds is BS and part of the problem today, to get the backside of the hand from my dad was to disrespect the women folks and I learned that once and the imprint on the living room wall remained their through my younger days. to be honest that old time discipline should be brought back into the homes and school systems without fear.
Now, if you are talking physical abuse such as broken bones and puncture wounds than that is a different matter.
I'm not a parent, so I can only go by my professional experience, which I stand by.
To answer your question, almost everybody on this forum brings up the 'slippery slope' when it comes to discussions about gun control, abortion, socialized medicine, and so on.
If we buy into the slippery slope idea (and--at the risk of sounding like a hypocrite--I usually dismiss the slippery slope as a fallacy, but let us apply it here), then it seems to me--and my work experience confirms this--that slapping leads to hitting with a belt, which leads to punching, choking, hitting, and so on . . . until we have either a violent, bullying kid . . . or a perfectionistic, withdrawn neurotic who's afraid of the world.
We had a contract with the prison system, and the common denominator in the vast majority of violent criminals is a strict, violent, abusive childhood.
There are many people out there that grew up in strict households who were often beaten and "turned out just fine", but this argument means nothing to me.
There are many chronic, heavy cigarette smokers who never get cancer . . . yet this doesn't mean that cigarette smoking doesn't cause cancer.
People who turned out all right after being beaten as children turned out all right in spite of the beatings, not because of it.
There is a difference.
However, as I said earlier, I'm a paramedic, so my view may be skewed in certain ways.
I'm also prejudiced against corporal punishment because of my own upbringing.
I'm actually autistic. I'm high-functioning, but still autistic. My parents punished me for years on end because of my autism. "If you're smart enough to multiply large numbers in your head, then you're smart enough to know how to not be autistic. This is why you choose to be autistic, so you deserve what you get." There is actually a T-shirt that you can buy on the Internet that says--in part--"Attention Grandparents: You can't spank the autism out of my child." Below is a similar one.
I also had petite-mal epileptic seizures as a child (Which I grew out of, which is common. 30% to 70% of all autistic people have some form of epilepsy), and was punished for daydreaming and "not paying attention" when I had as many as 10 seizures a day.
The reason why I was autistic and why I had epilepsy was because I wasn't "motivated" enough to care about doing things the right way.
And so on.
My parents and my sister actually ended up disowning me over my autism because I called them on this when I was older, and my parents both died with the rift unfixed.
I always tend to think that there are alternatives to teaching children that problems are solved with violence.
Or--to put it another way--intensely religious families are often horrified if their children see gay people, because "modeling gay behavior can cause a child to become gay" since nobody is ever born gay because God doesn't make mistakes.
If we accept this, then why aren't we at least as equally concerned about modeling violent behavior, and showing kids that hitting is an answer to a problem? Especially when we live in a violent culture? Is this something that we want to add to?
I'm not trying to be insulting to anyone's background, but I think my points are valid.
