> It's genuinely scary that you have any contact with children

Please stop posting personal attacks to Hacker News, regardless of how strongly you feel about a subject.

Sorry adrusi and dang.

I'll stop posting to threads like these.

Please keep posting.

I really like your comments and believe we need more of what you have to say on HN.

Just try to develop the ability to avoid getting emotionally charged and venting your emotional energy on other commenters.

It's something I've been working on for a long time and I can assure you it's worth the effort.

You're most welcome to email me if you want some suggestions on effective techniques.

thanks for the kind words.

But this is a hot-button topic for me. I've made this mistake before. So it's really best if I just avoid it until I can talk about it in a way that's compatible with HN rules.

You're not presenting any kind of defense for your claims. You're saying things like they're obvious truths, when they're obviously not for the sake of this discussion.

But so are you, and since the action you're proposing (violence against children) is a violation of that child's human rigts as defined in international agreements, and is illegal in several countries, and will draw attention from child protection in many others, you have a higher threshold.

No parenting expert recommends violence against the child - (although a few religious extremists claim to be parenting experts).

Note that any experts dealing with children whose behaviour is described as difficult or challenging will reject violence against that child - and it's that behaviour which you have said should be met with violence.

As one example of an evidence based programme (although the evidence is weak) you might wantto lok at Webster Stratton.

I'm presenting this as self-evident truth because the evidence is over-whelmingly against hitting children. You might think there's some debate to be had, but that's because you live in the US which is i) extraordinarily violent country, and ii) has religious extremists who promote violence against the child. The rest of the developed world had this debate in the 1980s and decided that hitting children needs to stop.