I don't think how to deal with an adult is a good guide for what's an acceptable way to deal with children. For instance if someone were to put their wife in timeout or take away her allowance that would make them an abusive a-hole, but these are perfectly acceptable punishments for a child. Likewise leaving one's wife is an acceptable option for an adult but not for a child.

I would put my child in time-out if he left his wife.

Children are driven mainly by emotion. Particularly young children. Pain is an emotion that tends to override other emotions. A brief, sharp pain can snap them out of an emotional loop they found themselves caught in. Since the pain is very brief, they tend to revert back to a much more reasonable state afterwards.

All that said, yes there is a difference between parenting and abuse. However, children are not tiny adults. They are tiny humans. You can often tell how they are feeling or why they are feeling that way, but it isn't by thinking the way a well-adjusted adult would. The whole point of parenting is to help them get to that point eventually.

And 99% of the non-spanking arguments ignore these truths and seek to treat children like tiny adults. If treating children like adults were possible, then we would redefine them to be adults and let them go on with their lives.

If someone acts the same way at 25 that he acts at 13, that person would be a sociopath. But 13-year-olds are rarely sociopaths (i.e., they are only when truly mentally ill).

Children can't function the same way adults do, and we can't treat them the same way, full stop.

If we could treat children the way we treat adults, they wouldn't be children, they'd be adults.

This is the kind of willful obtuseness the poster upthread is talking about.

I'm not asking people to treat children as adults.

I'm just saying that hitting a child is always as abusive as hitting an adult, and often more so because the child has no chance of escape.

There are many ways of parenting, and msot of them do not include violence against the child.

This is why hitting children is illegal in many countries.

Never mind treating children as adults: how about we treat them as humans, with rights that need to be protected?

>Again, it wouldn't be acceptable with an adult; just apply the same standard.

And that's pretty much the key point. You cannot pretend children are adults.

Our society draws lots of important distinctions between adults and children.