It's a tough balance.
Sarcasm? We have both privacy and free roam rights for children in germany.
Talk about sane legislature!
It's nothing to do with SRS, which is not offered to children anyway, so your dislike of that is irrelevant.
It's my understanding that spanking isn't the optimal way to discipline children and still shouldn't be done, but conflating it with beating a child is ridiculous and offensive.
Yes, striking your child to teach them a lesson is definitely completely unrelated to striking your child out of anger/frustration. Definitely no connections there at all.
To me, a "spank" is usually a mild to moderate slap on the rear, a part of the body particularly well cushioned that can handle it just fine without physical trauma, not to mention psychological trauma.
When I think of a child who has been "beaten", I imagine repeated bludgeoning across the body, often with a tool, and usually with visible bruising and possible laceration and bleeding.
If you've ever been a parent, regardless of whether you think spanking is OK, you know that there is a huge difference between these two activities. I personally avoid physical discipline myself, but I can understand a parent who decides to give their kid a spank on the rump after the child did something where they didn't understand how seriously negative the implications were.
For example, if 5 year old runs out into traffic on a busy road and you pull them back, which form of discipline is more likely to negatively incentivize the impulse to dash into the street to get a penny? I can see why someone would think that the short – but sharp – pain of a quick spank is more effective at protecting the child's short and long term health.
When I think of a child who has been "beaten", I imagine repeated bludgeoning across the body, often with a tool, and usually with visible bruising and possible laceration and bleeding.
"Spanking" can definitely include implements, though that's less common nowadays as people have started to view the act in a less positive light overall.
And the "without psychological trauma" is one aspect where it isn't really that clear if there is a level of spanking that avoids that whole issue.
Exactly, which is why I myself choose to play it safe.
But it's kinda like the, "No evidence that parachutes save lives" thing, where because you don't have a double-blind randomized controlled study, we have to end up relying on our intuition.
And – unlike with parachutes – everyone has a different intuition as to whether spanking is actually going to result in trauma. Lots of, "I'll never hit my child" going up against, "I was spanked as a child and I'm just fine" so its all back to personal judgment.
I think by using violence, the main thing you teach kids is that using violence is an option. I prefer to discourage violence. I'm not saying I never grabbed or held them a bit too roughly, but I think they learn a lot more from me talking to them and explaining why it's wrong, than from pain.
> When I think of a child who has been "beaten", I imagine repeated bludgeoning across the body, often with a tool
I see people talk about belts far too often. I would consider that immediate grounds for losing custody over your child.
It is true that a malicious parent is capable of mentally damaging their child without recourse to violence, but it does not follow from that that we should shrug and permit it. Violence is an overwhelming force multiplier in an abuser's toolkit, and also strictly unnecessary for good parenting.
I'm glad that you brought up this example because it's the one context in which I think spanking can be acceptable (needing to shock a child from something they were about to do that could have endangered themselves or others). I'm not a parent and not sure I wouldn't try to find some other approach but I can see the strength of the argument here (where I can't see it for other uses of corporal punishment of children).
The empirical evidence is mixed. The best behaved kids in the world are in east Asia, where physical discipline is still quite common. Physical discipline was widespread in the west during the very timeframe that contemporary civilizations developed. America as you know it today, with all its prosperity, was created by people who were spanked as children.
More likely by people who played outside as children. I'm pretty sure that's more universal than spanking.
Which is giving me an idea: are there societal problems among youths that correlate with either a lack of spanking or a lack of playing outside? Most of Europe has banned spanking but encourages playing outside, whereas in the US, spanking is legal but playing outside strongly discouraged. Which kids are doing better? Less violent? Less psychological problems?
> Physical discipline was widespread in the west during the very timeframe that contemporary civilizations developed.
I'd be real careful pushing that justification; it can be used to support all manner of unnecessary (and was-never-necessary) evil.
I meant Asians in Asia. Also, as I mentioned in the thread you linked, I’m unpersuaded by your study of Asian Americans, especially because of the highly idiomatic phrasing of the polling questions. I’m also not even sure how you’d design a study to measure this to account for confounding factors. For example, how do you separate parents who use physical punishment because they have poor impulse control (which is quite heritable) from those that use physical punishment when it’s appropriate? And what’s the definition of success? E.g. what if teachers hitting low impulse control students doesn’t do much for the student, but reduces disruption so the rest of the students in class do better? That wouldn’t seem to count in the studies on this I’ve seen.
Nobody should hit kids. This is a bad contrarian hill to die on.
We know for a fact that corporal punishment is widely used in Asia. Surveys show that 60-70% of parents in India, China, and Japan spank their kids or approve of spanking: e.g. https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2014-06/03/content_175.... It's possible that all those Asian immigrants come to American and adopt western attitudes against corporal punishment, but I'm going to need more than a poorly worded survey to believe that.
> Nobody should hit kids. This is a bad contrarian hill to die on.
You're the contrarian here! The same survey you relied on in the other thread shows that the vast majority of asian American parents (73%) spank their kids.
It was also created by people who practiced bundling [1] as a courtship ritual, hanged people suspected of being witches [2], and used mercury as a treatment for melancholy [3].
Out of all the practices you could have picked as a cause of America's current prosperity, why on Earth would you go with beating kids?
You're smart enough to know the difference between correlation and causation. Do you have evidence that physical discipline was the reason America became the country it is today?
If you don't have such evidence, how do you know that we wouldn't have been even more prosperous without corporal punishment as a child-rearing method?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_(tradition)
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials
3. https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2017/10/22/mercury-was-...
By contrast, cultures that stopped using physical discipline are almost universally in decline. On the European continent, for example, post-Christians who don’t use physical discipline are being outcompeted by Muslims who do.
That's why you find them being passed in conservative and ultra-religious states: Utah, Texas, Oklahoma