Fluke82

There is a lot(!) of research on spanking (some links below) but there is a quote I heard go around attributed to Cicero, born 106BC, that I think is a better answer to your question: "Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book."

Similarly I remember in my college history of communication class, we were very interested in if the Internet would destroy relationships and power dynamics (I'm dating myself, Internet was new at the time) and we spent a lot of time looking at how upset people were with the rise of literacy, such as in Hunchback of Notre-Dame there is the sentiment that the book will destroy the church.

All this to say we have been complaining "kids these days" basically since they invented spoken language. Possibly we see kids differently today in western culture because we control more of their activities and time so we get more pushback ("I don't want to go to music class!") or simply we spend more time with our kids now than generations past and rather than allowing them to run outdoors with their friends, we see them running in restaurants and other non-ideal places.

Anyway, research on spanking/hitting as promised:

Gershoff's overview of past research - Spanking and Child Development: We Know Enough Now To Stop Hitting Our Children - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3768154/

American Psychological Association 2012 overview - http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/04/spanking.aspx

Pediatrics article linking spanking to increased child aggression - Mothers' Spanking of 3-Year-Old Children and Subsequent Risk of Children's Aggressive Behavior - http://m.pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2010/0...

Canadian Academic publication overview - Physical punishment of children: lessons from 20 years of research -http://m.cmaj.ca/content/early/2012/02/06/cmaj.101314.full.p...

Abstract of article correlating spanking and later abuse - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18779030