Is Spanking an Acceptable Form of Discipline?

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John Rosemond says that most parents don’t accomplish anything by spanking. They spank the same children over and over. That means it is generally ineffective, even in his view. He would have to agree that many parents spank in anger and frustration and sometimes injure children. Almost all physical abuse begins as “discipline.” We spend billions of dollars annually on child abuse prevention and treatment in the U.S. Physical abuse of children occurs at high rates and researchers find that for every confirmed report of physical abuse, 20-50 go undetected.

If a physician had a choice of equally effective medications to give a child would he prescribe one that could cause harm? Rosemond should do likewise and recommend that parents do not spank children.

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The fact is, many if not most parents accomplish next to nothing with time out, taking away privileges, or any other disciplinary consequence. For example, parents who use time out often report that they use time out over and over again for the same offenses, with no seeming effect. Unfortunately, since the liberal parenting revolution of the late 1960s, early 1970s, American parenting has been a crap shoot. This problem is not going to be solved by more liberal, despotic intervention in the family. The liberal anti-spanking experiment in Sweden has pretty well nailed that. It’s going to be solved by reaching parents with proper information, not by enacting law. It may surprise some readers to learn that I have never recommended spanking as a matter of course. I simply warn my audience that liberal good intentions almost always lead us down the road to Perdition. I do not recommend spanking, nor do I NOT recommend it. I am frequently found telling parents that if they are going to spank, do it properly, in a way that accomplishes something, a something that negates the need for more spanking for the same offense. I have to believe that keeping the government out of this is the better solution to the “problem,” which is a problem people with their heads in the clouds helped to create. As for schools banning paddling, I have gone on record as far back as twenty years ago saying that schools should not use corporal punishment as a discipline tactic.