Mega-post, to catch up on the thread.
If you love your kid you have to embarrass and hit them?
I'd imagine kids whose parents had strong personalities & effective enough communication skills to make punishment unnecessary will have plenty healthy kids.
If you're a effective parent you don't need punishment, just consequences. Ideally consequences to fit the crime.
natural consequence : For example, throwing food on the floor = no dinner.
punitive & unrelated punishment Throwing food on the floor = drop your pants, bend over and get your ass smacked won't make much sense to a kid & isn't an effective way of showing why it's bad to waste food.
If you're an effective parent with co-operative children, of course you won't need much, or any, punishment. The situation we're considering (and bear in mind that I'm merely trying to suggest that spanking can be useful or even necessary) is one where a parent is not effective and the child is misbehaving.
Do you just sit back and admit that you suck as a parent, and that you should just let your child run rampant, or do you instill some sense of right and wrong despite not having the sort of emotional bond and respect that you'd like?
Let's remember that not everyone can have a strong bond with their children. Maybe it's because the parent is simply not intelligent enough to care for a child properly, or maybe any parent can have a particularly unruly child.
What if your child decides that it's not hungry? Do you then not feed it as a punishment? We need a punishment that is always a punishment, or else we're simply teaching a child not about right and wrong and respect, but that things don't matter if it doesn't care for them.
There is only one universal punishment mechanism: the one that evolution (or God) gave us. If it's good enough for the entirety of sentient life, then it'll do nicely for any child of mine.
Pain is a superb teaching tool because that's what it's evolved to do in us!
Kids understand consequences. Break a lamp, no light after sundown for a day (they'll remember that if they like to do stuff at night). Spanking is the last resort of an uncreative parents (and unlikely to convey any lesson except don't get caught).
Exactly. The spankers & spank apologists deny children are capable of reasoning & then wonder why there kids don't listen & they "have to" spank them.
If you must resort to physical abuse, better to (in that situation) make the kids walk barefoot across a sea of legos, at least they'll learn something from that & understand on a visceral level why that specific action is wrong (rather than the abstract - "this is bad cause daddy says it's bad & smacks my ass hard when I do it").
What if the child doesn't care for light at night? Is it then fine for it to break lamps?
The non-spankers and brat apologists assume that all children are responsive to reason and then have the gall to rail about the bad parenting nowadays!
If even a few children will not reason, that's justification enough to allow some spanking (for these children).
How would you force a child to walk across Lego? What if it won't? What if your child simply refuses? There will be a time when the child wishes simply to be ignored; it doesn't want anything.
Parents who refuse to use 'invasive' methods, such as spanking, will teach the child that it can get what it wants. The child will get its way; it will succeed in having nothing. The supposedly good parents are simply encouraging the child to retreat into its shell and not interact with the world, and, most importantly, not feel any responsibility, because the shell is always there.
If you can just persuade your child once or twice that the long arm of the law will always catch it, wherever it goes, then I suspect that it'll be very considerate. As a child I was very keen on privacy, and being sent to my room was not a punishment at all. I could, and still can, sit on my own and think and be happy. To be spanked, as I was, about three times, forced me to integrate with a world from which I could very well have become even more withdrawn.
It's always amazing how the people that were spanked feel some sort of compulsion to defend the practice. I guess that's how it gets perpetuated.
Indeed. How amazing that the people who actually know it and have experienced it say that it's not bad, and the people who have no first-hand experience have to resort to claiming that it causes some sort of compulsion or psychological harm in order to explain this. No wonder we get frustrated by the 'arguments', when we are rational and all we get in response is 'oh, it must be because you were spanked'.
If people who disagree with you are clearly under the influence of some form of mental control, perhaps you should stop arguing with them, since you're wasting your time. Or apply some insight to your own arguments.
I suppose if you want to get your child accustomed to arbitrary, capricious authority, hitting them is one way to do it.
as is any other form of arbitrary capriciousness. Spanking, from what I have seen of it, is very far from arbitrary or capricious; it is a last resort when the parents have tried everything else. In this sense it is the least capricious of punishments; others may substitute for each other, but spanking is truly the very last one.
IMVHO that's only a sign of lazyness and uncreativity on the parents' side with regards to correcting a child's behaviour. I won't accept the suggestion that only spanking works for some children. I am quiet sure that children who respond well to spanking also respond well to other types of disciplining and it's a matter of finding those methods. Takes education and effort and experience.
And most of all: the will to do so.
If you are quite sure then you have already made up your mind, whether or not the OP says so. However, if you have still not found these other methods of punishment when you have a child that needs spanking, would you prefer to let it go unpunished instead of spank it?
I got news for you both. Kids are craftier than you give them credit for. The simple plugins are quite inadequate as a child can indeed pull them out. And a kids attention span isnt as short as you think. Once they become fascinated with something they will keep at it until they figure it out.
Furthermore, what does that teach a child? Don't bother taking responsibility for yourself or following rules: we'll just arrange things such that the only things you can do are safe ones.
No wonder we've such a ridiculously sue-happy and overbearing nanny culture! Personal responsibility? Never heard of it!
Let me give you two situations:
You have your child by the road and it runs out into the road. You manage to drag it back, but your train leaves soon so you can't stop.
Do you:
a) miss your train while you explain to your tiny tot why running into the road is not a good idea, a talk which it will forget a few minutes later in the excitement of the train station, and sertainly by the time it's missing dinner because you're late home.
b) catch your train, and then try to explain to your tot that running into roads is no good, by which point it will have forgotten the incident, and so the vital misbehaviour-punishment correlation is lost.
c) give it a sharp smack (on the bottom, for those who use smack differently) to make it remember as you tell it not to do that, and catch your train. You might also explain the problem on the train, hoping that it will remember the smack and incident better than just another incident without a smack.
The second is more a story.
I often 'babysat' three little boys whose parents were full-on Grauniad-reading lefties. They never spanked, and ran the whole gamut of coercions trying to make the boys behave. The boys themselves were not desperately unruly, but simply often heedless of authority. Tidying up, going to bed on time, choosing dinner and not complaining about it when eating were all rarities, and bickering, squabbling and petty fighting despite being told to stop, or having the squabble supposedly resolved, were common.
I once had the misfortune to watch over them on a bad night when they were continually misbehaving; hitting each other, trying to pull everyone's trousers down, including mine, throwing toys and doing disgusting things with saliva.
The youngest was barely much more than a baby, and was not sleeping, and eventually was sick. One of the other two, whilst jumping around and not going to bed (or keeping out of the way) spat in my face, so I called their mother.
Both parents came home, and while the mother took the poor baby and fed him Calpol, the father stormed upstairs and spent a few minutes alone with the boys, including spanking them.
It was an extreme situation. The parents had, over the course of years, as it happens, exhausted the possibilities for control. The father, being a slightly old-fashioned man, had a special problem with spitting, especially in someone's face. Strangely enough, this type of behaviour was never so bad in the boys again, and they never ever laid hands on someone else's clothes, nor spat, again. They were, however, just as heedless in all the other stupid and annoying ways as before.
Sure, it's an anecdote. But I like it.
).
in a serious discussion. 
I quiet like the innuendo that I said you said it. And I also agree that discounting effective parenting tools should not be done without consideration. Just like parents should hesitate to reconsider their parenting tools, even if they are effective, for other methods which may be just as effective but with fewer drawbacks. 
