I would be so happy when my dad grabbed the belt because it barely hurt :))

the only time i ever see physical punishment as acceptable is when all other solutions have been exhausted

i've only been hit/beat with a belt twice ever by my parents and both times i was 100% out of line and refused or didn't refuse every single other solution they offered

I've been told by my mother I only got spanked once as a child, because I didn't know any better so I ran right across the street when cars were nearby at some point when I was rather young. Apparently I never did it again so I don't think it was the worst thing in the universe. I think beating kids regularly or harshly is a shitty parenting tool and is bad, but also I think that physical punishment is can be okay in specific and rare circumstances.

i cant even coach my tf2 players i hope i never have to deal with children

Henlo, my parents, mother in particular, was never afraid to spank us, and no, we were not spoiled, it is hard to spoil 5 kids and support a family, but hey, look at us, we all turned out fine- great manners, people love us, and we are most achieving and make our parents happy.

So no, not everybody who has said that is incredibly spoiled, sure someone has, but that being said, nothing is impossible.

why are these two parents

same here. i've completely lost all trust of feeling of safety with my dad not only because of the fierce amount of violence, hostility and aggression he showed me and my siblings but also because he's a proven liar and manipulator

i tend to just blank on that portion of my childhood when he was like this but he used to beat us like any other disciplining parent would, usually using something like slippers but sometimes he'd get this black wire thing with metal bits

i don't really know how discipline looks like in other households, from talking to others it seems to be a slap on the hand or on the butt but from my dad it felt more like an actual "beating up", where he'd get you down to the ground and constantly strike at you for several minutes before he ended his fit of rage and fucked off, but he'd still constantly shit talk you/put you down for hours.
this was especially because he really forced my brothers to get A+ in every subject in school, and he would study with them for hours in their room. the way he teaches isn't special in any way nor does it help you understand the material any better, he just does it to assert dominance and kill all self confidence you have, usually by explaining something terribly, expecting you to get it, and yelling at you/threatening to beat you up if you mess one thing up/get something wrong

i literally remember him yelling like "I HATE YOU, I DON'T LOVE YOU, YOU'RE A DISGRACE", etc. just 'cause one of my siblings was struggling with a particular topic in leaving cert maths/physics (which isn't exactly easy to understand first time). it was what i understood at the time as unconditional love; he only "loved" you if you got everything right.

my mum once told me that the police were called over to our house by the neighbours as my dad was going crazy again (he must have fucked him up bad 'cause I wasn't even born at the time so my sibling could have been no older than 10)

rn at my age of 15 i think discipline is alright to a certain extent, but it has to be paired with a rational direct explanation of why the kid did something bad, because hurting your child and expressing rage without teaching them anything literally isn't positive in anyway, all it does is make them upset and lower their trust in the parent (also potentially injure them if u go full retard on them)

sorry if this sounded like bitching about my life or anything

tThey got a kid to save their marriage, Doesnt really work on the long term.

E

got belted on the ass a few times when i was being a dickhead and im glad i did

my mom beat me a few times when she lost her temper and i can definitely say that it is not good for parenting at all,IMO

Real talk. What's the turning point for when exerting physical harm onto a child stops being a means of discipline and starts turning into actual child abuse?

Don't beat your kids

https://www.reddit.com/user/rogersimon10/

https://cdn3.volusion.com/luyxe.dexsa/v/vspfiles/photos/40mmLBlkSglLoopOSlv2686NcklSnp-2.jpg?1469811844

i mean if ur black its worse
gettin hit with a wooden spoon by ur african dad hurts

-

When I was little my mom used to just hit me with whatever she was holding.

My family is Russian and I got beat.

It has not left any mental scars or anything of the sort but I also think my mother did not do it for the right reasons either. I know she almost always did it because she felt angry and/or out of control, but I also don't blame her because she was also in her early 20's, very sheltered but trying her best when she was raising me. Honestly my most memorable recollection of getting punished as a kid was not getting some cheap glitter nail polish that I was promised for good behaviour after I accidentally said "fuck" without meaning to, because it felt completely unfair.

I don't think that it's ever necessary to resort to physical punishment to raise a kid right but I also think that people who just scream that it's always abuse no matter what are greatly over-exaggerating things. I guess the real problem is that you won't know how it affects your kid until it's too late; but the same thing can be said about any number of psychological fuck-ups a parent can have in regards to raising a kid. For example while I got beat, what really got me was my grandmother telling me she will die of an asthma attack if I was ever embarrassing her in public, which means that I now have a horrific fear of being noticed in a social situation. My grandmother probably got her own social anxiety from somewhere in her childhood and instilled it into me. But that has had a MUCH more lasting consequence on me than any amount of physical punishment I got.

Im brown :)

yes

400 respondents so far. The results are interesting

- 64% were beaten, 36% were not
- 52% think corporal punishment is justified, 48% think it's not
- out of those that have received physical punishment as children, 65% think it's justified
- out of those that have not received physical punishment as children, 72% think it's not justified
- out of those that think it's justified, 82% were beaten as kids, 18% were not personally beaten
- out of those that think it's not justified, 53% were not personally beaten and 47% were

As for my personal experiences, I'm a 22 year old slav so my parents did beat me as a kid (mostly my mom, my dad is bae). However, compared to some of the things posted here, mine was mild. It was almost exclusively getting single slaps when I went out of line or my mom chasing me around the house trying to whack my ass with a rolling pin (not the thick American style rolling pins, ours are thin and long, basically a rigid switch).

Personally, I don't know if beating your kid is justified or not. Sure, you can make the argument that you can always sit them down and say just the right words in just the right way that'll make them stop misbehaving, but in reality, that's not always the case. Parents are human too. They don't always know what to say. They have jobs, they have stressful lives, and kids can sometimes be insufferable little cunts. Sometimes they either refuse to listen or are too young to understand what's being said to them (like Osiris's response back on page 1).

So yeh, I think that physical punishment is justifiable but only if it's used as a last resort, not as a lazy shortcut to discipline.

As for it being traumatic, well, I think it all depends on the culture/zeitgeist (and whether your relationship with your parents is otherwise healthy and loving). Everyone my age got whacked by their parents as a kid and no one considers him/herself traumatized because it's just the way things were for us. Same goes for even older generations where it was normal to not only get beaten by your parents, but teachers and more distant relatives too. It might seem barbaric, but since it happened to literally everyone, no one feels it as trauma. But I guess if you grow up in a culture where everyone keeps telling you that if your parents ever laid a hand on you, it's abuse and you should be traumatized, then you will end up traumatized.

And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that actual abuse doesn't exist and isn't traumatic. All I'm saying is, not all physical punishment is wrong

Edit: added some more stats that I forgot the first time

if anything i should have been spanked more

i do believe habib was dropped on the head far too many times as a little boy

.

Firstly I want to re-frame what traumatize actually means because its got a bad reputation. All experiences "traumatize" or leave an imprint on your psyche regardless of intent or how it makes you feel. It's an interesting word because it's often associated with pain and suffering but you can bet your sweet ass visiting a beautiful place or meeting an amazing person or feeling any strong emotion has the same exact effect just in the opposite direction.

When people say they are "traumatized" what they are actually saying is that they were conditioned in such a way that created certain tendencies that effect their life in an undesired way. For example, if you beat your kid when they asked for food they would associate hunger with pain which can develop into an unhealthy relationship with food. If you beat your kid randomly they will learn to avoid you because you can pop at any moment and, by extension, avoid people in general which can lead to anti-social behavior.

Pain and love are just tools in the toolbox and both can be abused. How many children are coddled by their parents in the name of love? Plenty! When they grow up having a hard time integrating into the "real world" the damage becomes apparent.

With that being said, we shouldn't concern ourselves with if we should beat our kids but the question becomes what kind of behavior should we be encouraging and discouraging in a child in order for them to lead as much of a successful life as they can. What defines success, of course, is an entirely different topic.

Certainly pain doesn't have to be physical! By all means - don't let them walk over and you talk it out, allow them to understand the implications of their actions and how it effects others. Touch their hearts and invoke something within them to make them want to change for the better but when the little shit doesn't listen beat the shit out of them. (o^-^)b

Beating and fighting is only going to get the situation worse. If you can't make the kid understand why X is bad you're not trying enough.

violence is not a solution and if a parent says he cant get it through the child in any other way then he fucked up way earlier and shouldn't have been allowed to have kids before fully growing up

in my workplace i always see parents who cant control their kids and resort to hitting them even slightly, the kids don't learn from that unless they get really traumatized I guess

my dad didn't hit me as a kid and never will. only my mom did

I think the one time my mother ever laid a hand on me was when I was a toddler, and I punched her because I thought she was misbehaving. She retaliated by hitting me as hard as she could because according to her, my toddler punch apparently hurt her from what she says. I never hit her ever again after that. My father never hit me because he was never around, so aside from that one instance, I've never been struck or spanked. I'm not sure if my reluctance to use physical violence when all other options have been exhausted is because of this, but it's certainly possible.

I don't think smacking or beating your children is the way to properly convey to them that a certain action is unacceptable, and I'd never hit any child I may or may not end up having. Like others have said, there are better ways to teach children how to behave, even if they're momentarily inconvenient and require you to take time out of your day.

There should be a clear power structure until damn near the mid-teens with your kids. Resorting to hitting your children in order to maintain that dynamic implies that you've lost that power. I was spanked, I was scolded, I was beaten and I endured long ours of military style punishment. I can tell you none of them work unless the power structure is already in place. So the question isn't "Is physical punishment effective?" it's "Is it more effective than other methods?"
Science really says no (more often the opposite), but I'm sure the dumber part of the population doesn't dissociate it with proper discipline in lieu of the ability to create a proper parent-child power dynamic.