It’s fair to say that spanking is as much a part of who I am as my blood type. Thanks for giving its role in the raising of respectful and responsible children such an eloquent voice.

Thank you for sharing your perspective, Rennie.

My naughty bottom should’ve been bared and turned up on my mother’s lap for stealing, lying, being rude and playing with matches. But even though she might threaten to spank, I was invariably punished by the withdrawal of my mum’s affection. Being held accountable for my mischievousness would’ve been consistent with my need for a certain order in my life.

Quite simply, when I misbehaved, I needed punishing. And when I’d been willfully bad (such as when I set paper airplanes on fire in our basement at age 14), nothing so much as a good, sound spanking across my mother’s knee would’ve emphatically closed the book on an episode of juvenile wrongdoing. As it was, I can hardly think of an instance growing up when my naughtiness was memorably punished. I know my troublesome impulsiveness was never spanked out of me.

Much is often disparagingly said about an over-the-knee, bare bottom spanking being a toddler’s punishment, and certainly something profoundly inappropriate for an older girl or boy – but that’s entirely the point. In a family where spanking is understood to be on the table as a wayward action’s unhappy consequence, the choice is always there: the child can either behave or very possibly be spanked.

The anti-spanking zealots delight in misrepresenting spanking as “hitting,” completely ignoring the corrective humbling of measured correction on a growing youngster’s bottom. Would a shy, respectful boy of 14, who’d been raised with occasional spankings, have ever even considered playing so recklessly with matches as I did, alone in the basement of our new home? A good bare bottom spanking would’ve shamed me and stood as a wake-up call to my emotional development. Actions did indeed have consequences…or they ought to have done. For my fiery fun, I never got so much as a single, solitary smack.

I realize times have changed in child rearing. Even threatening to give a young miscreant a bottom warming has been demonized. More’s the pity.

Naughty children’s bottoms were understood to be naturally available for corrective warming and reddening. It was only a handful of times that my own backside was ever threatened with spanking. This was by my mum and my oldest sister. They might’ve threatened to spank, but I was invariably punished by the withdrawal of their affection.

Quite honestly, I would’ve much rather had my bum bared and turned up on the lap of authority for well-deserved smacking and paddling. Being denied those spankings simply made it that much harder for me to learn the critical lesson of Actions & Consequences.

As a boy who got the strap once at school, I don’t remember feeling abused. It was a distinctly unhappy experience that taught me something about the overriding authority in my life, and about being held to account for my behaviour. The wholesale denigrating of child spanking doesn’t impress me, no matter how many studies are cited. I needed those spankings denied me. To her credit, my mum in her later years felt the same.

You’re wrong. If you hit your children, you’re part of the problem.
Shame on you. Find a better way to get your children to obey you, or don’t have children to begin with.

Ok, like the alternative is so much better. Like the people who ‘rejected’ Christianity for the religion of evolution and thought that the Irish were subhuman. You need to re-learn your history. Religion has done a lot of good in this world; people trying to live for something more than self-gratification. Sure, people will be sinful and try to abuse it in some cases, but if you look at the majority of non-profits and charities, religion is what fuels them to do good for their fellow man. It is what keeps people in-check and helps bring accountability to our selfish appetites. What is your perfect world and what are the rules that govern it? Please tell me it isn’t the governmental system we have now where the rich are becoming richer, the poor are becoming poorer; where spanking is ‘abuse’, but drugging children up, castrating them, and allowing them to live a life of debauchery is not abuse; and where babies are sacrificed on the alter of higher education and sexual freedom?

Yes spanking is abuse. You have to be a bible basher from the US to the believe the opposite. But you know what : more and more folks are getting fed up woth the bible , the holly koran and all these old dusty books and religions which brought tears, pains and misery for centuries. To hell with them and their supporters!

https://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/2016/04/27/study-spanking-nearly-detrimental-abuse/X44bY3WymbVSv9LSRrKLWL/story.html

I was spanked and I do not resent my parents for it. So if you simply go by experience and the belief that all pain is abuse, then how can you explain what I experienced? I’m sorry you think your parents did such a bad job, but I appreciated my parents for teaching me a valuable lesson in the way that they did. You are welcome to do it differently with your children. As for me and my house, we will spank.