It is illegal to hit our partners, friends and dogs – so why is it OK to smack children? – It is extraordinary that the debate is still being had in England – we should focus on alternatives to physical discipline
It is illegal to hit our partners, friends and dogs – so why is it OK to smack children? – It is extraordinary that the debate is still being had in England – we should focus on alternatives to physical discipline
27 comments
I personally disagree with smacking children, it seems to be that most of the time the arguments are;
– My parents smacked me when I was naughty and I turned out fine (said through buried emotional trauma)
– Dogs nip their puppies to teach them to socialise (my children are nothing but animals)
– I’ll give them something to cry about (I’m happy to traumatise my child)
– How else do you tell a child something is bad? (I’m incapable of talking to a child)
So as you can see, they’re all perfectly healthy reasons. /s
I thought that smacking children had been illegal in the UK since the mid 90s until recently. This should be wholly unacceptable. Time to get it into law.
“If children are too young to understand a conversation about more appropriate ways to behave, then they are certainly too young to understand why they have been hit by their parent. Conversely, if they are old enough to understand the conversation, then there is no need to hit them.”
Sounds right to me
The big problem as I see it is that a majority of people have either had or delivered a smack on the bum to a naughty child in a way that has worked as a discipline method without any real detriment to the child. It’s been a part of disciplining a child since time immemorial so most people don’t see the harm in it, as often there isn’t harm.
The perspective people don’t see is that if by banning smacking, it could save just one child from serious abuse (and it would be infinitely more in reality), would you accept it? I think if posed that question, the vast majority would happily give up their bizarre right to hit their own kids to stop one child being seriously abused.
It’s a perspective thing coupled with the reality that when most kids get a little slap or a spank for discipline, it’s fine and often works with no lasting detrimental effects. More needs to be said about why it should be banned and that it isn’t something just aimed at normal parents who may rarely administer a light smacked bum.
The debate is still had because there are people with truly conservative values who believe that the lefty woke bad people are coming to take away their rights.
If those people would actually engage in the conversation instead of scream about their rights to beat their kids we’d probably get a bit further on.
I smacked my kid’s arse once and realized straight away that the action was about my feelings and nothing to do with dealing with the minor problem my little one was doing. I never hit my kid again. He’s now an awesome individual, sane, well balanced, kind and friendly. He also got his Master’s last year. You do not need to assault a child to raise them well.
‘I was smacked as a kid and turned our alright’.
No, you were abused and condone the abuse of children.
If your only method of “correcting” bad behaviour is to smack your child, you’re a bad parent.
My argument, WHY would you want to hurt your child?
Literally why would you physically want to hit or hurt them? If anyone else did that to your child you’d go Ape, so why do you want to do it?
– edit – Removing some replies to others because in all honesty I haven’t got the energy to argue with someone on the internet I’ll never meet, and getting irritated with a random person probably isn’t healthy lol
Unfortunately I wouldn’t support a blanket ban, sometimes it’s needed (yeah yeah I know it’s never needed blah blah blah)
I came from a trad household in the 70’s ergo you even looked at your old man the wrong way you would get a clip round the ear and to be honest I always thought to myself if I ever have kids I would treat them the same (the usual I grew up fine line)
Fast forward 20 years and I had a kid, now for some reason I never laid a hand on the kid never could do it, so did the naughty step, the reasoning, the raised voice and it worked never needed to smack my child.
Then they started to mess with the plug sockets (even used plug covers which they pulled off), tried everything didn’t work (see above) they would always be messing until the one day I caught them just about to stick something down the hole. For the first and only time straight across my lap and got a smack on the arse.
They never touched them again and I’ve never had to lay a hand on them again, sometimes unfortunately a short sharp shock is what’s needed. You may not agree but for that one time it worked for me.
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Obviously the problem occurs when some bell ends think it’s the only way.
Yeah.. I’ve always thought the law was inconsistent on this one:
– Hit your partner for misbehaving? Domestic violence
– Hit your pet for misbehaving? Animal abuse
– Hit your child for misbehaving? Perfectly legal somehow…
I don’t see any reason why hitting children should be exempt from our laws on assault/battery.
There are alternatives to physical discipline but at the same time, physical discipline should also be a viable method on occasion.
Once you’ve molly coddled your little twat of a child for 11 years and now he’s thrown a chair at the teacher, and set fire to the toilet block. Are you going to continue to tell him ‘No timmy, that’s bad’?
I’m still not right when I hear a plate clatter too hard on a table or a raised voice sometimes. Smaking if defo going to affect many kids in different ways. Even if one parent is like ‘I turned out fine’ your own kid might have a trauma reaction to it and other types of at home violence
Plus much harder to catch abusive parents in sea of everyone smaking their kid. If no parents do it then the kids who do experience violence at home will know something is wrong and more likely get help sooner
The ‘funny’ thing about this discussion is that the vast majority of people at child-birthing age are anti-corporal punishment.
But most law-makers are older and thus have a higher percentage of “it happened to me so it’s not that big a deal”.
As a result you have something that’s really uncommon and frowned upon but not outlawed because of the stuck-in-the-past types not just clamping down on it.
I wonder if there is a correlation between the rise of violent crime committed by children and teens and the reduction in home discipline.
The UK sure is a funny place.
How hard are you hitting these damn kids? Smacking children on the bum is fine. It should only be a tap. It’s an action that goes with the word no. They then understand the word no without the action in the future. It’s an early adoption of action have consequences.
We stop this shit by teaching kids why this is a bad idea.
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We really, really, really need to have a class in school that’s animal care, child care and basic life skills.
Let’s also include sex education, how to spot abuse, study the different kinds of mental health disorders and disabilities, different races…
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Let’s replace RE with this Life Skills course. Plenty of room.
Sometimes a child is doing something so dangerous the risk of trauma is worse than saw…. The risk of electrocution
The sheer number of fallacious – or outright bad faith – arguments that recur in this debate (on both sides) makes it very tiresome. I think my top three are:
* *You can’t hit a random person on the street / your partner to make them behave* – No, but you also can’t send them to their room or confiscate their stuff. The parent–child relationship is different in kind from those other relationships, and the parent can discipline the child in *at least some* ways which would be wrongful outside that context. What you can and cannot do to the person on the street / your partner doesn’t tell us anything about the legitimate limits of that principle.
* *Physically chastising children does them harm because they grow up thinking physically chastising children is OK* (aka the standard riposte to “it never did me any harm”) – clearly question-begging.
* *But what about pulling a child back from a road / slapping their hand away from a hot stove* – those aren’t chastisement in any sense and so would be unaffected by the abolition of reasonable chastisement as a defence. Indeed, they don’t necessarily depend on the parent–child relationship at all: it would probably be legitimate in similar circumstances to slap another person’s child’s hand away from the stove or pull an adult back from the road.
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Ultimately it is just a debate about the limits of the principle that parenting is a matter for the parents. Clearly there are limits to that principle. Equally clearly, that principle exists – see, in a slightly different context, the observations of Hedley J in [*Re L (A Child) (Care Threshold Criteria*](https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCC/Fam/2006/2.html) [2007] 1 FLR 2050 at paragraph 50:
> society must be willing to tolerate very diverse standards of parenting, including the eccentric, the barely adequate and the inconsistent […] it is not the [province] of the State to spare children all the consequences of defective parenting. In any event, it simply could not be done.
I don’t often agree with the guardian but they are 100% right here. Physically assaulting a child is never ok. I feel sorry for all of you were were victims of it and yet make excuses for it.
My parents only did it once in my entire childhood. After that, the threat was enough to make me either behave or fucking leg it.
I don’t think that smacking kids is right, because where do you draw the line, but parents should be prepared to follow through on other types of punishment, like taking devices away, grounding or timeout. Otherwise the little bastards quickly learn that you never mean what you say. I always believed that my parents would follow through, so just the threat of punishment meant something.
I used to hit my son, and was very much one of those people who said “I got hit, it never did me any harm.” I had not considered the implications until a friend, a psychologist who had trained in child development, very succinctly told me that I didn’t consider it acceptable to hit anyone else in my life, so why would I think it a good idea to hit the person I love more than anyone else. It was a real light bulb moment for me. I never hit my son again, and I’ve never hit my daughter.
I genuinely think that most people who do still hit their kids do it unthinkingly. It is learned behaviour; I learnt from my parents, they from theirs, and on and on and on. It only takes about five seconds of thought to see why it shouldn’t be done, but I think you need to be confronted to have those five seconds. It’s too ingrained in us.
Not making an argument for or against smacking children but this is a weird comparison.
Usually when you’re hitting your partner/friends etc you’re in a fight and whalloping them.
Are people really knocking out their kids? Thought smacking kids was a bit of a slap on the arse?
My question is, why is it illegal to hit anyone else but children? And why can only parents do it?
Schools constantly have to discipline kids but they can’t smack them, we made that illegal many years ago but they still find another way to discipline kids for their behaviour.
The amount of adults that act in an awful way, yet we cannot hit because that would be assault. We cannot hit our spouses when they act in an undesirable way because that would be domestic violence. I also cannot hit someone else’s kid when they’re acting out in public but why is a parents right to hit a child protected when you cannot do so to anyone else?
My boomer parents smacked me. Just taught me to lie and hide. Can’t imagine smacking my son, never have never will and he behaves himself just fine.
I got “smacked” as a child by parents and teachers.
There were times when I had bright red hand prints on my back from open hand slaps.
But because there were no bruises technically, nobody did FA.
You don’t have to leave a mark to damage a child. A beating is a beating. Fact.
Well both my parents hit me and all I have ever wanted out of life is to see them die painfully and slowly. Sadly, dad’s a coward and ran away like a pussy when he realised I was strong enough to strangle him to death.