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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It’s now the official position of the United States government that corporal punishment should not be used to manage children in our public schools - and quite obviously the intent is to signal that same position to parents. This statement by the US secretary of education is full of hyperlinks to the latest research on what it does to children. 
https://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/secletter/230324.html

This next piece is nearly 10 years old, but the statistics on use of physical punishment in parenting remain about the same today. American mothers, by a wide margin,  endorse and employ physical violence in managing their children’s behaviors. Americans fathers with access to their children also use physical violence in parenting.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/hitting-kids-american-parenting-and-physical-punishment/#:~:text=35%25%20of%20children%20experienced%20some,at%20least%20once%20per%20year.&text=26%25%20of%20men%2018%2D59,by%20parent%20as%20a%20child.&text=61%25%20of%20women%20report%20hitting,spanking%2C%20or%20slapping%20their%20children.&text=41.6%25%20of%20parents%20physically%20punished,child%20in%20the%20past%20year.

The older I get the less puzzled I am by how many wounded people there are in the world and how much violence. I grew up in a violent home where both parents seemed to get off on managing typical, developmentally appropriate child behavior with regular beatings by fist, yardstick, belt, and dog leash. We lived in fear of our parents, didn’t have close emotional bonds with them and we all have the spectrum of midlife dysfunction and disorders as a result. My two siblings who had children repeated the pattern and it has been upsetting to see the results there, too.

I grew up to be a commitment phobic childless workaholic, first as a domestic violence advocate then as an attorney prosecuting abusers of all stripes. I also carried cases for many years in dependency/neglect court and the juvenile justice system. The link between violence in the home and in one’s early childhood experience and later dysfunction of all kinds is beat your head against a brick wall undeniable. Yet people continue to beat their kids and call it love.

Peace on earth begins at home, we say in the DV movement. [/quote]

The only people you work with, the people you've worked with for years and years, are victims of domestic violence and abuse.  So you think everyone is an abuser.

ER doctors are well known to be bad at risk assessment.  Police are well known to think everyone is a criminal.  You think everyone is an abuser.  [/quote]

Not true. Beyond my years in law enforcement I also have spent years as an educator and hospice caregiver among many families who have not been involved in the system but who employ(ed) corporal punishment in child rearing. I cannot begin to tell you the laments I have heard on people’s deathbeds.

Those of you who hit your children - they NEVER forget it. The hurt and rejection it puts into their hearts will be something they tell a caregiver about when they are dying 70 years later. It will be something that they understand drove much of the unhappiness in their lives and in their adult relationships and which troubled their own experience of parenting because raising kids makes them fully understand how badly they were treated. And for many generations it is also something that it is never okay  to talk about, because we must honor our mother and father even if they hit us regularly and called it for our own good, told us we deserved it. So it’s something they finally cry about in tbr months and weeks leading to their dying and leaving this earth - and that’s the one legacy you’ve passed on that some hospice caregiver knows about you decades hence.

I have no doubt you’ll stay in denial and justify to yourself every time you hit your kid (and *you* never do it in anger, you’re perfect after all) that it’s for their own good. And all the professionals who have studied this for years are just full of crap. As if it’s not plain common sense that getting hit hurts both physically and psychologically, none of us likes it, why on earth would you inflict it on the people you claim are the most important in your life?

It’s insanity. People who physically assault their children and call it love are deluded and mentally weak. [/quote]

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