johnbrandt wrote: Parents know damn well that there's a huge difference between smacking thier kid and child abuse, and parents rightly feel strongly offended when wankers like this come out with thier ideas and spout such shit as "todays smack becomes tomorrows punch".

Except parents don't know the difference, hence why large amount of abuse (as in actual assault, not just smacking) occurs. And, to compound the problem, actual child abusers who beat the shit out of their children manage to get away with it by appealing to the rule of "reasonable force". That is, you get parents who beat a kid black and blue with a 2X4, and justifies it as "reasonable force" because the kid had slapped his mum and stole the family car.

Anti-smacking laws, like the one introduced in NZ a few years ago, have been hugely successful in catching these child abusers and locking them up. And, importantly, the law has been set up so that the average parent who gives their kid a light smack for running into the middle of the road is unlikely to get into trouble (so far at least none of these parents have gotten into trouble).

johnbrandt wrote:The problem is that "experts" like this guy and his friends assign adult levels of reasoning and situational awareness on little kids even down to toddlers. It simply doesn't work like that...kids don't work like that. Everyone has to have been in a household for a visit or seen kids in the supermarket or shops running wild while the parents stand there and quietly try to reason with a child who can barely understand english yet, much less philosophical points like "Now how do you think other people feel seeing you acting outlike this?"...the message is much more easily delivered and remembered by the child by a quick smack on the bum.

No, experts don't assign adult levels of reasoning, and that's why they suggest that parents only use behavioral methods that can be shown to be effective - rather than doing something like hitting them and expecting them to perfectly reason themselves into not performing whatever abstract behavior the parent deemed inappropriate.

The problem is that there is a vast amount of behavioral research on punishment methods which demonstrates that it's an ineffective method, with very serious side effects. Researchers like Azrin and Holz have performed a lot of the foundational studies in this area, and their results have been replicated again and again over the decades. Their primary findings are that for punishment to be effective, it needs to satisfy a number of criteria:

1) it needs to be immediate. If your kid runs out into the middle of the road, and you pull him back and drag him onto the pavement, then it's too late for smacking him to have any effect.

2) it needs to be highly intense. If you try to implement a sort of sliding scale of punishment, like yelling at them, and then warning them that you're going to smack them, and then smacking them, then all you are doing is acclimatising them (and thus densensitising) them to each level of punishment, making each one less and less effective. To stop a behavior using punishment, you must start with the most extreme form of punishment (e.g. if your kid talks back, don't yell or warn them, just hit them as hard as you can across the back of the head).

3) it needs to be implemented by someone other than the parent. The person who implements the punishment becomes a negative discriminative stimulus; that is, the person becomes associated with punishment, which is obviously something incompatible with being a good parent.

The problems that each criteria solve are important. Essentially, the reason why parents are fooled into thinking that punishment is working, even when they don't meet these criteria, is because an non-immediate and weak punishment will still result in a temporary suppression of behavior. However, what we see is that when performed incorrectly, punishment actually results in a behavior that is harder to get rid of. It also results in problems like children viewing the punishment as simply being an issue when the punisher (i.e. the parent) is present; which encourages behaviors like lying, or simply a global suppression in behavior when the parent is present (which of course is a problem for a parent-child relationship).

What we actually find is that there is a clear behavioral effect occurring in these situations. But rather than this effect being punishment decreasing the problem behavior, we find that the punishment increasing the punishing behavior (i.e. the reinforcement of punishment), where because the parents are fooled into believing that their actions are working (due to the immediate effect of temporary suppression), they continue using their punishment methods. However, it's quite easy for a parent to figure out whether their punishment methods are working or not: When punishment works, it works immediately and permanently. If you constantly need to smack your child for talking back, or lying, or fighting with brothers, or whatever, then the punishment isn't working.

The upside to this is that the alternative to punishment is not explaining or reasoning to a child as if it were an adult. We use the behavioral principles of reinforcement, extinction, habituation, etc, to change their behavior, in the same way we train dogs. Interestingly, we see the exact same misconceptions in a lot of dog owners who mistakenly believe that punishment methods reduce problem behaviors, when we have a mass of scientific data which flatly contradicts their assertions. The problem though is that dog owners and parents who choose to use punishment methods support it not because they have any reason to believe it works, but because it was likely used on them and they don't have the education necessary to use any other methods. But the point of bringing up the dog example is that all dog training experts agree that punishment methods are largely useless when training dogs, and yet their alternative is not trying to explain or reason with the dog to ask them to stop it.

I was smacked as a kid, and when not taken to extremes, I see no real ethical concerns with the act. My only complaint with it is that, as a behavioral researcher, I recognise that the beliefs of parents contradict everything we know in behavioral science. So whilst I have no ethical issues with the behavior, I also understand that it cannot have any beneficial effects in the way it is routinely used and (importantly) it can also have a mass of unintended negative effects that untrained parents won't recognise or be aware of. On top of this, even if it could be shown that smacking somehow manages to contradict the entirety of science, and that the personal anecdotes of biased and emotional parents are more accurate than objective evidence, then it still would not suggest that we should use smacking as we know that reinforcement methods would (at the very least) be as equally effective. Since one option involves harming a child (albeit only to a minor extent) and the other doesn't involve harming the child at all, then we should still refrain from smacking.

johnbrandt wrote:So...we already have stern laws against child abuse...what makes anyone think that the typ of people who regularly beat the shit out of thier kids are suddenly going to stop because a basic smack is banned?

I think the main problem is that for a lot of countries, child abusers are using the law that allows smacking, to abuse their children (this was the case in New Zealand, at least). In other words, people would beat their kids, to the point where they were hospitalised, and when taken to court their lawyers would point out the law that allows smacking and argue that their beating was within the realms of "reasonable force".

But I don't think anyone could deny that parents who are willing to smack their kids will be more likely to do on to beat their kids. The fact is that parents generally don't smack their kid because they're trying to change their behavior, or that they believe that it's going to be effective. Parents smack their kids because they're pissed off and emotional, and as such their behavior is unpredictable and can easily lead to a more severe beating.