Parenting Professor says that she supports smacking children

We don’t issue corporal punishment to our worst criminals in prison, so the idea of having to use it to punish the smallest and vulnerable in society (children) is ridiculous to me. Sign of poor parenting. Physically restraining violent adults or children is of course acceptable but meting physical punishment is barbaric.

Disgusting, she needs to be on the breadline, how dare she claim the title professor when she is obviously a child beating quack.

So you’d have used physical force to ensure she sat with you. You’d have had to have wrapped your arms around her middle very tight as she writhed and screamed, repeatedly grabbed her as she twisted away and pushed her into a sitting position.

I am pointing out with that that with that you are using quite a lot of physical force (it’s one of the reasons I don’t like doing it actually as I worry it’s easy to unintentionally and without meaning to injure a toddler.)

And that is superior to a slap? I don’t personally know that it is (fyi I used neither.)

Id have made her sit with me for a short period and if she did it again I'd have carried on removing her from the situation. I have had the same experience but my child was a biter. Id have to watch them like a hawk but if they did bite they were taken out of the soft play etc and sat on my knee for a few minutes. I totally recognise how difficult it is to try and contain a wrestling toddler, they are the strongest thing in the world. But they soon realised that if they behaved in a certain way there was a consistent consequence. I can't see what a smack would have added to the situation? If it was a shock thing I found a loud no was pretty effective.

We all parent different but I don't think smacking is the magical solution people seem to think it is

I’m really relieved to read this as I am having a horrendous time with mine and I have never felt so utterly wretched as I do just at the moment!

Not necessarily. Our DS is neurotypical, has never been smacked, and was violent until about six and a half. Our home life is pretty stable- he has everything he needs, DH and I have a stable and loving relationship, he gets plenty of love and quality time with both of us.

I don’t think it’s necessarily logical to say that children will only be violent if they’ve either been exposed to it at home or have a neurodevelopmental condition. Violence is a pretty natural urge in children- just watch a group of toddlers, you’ll see plenty of kids willing to thump each other and most of them won’t be being smacked at home. Most children will be socialised out of it, and for many of them, firmly telling them no and lots of talk about gentle hands and how it hurts people to be hit is all it takes.

This didn’t work for my DS, he needed a much stronger deterrent to put him off. Because we were very wedded to gentle parenting techniques when he was little, it took us getting to the absolute end of our tethers with the violence and moving to quite long, boring time outs in another room the second he hit us or threw something. This solved the problem, which was extreme, in a couple of weeks. He’s now a very well-behaved and kind child who can’t believe he behaved like that. But before, because he wasn’t getting strong enough push-back from us, despite all our natural consequences and talk about feelings, he felt it was something that really wasn’t that bad. Especially as we were validating the emotion that led to the hitting, he got the impression that it was not great but justified in some situations.

I’ll never be in favour of smacking and would never do it. But we were told by several people that they thought our firm, time out approach was bordering on abuse. So if gentler approaches don’t work and anything firmer is unacceptable, it’s not hard to see how neurotypical children from stable backgrounds can end up being quite violent for longer than is normal, because parents really have no recourse beyond techniques that just don’t work for their kid (none of this is a general criticism of gentle parenting btw. I know plenty of delightful gently parented kids. But it was totally ineffective for ours!)

No, indeed. Which is why comparing this subject to what you’d do to an adult doesn’t make sense. They are different relationships.

This is the second time in 24 hours I have seen media mentions and then commenting supporting violence against children. Different continents and completely different forms of media. It almost makes me wonder if there is a conspiracy to move the Overton window.

No, I said that you can’t reason with a toddler.

Helpfully, I have one from this afternoon. (I have a few actually.)

My nearly three year old was on a small climbing frame and shoved her brother off. There was another toddler on there with her. If I’d forcibly moved her she’d have started kicking and screaming and would have kicked the other toddler. Her brother didn’t want to leave. I could have forced her down and I’d have had to have had her in pretty much a stranglehold to stop her getting back on (and don’t underestimate how strong an angry toddler is; she’d have been biting me, attacking me, writhing around - I’d have had to have held onto her really, really hard to stop her going back.)

So what do you do? I have no idea whatsoever. I am sure I’ll be told what I should have done and I’m also sure it wouldn’t have been remotely practical (this is not personal to you, just my experience of toddler threads on here.)

You also suggested the less developed a child’s communication and understanding is the more the need for physical force which is just fucking mental.

What are all these many scenarios that can only be dealt with by smacking?

It's so bloody easy to parent without smacking, it really annoys me that people pretend it's hard.

1. Love your children and spend time doing fun things with them
2. Set a good example; model good behaviour.
3. Identify and praise positive behaviours
4. Do not reward bad behaviour with attention
5. Keep an eye on them and step in and physically remove them when they are being a danger to themselves or others.
6. Natural consequences where possible. If not possible then no electronic devices.
7. Go back to number 1

If you do this consistently then by 5 the hardest part is over and you can enjoy people telling you what wonderful children you have for the next decade or so.

In what type of scenarios?

I haven’t but I do think some kids need a good smack to sort them out. I saw a mum smack her child once after really trying to reign in his behaviour. One smack and he stopped behaving like a little brat and spoiling it for everyone else. I looked around and could see everyone probably thinking good!

My first post on this thread read ‘Smacking is awful and I don’t want to ever return to it.’ So no, in a word.

But it does render us more or less helpless in a lot of scenarios. And I want us to be honest about that and stop the pretence that all we need are firm boundaries.

I was hit as a child, the type people are advocating for on here. I hated it, it hurt, it humiliated me and taught me nothing. I could never hit my children as a result. We have found firm boundaries, fair consequences, respect and talking was far more effective. I suspect the decline in behaviour has been more about the lack of boundaries and inconsistency as opposed to a decline in physical punishment.

Hang on, you’re actually suggesting physical force and hitting is better for under 3.5 year olds than older kids?
I mean that’s just barbaric.
Hitting children is wrong full stop but hitting a toddler? Honestly what’s wrong with you.

If a toddler can't understand words, tone of voice or being removed from the situation why would they be able to discern the cause and the effect and therefore the lesson of being smacked?

Smacking a child is physical and emotional abuse. There’s no defending it, no context in which it’s ever acceptable. The fact it’s done by parents, the ones the child should most trust to be safe with, is appalling. I really, really cannot stand people who defend or advocate hurting children

You can understand that when something has become a negotiation, you've already lost your boundary without the solution being a smack though. It should just be better upholding of boundaries.

It's a completely rational response to danger. Mammals tend to invest a lot of resources into their offspring after birth. So it makes sense to focus those resources into the offspring most likely to survive. Brutally, it's better to eat your babies to recovery the energy from them and remove yourself to safety than it is to continue using valuable calories producing milk for offspring that another animal may kill.

this, children need to understand that societal rules are not optional. There is a big difference between battering a child and a tap
on the back of the hand. You cannot negotiate with a toddler; they can’t process what you are saying but as a parent you have a responsibility to keep them safe.

It's not abnormal either. Many mammals do it under stress.

💯!!