Parenting Professor says that she supports smacking children

You can be a parent without hitting them. You can have strong boundaries without hitting them. There are plenty of fab kids in the world who know how to behave but have never been hit.

I have many thoughts about this. The BBC regularly publish things like this without applying any critical thinking. It's lazy journalism.

So the UCL group have clearly been funded by a pressure group to give a gloss of respectability to some basic investigative work that shows something self evident: parents from lower socio-economic groups with less education have fewer tools in their parenting toolbox and so are more likely to resort to violence as a punishment. Those same (poor and badly educated) parents are also likely to have children who do worse than average at academic exams. The trouble is the parenting and the smacking is a symptom just like the GCSE results.

Then because the BBC likes to pretend it's evenhanded it gets another academic who is paid by a different pressure group to say something suitably controversial that appeals to those same parents.

Finally the OP posts a link on Mumsnet, we all click to read it and the BBC are happy.

Obviously smacking children is wrong and unnecessary but a) it's impossible to police and b) there will still be children who are underperforming at school because of inadequate parenting but there is very little money to improve parenting skills and as happened with SureStart the middle classes will be the ones who make use of the resources available and so the attainment gap will continue to expand.

No, she's speaking the truth. The amount of people who plead, bargain, negotiate etc with children and come on here confused about why their children verbally, and sometimes physically, abuse them is proof that this insane trend of being friends with children, instead of parents, is just a disaster.

I just had a quick Google of her and I get the impression her ideas generally fly against accepted views on parenting. No doubt she will be enjoying the publicity her view on corporal punishment will be generating.
Justifying physically assaulting a child is morally bereft.

Boundaries just absolutely don’t need to be backed up by violence.
It’s ironic she talks about the of society where the social norm is we don’t go around hitting people, but the way we introduce children into these social norms and unspoken societal rules is … by hitting them?

The study is complete gumpf:

"The study was observational, meaning researchers compiled results from questionnaires completed by families of children who had been physically punished.

However, their analysis could not prove a direct link between smacking and the results, as other factors might have influenced a child's life over the research period."

I guarantee there are other significant factors at play (educational level of parents / socio-economic class), which mean smacking and lower GCSE results are more likely.

It’s an awful message certainly, but that headline is patently ridiculous.
Lower GCSE grades??