To be more than annoyed when people inform me my children need a good smack?

[Slightlyneuroricnat]

It really winds me up.
Not so much the oldies who say " in our day I would have a got a whack for that " but people that can see I'm already having a tough time dealing with 2 toddlers, my eldest daughter is going through a phase ( I bloody hope ) of hitting everyone including me and we always have the same conversation, I don't hit you and you must not hit mummy, you've hurt me and now we are going home.
So we had this yesterday in a park and a lady informed me that I was " wishy washy " and what she actually needed was a good smack herself.
Am I being unreasonable to think she is an ignorant fool or am I some kind of martyr as I don't believe in hitting children?

Anytime

Thanks, interesting read

Thanks for that link - really interesting. Especially where it says that adults distinguish between 'hitting' and 'smacking' but children don't.

We've spent five hundred posts discussing the difference - is it any wonder children don't get it?

I was interested in the parents' perceptions bit - that they are more likely to give up smacking if taught proper alternatives, otherwise they see that "it works" and "never did me any harm". Strategies that ignore "you shouldn't hit" in favour of "it doesn't really work, try x y z instead" were better received and more effective.

Spero, disingenuous? Hmm, let's review.

What I say is simply that I find the idea that someone would deliberately and calmly smack a child, deeply disturbing. You appeared to be saying that you didn't actually do this, you baked a cake instead. So you don't need to take my views to heart as they can't be describing your parenting?

Oh, come off it.

Furthermore, this is not what you have simply said over the course of this thread at all. If you care to look back what you started off by saying is that because your, pretty self selecting, clients had all been damaged by smacking you know for a fact that everyone else must be. You repeated this several times. You then went on to say, and this is pretty much verbatim, that anyone capable of physically disciplining their kids goes through a mental process of discounting using implements and smacking them about the head and then rules that out to avoid the authorities. Someone who deliberately and calmly decides where and how hard they are going to hit a child is in my view a disturbed and disturbing person. Quite a different concept to just finding the idea disturbing and a quite damning personal attack on anyone who smacks. You then go on to say that anyone who smacks is immature and stupid and will always smack more. You also go on to call all parents that smack 'not fit to parent' (an unfit parent, no?) then backtrack later on and say that's not what you said at all, what you said was 'bad parent', although I don't really see how one doesn't go with the other. You suggested that another poster was a 'twat' for pouring scorn on anyone else's personal experiences, although the majority of your argument is based on you doing exactly that. Likening calm smacking to verge on the psychotic invites comparisons between people that calmly smack and what, if not a psychopath, exactly? All of this and then you really, seriously consider yourself to be in a position to star wittering on about judging others because I made a snidely remark about one of your parenting choices?

Several parts of your argument have been frankly incoherent and contradictory, such as asserting that you routinely saw children being cuffed and swiped at at the gates of your daughter's primary school in a 'very rough part of South London' and yet, despite me having told you that I live in a very rough part of South London keep grasping at this link your mind has created of me smacking at home because I want to hide from the authorities. Is it that you saw nothing of the sort? Or if you actually did witness this regularly and the police weren't roaring up every morning did it not draw you to the inevitable conclusions that a) what the majority of posters do on one thread on mumsnet isn't actually indicative of what actually goes on across the country so this huge clamour for a smacking ban probably doesn't exist any further than your own social or professional group and b) the police, round my neck if the woods, have much better things to do with their time than running around investigating parents for doing something that is not, as the current law stands, illegal? If, indeed you live in a rough part of South London, rather than in one of the extraordinarily naice parts of South London that have sprung up in the last 10 years or so since well paid professionals such as lawyers got priced out of the centre so had to move outside and gentrify, you would certainly be aware that a calm and reasoned parent giving their child a slight tap on the hand in public wouldn't raise an eyebrow let alone warrant a call to the police. .

Why are you so determined to argue that using physical chastisement against a child is acceptable?

If you believe that then fine but don't be surprised when other people think those who do it are exhibiting bad parenting at that time and that its ineffective as a punishment or teaching tool.

One reason 'Oldies' as you so delightfully call us them, advocate smacking, is because they know, having been smacked themselves, that it deals with the situation quickly, effectively and leaves the mother far less frazzled, and can be used as a threat sanction rather more powerfully than 'mummy is going to be very cross and upset with you all the way home and probably end up crying or speaking in that voice that makes you want to murder her, and disregard her instructions next time.' Just a thought.

Fefifo - this is a debate worth having, but it is hard having with someone who is determined to misrepresent what other people say.
If you care to look back what you started off by saying is that because your, pretty self selecting, clients had all been damaged by smacking you know for a fact that everyone else must be.

I never said that. What I said was I found it interesting that the vast majority of my clients were smacked as children and smacked their own children. You have chosen to make a leap that is unsupported by anything I actually said or believe.

I do think smacking is bad parenting - I accept it is probably hyperbolic and unhelpful of me to call people who smack 'bad parents' without more. I accept it is more nuanced than that. But I stand by what I said that smacking is bad parenting - it doesn't work and there is a serious risk it causes physical and emotional harm.

Several parts of your argument have been frankly incoherent and contradictory, such as asserting that you routinely saw children being cuffed and swiped at at the gates of your daughter's primary school in a 'very rough part of South London' and yet, despite me having told you that I live in a very rough part of South London keep grasping at this link your mind has created of me smacking at home because I want to hide from the authorities. Is it that you saw nothing of the sort? Or if you actually did witness this regularly and the police weren't roaring up every morning

Sorry, I just don't understand this at all. My daughter went to Hillmead Primary school in Brixton for a year and a half. I frequently witnessed parents cuffing their children when I dropped her off and picked her up. half her class were taken away each afternoon on a Kids Company minibus. It was very sad.

I have also made it clear that 'bad parenting' doesn't necessarily cross the threshold into significant harm and hence care proceedings or social work intervention.

On two occasions I have reported my concerns about someone to the NSPCC and received a totally uninterested response, which has upset and shocked me. One such incident was a child being cuffed quite hard to the head on the tube.

I think smacking/hitting/whatever children is WRONG. Parents should not do it. Hitting a child 'calmly and deliberately' I am quite happy to judge as verging on the psychopathic.

You now seem to want to spend more time making personal attacks on me than putting forward defensible arguments for your position. Which is hardly surprising, as I don't think there are any defensible arguments.

o and ps I don't live in London any more. What I experienced at my daughter's school is a large part of the reason why.

Ok spero.perhaps we should start with the elephant in the room ie the decline in pupils behaviour since corporal punishment was abolished in schools. or about the decline in children's respect generally, decline in self discipline, rise in disruption in the classroom.Wathing Educating Yorkshire/Essex.The kids would not have dared to behave like that when I was in school.

They didn't behave like that in my school after it was banned either. Point?

There is no way to reconcile modern teaching methods (differentiated, multidisciplinary, child-centred) with corporal punishment. None. And no teachers I know would still be teachers if they were obliged to hit their pupils.

There is no such 'elephant in the room'.

The collapse of families, the rise of drug use, alcoholism, criminality etc, etc cannot be linked to the fact that teachers cannot hit children with implements any more.

I agree that teachers should be supported and protected a lot better and that aggressive violent pupils should be dealt with more effectively via containment in pupil referral units or similar. But these violent aggressive pupils would not be 'put right' by a few swipes of the cane.

Their descent into violence and aggression started very early, at home. Just before my daughter left her school, she and two friends (all aged five) were assaulted by 3 little boys. Aged six.

Would beating them have sorted out whatever was so grossly and disturbingly wrong with them?

Not 'beating' them.Spanking them when they deserved it after due warning would have given them a clear set of boundaries and consequences.
'The collapse of families, the rise of drug use, alcoholism, criminality etc, etc cannot be linked to the fact that teachers cannot hit children with implements any more'
No , but all those things come from lack of self control, which again is a result of boundaries and consequences.

I was at school when corporal punishment was routine, behaviour was not better

Yes it has to be used sparingly I think to be effective.

What nonsense.

Rates of violent crime are actually going down. There is far less violence in society than there used to be.

So you would describe the use of a cane to beat a child's hand or buttocks as a 'smack' ? and to what age would you 'smack' in this way?

The teenagers? Or just the little ones?

Yes, of course you need boundaries, enforcement of appropriate behaviour and clear consequences for wrong doing.

What you don't need is to attempt to apply any of that by assaulting children.

It does not work. Why do you think they got rid of borstals? They. did. not. work.

Nunquam, In response to your post at 11.08 (apologies, I am not able to keep up with the course of the general thread during the day).

I am sure there is smacking that causes a great deal of pain that falls in line with the current law, which is why I said it needs tightening. Again, I think that for someone to be emotionally traumatised by occasional smacking there must be something else going on there, how would you legislate and police emotional abuse for example? Do you think that the majority of people that have been occasionally smacked in generally happy, loving home would say that they have suffered emotional trauma or not? In general, I mean, not just on MN. Indeed it does seem to me that a lot of the posters on this thread that are so vehemently in favour of an all out ban have actually had close experience of the very worst examples of violence that occurs in society, whether professionally or personally, as an adult or child. In my own experience, and that's all I have to go own to form my own views, of all the people I know who were smacked by parents that really did manifest their love and care for them in many other ways I don't know any that talked about their experiences as anything other than a casual anecdote. They themselves certainly wouldn't.

I find smacking to be very effective with my children. Given that everyone else seems to find it really weird that I can calmly smack my children and have only given examples of smacking as a result of loss of temper, I wonder what your first hand experience of seeing a parent practice this is? As I do it, every few months or so and as a deterrent from behaviours that will result in pain, not as a regular occurrence or to deter something like whining for 10 minutes for another biscuit. Please no more talk of dragging them through twenty minute journeys in fear as that's been cleared up. If everyone finds it so strange and unimaginable I would hazzard a guess that they haven't seen it practiced, and are therefore not best placed to judge its effectiveness or indeed question my assertion here.

Oh, dear, and I meant to make that short.

Wouldn't characterise themselves as being traumatised.

Go and have a read of the barnardos link a few posts above your last

I find smacking to be very effective with my children..As I do it, every few months or so and as a deterrent from behaviours that will result in pain

And you don't see any contradiction here? You don't smack for normal childhood whiny irritating behaviour. Only the really bad stuff. And they keep doing it. And you keep smacking them.

Do you really think this is working?

I was smacked - normal smacking for the times, standard punishment. Trauma might be too strong, but very unhappy memories and something I don't want to inflict on my kids yes. I don't want them to think that a good punishment is a smack.

I can't speak for the majority of people, but I would suspect that more than you might imagine have suffered some sort of emotional damage from being smacked.

Emotional abuse can't be policed, but smacking can and in doing so therefore logically the emotional abuse would be prevented.

Maintaining a stance that smacking is ok can only be anecdotal at best and doesn't compare to the knowledge we have now that there are far more appropriate methods of discipline.

Need, in fairness as a pro-smacker I'd exercise a fair amount of scepticism about the findings of a report on the issue published by a group called Children are Unbeatable! I will read it carefully tonight but I think it's fair to say the findings will be biased.

Actually Spero, yes. The particular behaviour that I've smacked for doesn't generally happen again. Have you only ever had to use any of the forms of disciple that you would advocate, such as a time out once? And then your daughter has never misbehaved in any shape or form ever again? Bloody hell, I'll reconsider.

Instead try applying that same logic to any one of the forms of discipline that you deem acceptable and re-evaluate your point.

My daughter misbehaves. And I show her the consequences of that - I cut her allowance, I turn off the TV, I tell her 'no' and I mean it.

Why on earth would I hit her?

If hitting was this miracle cure that stopped bad behaviour in its tracks, I might consider it. But you have to hit your children every couple of months. So they aren't making the connections are they? So why do it?

I just can't get past the concept of purposefully causing the most precious thing in your life physical pain.

I wouldn't smack my mum, sister, cat, husband. So why on earth would I smack my child.