To ask your opinion on slapping kids as discipline?

[Sizedoesmatter]

Just curious to see what the general opinion is on using slapping or 'spanking' (I despise that word) children?

Mine is a very hard no. I don't agree with it in the slightest and I hate the argument of 'I was slapped and I turned out fine', in my opinion you didn't, because if you turned out fine you wouldn't be slapping your children. However 3 seperate sets of parents out of our friend group do use slapping as discipline, so it's obviously still quite common.

Is it ever OK to slap a child? Do you think it's an effective form of discipline? I got my fair share of whacks with the brush off the dustpan and brush or the wooden spoon. I can remember running from the house one day when my mother grabbed the sweeping brush during an argument. Can't say those experiences done me any good. Others may think different?

Aventurine
Those countries banned slapping in educational institutions and in public but within the four walls of their homes parents still pretty much discipline their children any way they see fit.

Those countries banned slapping in educational institutions and in public but within the four walls of their homes parents still pretty much discipline their children any way they see fit.

Nope. Sweden had already banned slapping in educational settings in 1958.

The 1979 law referred to parental smacking. And tbh made very little difference to most parents as smacking had already been considered socially unacceptable for a long time.

I grew up there in the 60s and didn't know any families where the kids got smacked. It just wasn't a thing. We were taught child development in secondary school and smacking was very much presented as a no-no. Of course one knew that there were parents who did it, just as there were parents who abused alcohol or did other inappropriate things, but I never witnessed it.

Most parents I knew were firm and consistent: we knew the boundaries and knew we were expected to be respectful towards adults. We just didn't think of smacking as part of that equation.

My father was a young secondary school teacher in Sweden when the 1958 ban against corporal punishment was introduced. He said discipline became a lot easier after that because it made away with a situation where the pupils took pride in trying to outwit the teacher and viewed the teacher as the enemy.

My mother (also a secondary school teacher) used to read with some kind of amused horror about the discipline problems in British schools where corporal punishment was still the norm.

With hindsight it is probably fair to say that the discipline problems (which have now also reached Sweden) was probably more about wider societal issues than about the punishments per se.

But you don't have to read older accounts for very long to realise that behaviour in e.g. Victorian public schools was often atrocious and that "breaking the teacher" was viewed as a sport.

^My father was a young secondary school teacher in Sweden when the 1958 ban against corporal punishment was introduced. He said discipline became a lot easier after that because it made away with a situation where the pupils took pride in trying to outwit the teacher and viewed the teacher as the enemy.

My mother (also a secondary school teacher) used to read with some kind of amused horror about the discipline problems in British schools where corporal punishment was still the norm.

With hindsight it is probably fair to say that the discipline problems (which have now also reached Sweden) was probably more about wider societal issues than about the punishments per se.

But you don't have to read older accounts for very long to realise that behaviour in e.g. Victorian public schools was often atrocious and that "breaking the teacher" was viewed as a sport.^

Of course this doesn't relate directly to parents belting their kids, but I wanted to say what an interesting and insightful post I thought it was.

I remember reading that the year they banned corporal punishment in English schools assaults on teachers halved. 10:35corythatwas Sweden seem to be a lot more forward thinking than England. We are way behind. I remember smacking by parents in public being common in the 70s/80s where i grew up in South London. I was hit a lot by my mum and started hitting back at age 14, which initially turned into actual fights with us hitting each other. (Sooo dysfunctional) until she gave up hitting. She's still alive now and i have a very low opinion of her and we aren't close. I've never hit my teenagers and we have a good relationship

dancingbear, if you want an insight into what an older generation regarded as normal behaviour towards a teacher in children from a privileged background, read Goodbye Mr Chips. Intended as a heart-warming sentimental account of the beauty of teacher-pupil interaction, but look out for the bit where the Head has to ask Mr Chips to come back from retirement because the class has just broken a younger teacher "they poured water down his neck in Prep. Silly fool, got hysterical". All the fault of the teacher, nothing to suggest the children are not completely within their rights.

Recently read an account- this one autobiographical- from an early 20th C school in Sweden where the girls terrorised their female teacher by openly masturbating in their benches.