Smacking

[KS40]

I feel that it’s reasonably ok to smack every now and again, a short sharp ‘stop’ smack on the bum when my daughter is misbehaving. I know my partner doesn’t agree and that makes me feel like I’m out of line. I’m curious how other people feel, is it really never ok to smack? My daughter is nearly 7 and since the age of about 5 I’ve given her the occasional smack (I never did it when she was really little) I would say more so recently because she can really throw her weight around and will generally shout over everyone, stomp, slam doors, throw things around, stick her fingers in her ears, roll her eyes, call everyone an idiot etc etc. I’m generally quite calm but I can loose my rag, especially at bedtime for example when I’m trying to put her little sister to sleep and she’s running round the house like a loon, which she did tonight and I marched her upstairs with a smack to the bum.

Any thoughts please.

Smacking a child is illegal in the UK,
But has a legal defence of "reasonable punishment" under Section 58 of the Childrens Act.this only applies to parents and legal guardians.
So in this day and age you need to be very careful about smacking your daughter. In so much that she or someone else could report you.
However, its my personal opinion like yours that a smack is sometimes called for.
You are sure to get a barrage off people on here who are totally against smacking.

Thanks poshindevon. I’m certainly not walloping or hitting my daughter, no mark is made on her bum, it’s just a bit of a smack which is why I think it’s fine to do. I can’t see myself ever having to smack her sister because she has a point where she does what she is told, the bigger one doesn’t ever get to that point. Want I want to avoid is ending up screaming and shouting at her which can happen sometimes. I find shouting actually more harmful than a quick slap.

No. Smacking is wrong. It humiliates your child and teaches them that hitting is OK. Check out gentle parenting strategies instead.

Yes of course gentle parenting techniques are generally used in our house, we do try positive reinforcement, give lots of warnings leading up to transitions that can be difficult, try and keep calm as best we can. I try never to take things/ toys away, I've not read a bedtime story before and I felt worse for doing that than a smack so I decided to never to do that again. My daughter doesn't have an off switch, she can be a real handful and when she's kicking off and I've had enough a smack can change a moment. The other night I smacked her because she ran downstairs at bedtime (after some other annoying behaviour) and when I took her by the hand to lead her back upstairs she dropped into a dead weight- it's her party trick, she will stop dead in front of you to prevent you moving. So I bum smacked her to move her arse. Then she did.

When there's a really tired crying child upstairs and your older child is dragging her body in front of you blocking you from going back up there, what calm parenting tips are there? I'd like advice for how to be calm in these moments...

I'd be interested to hear whether parents who use a smack like you describe (a light smack on the bum / wrist, not a massive hard wallop) feel it helps in an escalating situation, and prevents the same behaviour happening again?

I was an 80's kid who was smacked when it was the norm for most of my friend too, but because my mother is a toxic narcissist (who is still playing havoc with my mind now), I can't see smacking clearly and separately away from her. I identify smacking with her and how she's treated me with constant emotional abuse, so have never smacked my child, basically because I just see and feel my mother in it as her thing, if that makes sense. I've always wondered if my dd would be less challenging shall we say if we'd smacked?

Dh and I have sat with heads in hands and said, are both our sets of parents right when they say our dd just needs a smack? He has never smacked dd either as he knows how mixed up my feelings are with my mother and seeing it as her thing, and I'm basically petrified to do anything like her at all.

After really awful behaviour from dd say at bedtime or over homework, or not having what she wants, she will refuse to do things or move like your dd, will get really incredibly angry and shows us no respect calling us idiots, hates us etc. sometimes she's aggressive and will lash out or throw something at one of us. Then we sit there together talking about it later on when she's finally in bed and always say the same thing - do you think it's because we don't smack her, so she has no real stopping point / firm boundary in place and an immediate consequence? So I'd be really interested to hear if other parents think a smack (again, a light one) stops things getting to the level I describe, do your kids behave better than they otherwise might because of the threat of / the occasional light smack? Op what you describe is very much what I've heard other mums discuss doing when their children are really misbehaving, I think there's more stigma in admitting to it now though so maybe fewer people admit to smacking nowadays than they used to? Like I said, I'm talking about a light smack on bum / wrist in case anyone thinks I mean anything else. Op I would love to know, if my mum hadn't been so emotionally abusive and therefore me now avoiding doing anything and everything she did as a parent, had I smacked dd, would she be better behaved? Do you think without ever having a smack when things are getting really out of hand, your dd would have pushed things even further? People say smacking teaches children to lash out, but we've never smacked dd and she has a history of lashing out at us, plus I was smacked and I've never lashed out.

Most children were smacked for being naughty back in the day.
My parents were loving and kind , my father never smacked us.
He only had to raise his voice and we knew to stop or there would be consequences and privileges taken away
My mother smacked us. She was not messed in anyway. I am not damaged nor are my siblings. We went on to be well educated balanced people.
The grand children were not smacked but parented firmly and consistently.
The problem with millenials is that they are too weak when parenting. They do not follow through with punishments as it hurts the parent to punish a child. So the child is bouncing around like billiard ball out of control. The children do not understand that no means no. I am appalled at the behaviour of children I see in supermarkets, restaurants etc because the parents think their naughty little darling is so cute everyone else must think they are cute and the child us allowed to do what it likes with no parental control.
I did not feel humiliated when smacked. I knew I had done wrong and upset my loving mother.

No. It's never okay. It's never right. It doesn't help. It clearly does not help your child, who 'can really throw her weight around and will generally shout over everyone, stomp, slam doors, throw things around, stick her fingers in her ears, roll her eyes, call everyone an idiot '.

There is, really, a ton of evidence that it doesn't work.

'In 2016, Elizabeth Gershoff, an associate professor of human development and family sciences at the University of Texas Austin, published a meta-analysis that pulled together 50 years’ worth of research on spanking, cumulatively involving more than 160,000 children. The paper, published in the Journal of Family Psychology, focuses specifically on “what most Americans would recognize as spanking and not on potentially abusive behaviors,” she said. It is the most comprehensive research review to date. (Vox’s Brian Resnick had a great interview with Gershoff in 2016.)

The results were clear: Spanking does not produce good behavior. In fact, it is linked to increases in a wide variety of negative outcomes, from antisocial behaviors to mental health problems to (unsurprisingly) spanking or physical abuse. It does not lead to more compliant or well-behaved children. (Susan Pinker wrote up the study for the Wall Street Journal; the comments beneath her piece are instructive.)'

www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/1/12/16844062/spanking-your-kids?utm_campaign=vox.social&utm_medium=social&utm_source=sprout&utm_content=1515780460

Can I just point out that gentle parenting does not equal permissive parenting. I have limits that are enforced. It's about having boundaries but then helping your child to accept them and empathising with them. I'm not a weak parent. Nor for the record were my parents, who never smacked me, even in the 1980s.

OP, I am pretty meh either way about smacking in general but you did ask for advice about how to be calm and a couple of things that you say about your DD bother me. One is that her behaviour is getting worse and you need to use more punishment recently - shouting or smacking. Maybe you need to think about the bigger picture and what is making her so much more angry and defiant.

And maybe you need to change the way you organise flashpoint times like bedtime. A good way to stay calm is to figure out why she's doing it (there is always a reason!) and plan a strategy in advance. Maybe you need to ignore more of her minor misbehaviour if that tends to provoke a worse fight - do you really need to pick up on eye-rolling for example? Your DD1's bedtime behaviour looks like some mix of over-tiredness and attention seeking. Annoying you, blocking your way and getting you to ignore her crying sister while you get angry, give her a smack and march her upstairs might be quite a win for your DD1 - an uncomfortable win, but a win even so, because if she just kept out of the way you would ignore her altogether to go settle DD2. So perhaps if you let DD1 run off her energy earlier in the evening, then put DD2 to bed and get her settled while DD1 does something quiet (such as starting to get herself ready for bed) and then DD1 gets some calm time alone with you, then that would motivate her to let you go and get DD2 settled. You could use "WHEN/THEN" as a calm parenting technique "WHEN I have settled DD2 THEN we can have our story time".

I went to a lot of parenting workshops for managing kids with challenging behaviour - some for ordinary kids and some for really challenging kids - kids with BESD issues, SN, disturbed backgrounds, MH problems, ASCs, whatever. And what I learned from all of them is that I never need to smack. I don't think smacking is always terrible (though if you have a child who is prone to violent outbursts smacking does make things worse) But there is always something else I could do that will be just as effective and often something else that will be more effective. Quite often when a non-smacking punishment isn't working it's because the real answer doesn't involve punishment at all.

I also think that these days some parents see smacking as like the One Ring in the Lord of the Rings - very evil and dangerous but also very powerful for making kids obey. And if only it was safe and we were allowed to use it properly then modern discipline problems would be over. But this is a fantasy. Smacking doesn't work any better than anything else. It often works less well. I am old enough to remember kids who shrugged off repeated spankings.
Poshindevon mentions consistency and following through. She's right, those are both really important. And you can do them without smacking. It's also only too easy to smack in an inconsistent way, or in a losing your rag and hitting out kind of way, and that's more harmful than not smacking at all.

Another risk about smacking an out-of-control child with no off switch is that smacking may stop working and at some point she may even smack you back, or smack you to get you to move your own arse (i.e. do what she wants, listen to her....) She might be getting increasingly angry and frustrated with you in lockstep with you feeling more angry and frustrated with her. If she ever does hit you then that is the point when you definitely do need to stop smacking altogether and find a solution. But really even now you could have a rethink about what is going in for your DD1 and why you need to smack at all.

(oopsie - for "more harmful than not smacking at all" I meant "more harmful than no discipline at all", sorry for confusion!)

• I feel that it’s reasonably ok to smack every now and again, a short sharp ‘stop’ smack on the bum when my wife is misbehaving. I know my friend doesn’t agree and that makes me feel like I’m out of line. I’m curious how other people feel, is it really never ok to smack? My wife is nearly 37 and since the age of about 25 I’ve given her the occasional smack I would say more so recently because she can really throw her weight around and will generally shout over everyone, stomp, slam doors, throw things around, stick her fingers in her ears, roll her eyes, call everyone an idiot etc etc. I’m generally quite calm but I can loose my rag,e I marched her upstairs with a smack to the bum. I’m certainly not walloping or hitting my wife, no mark is made on her bum, it’s just a bit of a smack which is why I think it’s fine to do.*

Assault is always wrong.

do your kids behave better than they otherwise might because of the threat of / the occasional light smack?

Good Lord, no! Really, don't go there. Smacking is exactly what you don't want to do to a kid who hits you. It can make things so much worse. Just don't ask me how I go to know that

One of the problems about an EA toxic narc mother is that as well as doing bad stuff she probably never showed you how to do really effective good parenting either. There's a slightly old fashioned but still good parenting book by Sue Jenner called Parent/Child Game which you might like. She has good explanations for what works and she even puts numbers on how often you need to do things to make them work (which I like - I like numbers!) She discusses that some kids are easier to parent than others and what to do with the difficult ones, and the effects our own childhoods can have on our parenting and how to leave the bad stuff behind and still be effective. And smacking isn't needed.