Spanking is not good in anyway . There are lot of other ways. Make them grounded for a day or 2 . Dont give them there favourite dish and they will understand what mistake they made

Spanking to make a point - yes, hitting to the point of bleeding - hell no.

Yeah big difference between spanking and hitting but where is the line crossed it is a very difficult situation.

I think other options should be considered before spanking as spanking can leave life time scars.

I don't believe in using physical discipline but I have and I always regret it.

There are better ways to handle even dangerous situations.

When my oldest son was about 2 we were trying to do a mini renovation in our kitchen and he was happily poking a screwdriver into the holes in the cabinets where handles had been.

I was busy doing something and I turned just in time to see him heading for the electrical outlet with the screwdriver (the one that was behind the refrigerator before I moved it)

I swooped down and grabbed him just as he was about to insert the screwdriver and put on a real drama show of checking that he was ok, telling him how scared I was, hugging and checking his hands alternately.

He was so freaked out about how freaked out I was that he avoided electrical outlets like the plague after that and even would pull me away from them if he saw me trying to plug something in.

Around 4 years old he wanted to plug something in for me and asked me to "teach him" how to do it - he was still cautious.

Showing your kids how scared you are when they do something dangerous is 100 times more effective than hitting them....

There's an old story about a parent that delivered a smack to a kid who ran on the road. The next time he ran on the road, he covered his rear end with his hands first.

Lisa

I have a daughter and son. I usually don´t spank them unless they do something that could put them in danger.

When I was a kid my parents spank me almost for everything, so I don´t want to do what I disliked with my own kids.

I don't think spanking is ever really necessary unless the child persists in doing something totally inappropriate after you've already corrected. Spanking should be used to reinforce existing, non physical punishments. They should fear disobeying the punishment, and as long as the child understands that the reason they're spanked is because they persisted in misbehavior then I think it's Ok.

I don't think it should ever be the first course of action though. If the child is in dangerous circumstances, a sharp tone of voice and removal from danger should suffice while the child is tiny. They won't remember anything at those very little ages anyway so physical correction wouldn't be any more effective than what I've posted here.

I don't agree with spanking for the most part thanks to my mother for abusing me in that way when I was a child. However I find that a good time out and grounding from there favorite things such as tv, toys or activities and a good talking to will let them know that you love them but yet what they did was wrong.

I cannot agree with spanking as a discipline. I think spanking a child is teaching a child that hitting is an option to communication. Talk to your children, reason and process the issue. Take the time to use words. After all, we want them to use words rather than scream or hit or bite.

Yes! Sorry, but look at the difference in children now. I know that a spanking was sure effective on me!

As someone who never hit my children, and as someone who had children who were known to be very well behaved wherever they were, I have always believed that hitting children is not necessary and that the only people who need to hit their children are people who have not adequately helped children become very reasonable people by the time they're as young as two years old. I know this sounds harsh, but I have listened to pro-hitting parents over the course of the 30 years since I first became a mother; and it just seems it may be time to just tell it like it is.

When you are responsive to your babies and make them feel very secure and very treasured, and when you talk to them in little ways even when they're newborns, they become very attacked, their verbal skills develop earlier than some kids' do, and they generally want to please their mother and father once they get to be about eighteen months old. Better verbal skills mean they understand better when a parent says, "Ooh - don't touch the stove. It will burn you." The better verbals and reasoning skills and the wish to please that comes from having parents who try to keep a child happy and secure at all times combine to make teaching right and wrong easy and without need for hitting. Hitting teaches children that people hit, which usually isn't what we want children to learn. It may be temporarily effective for keeping a toddler away from the stove, but he is less likely to be receptive to any messages about how a stove can burn when those messages come from a person who has hit him.

Reasoning and communicating do not go hand-in-hand with hitting other people, and teaching children reasoning and communicating while teaching them not to hit other people and that violence in a home is wrong are what most parents hope to accomplish.

Older children may be threatened by someone bigger than they are in a house where hitting is seen as the only way to teach a child, but I can assure you that older children are pretty intelligent and don't have to be too intelligent or too old to realize that the parent who has run out of ammunition in his arsenal of parenting abilities and has nothing left but to hit a child is a parent who does not respect them, understand them, or have sufficient parenting skills to make children feel they can look up to them. Parents who hit their children send the message that only they have the right to hit their children, and even that sends a message to children that parents believe that have rights to do something that is generally socially unacceptable (hitting) because they don't need to respect their children.

One of my favorite verses is, "Children Learn What They Live" by Dorothy Law Nolte.
If we want to teach children to respect themselves and others they need to live with being treated with respect.

There is never a good reason to hit a toddler or preschooler who is only being how old he is and forgetting some rule. There is never a reason to punish a very young child who hit a playmate in frustration by an adult's hitting him. Hitting older children may actually result in their always harboring a small amount of hatred for their parent; or else, they will grow up believing that being a parent and an adult means hitting children and that they deserved to be hit as children, just as they may raise their own children to grow up believing they "deserved it".

People who don't know how to raise a child to be reasonable and to want to comply with some basic, reasonable, rules their parents set will never be convinced that hitting a child is wrong or that their parenting technique is inferior. That's fine. I'm not the one who has kids who needed to be hit and who didn't behave or who grew up to be slightly or very emotionally "off" people.

Parents who don't hit their kids often don't want to sound impolite or obnoxious and speak up about what they think of parents who do. Enough is enough. I've decided to talk.

Note: I have one adopted son and two biological children, so it isn't "well behaved" genes; and my kids were active, athletic, and plenty bright and independent; so it isn't that they were "passive" or "too stupid