[Epistemologist]

Quote by: The Bacon Guy To anyone supporting corporal punishment: It is not effective. Those that say it is are at loggerheads with the majority of psychological opinion backed up by numerous studies. In fact, a major and credited study from Straus, Sugarman, and Giles-Sims (1997) found that hitting children in response to antisocial behaviour actually increased the behaviour.

I think that there are still confounding factors that ought to be considered. For instance, this observational study conducted by Straus, et al had subjects from within a society where spanking is already viewed as a "taboo." That is, children who are spanked are sympathized with in their societies, which say that they have individualistic rights versus their parents' quasi-oppression.

So, of course children in the study wouldn't adhere to the conditioning effects of the physical punishment because they and other biased people who support the charade of the anti-spanking New Age movement would see it simply as abuse and thus pointless violence.

Also, many of the studies that say spanking causes harm don't consider the fact that correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation. So, just because a subject who undergoes spanking treatment is sad doesn't mean he/she is sad because of the spanking. The controls in the studies and experiments are sometimes not sufficient to stop such confounding variables from influencing conclusions.

Quote by: The Bacon Guy Those who say that spanking is the only option in some situations are not being imaginative enough. There are a great number of other options, most of which are as, and usually more, effective in any situation. Non-violent child discipline

These imaginative techniques may work some of the time, but they're not as effective as spanking. Simply listing a wikipedia reference that has no references itself isn't sufficient proof per se.

I could also list studies that support spanking as not harmful but rather beneficial, such as those by Dr. Diana Baumrind, Dr. Elizabeth Owens, Dr. James Dobson, Dr. Robert Larzelere etc. In fact, a recent study by Baumrind was actually supported by Dr. Murray Straus, who is ironically the first guy you mentioned who did the study on spanking's pseudo-harmful effects.

Quote by: The Bacon Guy Studies suggest that it does have long term effects, most of which are damaging. You can’t argue out one side of your mouth that it has the effect of correcting the child’s behaviour, then claim that it has no long term effects. A huge, fairly recent meta-analysis of sixty years worth of corporal punishment studies from Gershoff (2002) found that corporal punishment of children resulted a myriad of negative consequences, including increased delinquent and antisocial behavior, increased risk of child abuse and spousal abuse, increased risk of child aggression and adult aggression, decreased child mental health and decreased adult mental health.

See what I said above about these studies. Also, I've mentioned from the beginning that damage may occur when the society the children live in convinces them that spanking is bad. It's not spanking that explicitly causes their harm, its the society per se.

Should I go over the basic psychological concept of conditioning? If you apply a negative stimuli to a subject when he/she/it performs a certain action, the subject will soon learn (n.b. be conditioned) not to do this action to avoid that stimuli.

Quote by: The Bacon Guy It is a violation of the child’s rights. Striking any other human being would be considered assault, no matter how much the offender argues that it is an effective method of behavioural correction. The child has not broken any law, so his human rights should remain intact. It is counterproductive to promoting equality and justice. Legalising corporal punishment of children leaves the application of the punishment in the hands of the parents, therefore making it arbitrary and subjective.

This kind of systematic application of rights is just the problem I'm talking about.

Also, real parents could care less about equality when it comes to disciplining their kids and their kids' bona fide interests. As for justice, spanking is teleologically just because it supports the greater good.

It's your opinion that spanking is wrong, and that's just as arbitrary and subjective as that of parents. However, parents have a large majority of other pro-spankers with that same arbitrary and subjective opinion in order to make spanking intersubjectively just.

I realize that pointless, sadistic beating is wrong. But disciplinary spanking of children particularly in the developmental years should be allowed and is actually the best option for parents to exercise. At least don't discard the option.