I think we touched on this before....Follow

All due respect, they don't equate to you personally because of the degree. What that degree is will vary from person to person. It's not that it's a slippery slope, it's just that it's completely subjective and arbitrary.

Right, this I also don't get. You'd give him a 'time out' or whatever though? The cultural tradition of hitting him requires blood relations apparently?

Really? The conventional wisdom seems to be that it's wise to stop hitting them when they might hit back.

Both interpretations are consistent with our finding (shown in Fig 1) that compared with African American and Hispanic families, child behavior problems that require a parent-teacher meeting were predicted to be relatively less common in white non-Hispanic families when spanking before age 2 was infrequent, whereas the relative ordering was the reverse in families in which spanking was relatively frequent.

"The act of corporal punishment itself is different across parents - parents vary in how frequently they use it, how forcefully they administer it, how emotionally aroused they are when they do it, and whether they combine it with other techniques. Each of these qualities of corporal punishment can determine which child-mediated processes are activated, and, in turn, which outcomes may be realized," Gershoff concludes.

The meta-analysis also demonstrates that the frequency and severity of the corporal punishment matters. The more often or more harshly a child was hit, the more likely they are to be aggressive or to have mental health problems.

While the nature of the analyses prohibits causally linking corporal punishment with the child behaviors, Gershoff also summarizes a large body of literature on parenting that suggests why corporal punishment may actually cause negative outcomes for children. For one, corporal punishment on its own does not teach children right from wrong. Secondly, although it makes children afraid to disobey when parents are present, when parents are not present to administer the punishment those same children will misbehave.

In commentary published along with the Gershoff study, George W. Holden, PhD, of the University of Texas at Austin, writes that Gershoff's findings "reflect the growing body of evidence indicating that corporal punishment does no good and may even cause harm." Holden submits that the psychological community should not be advocating spanking as a discipline tool for parents.

In a reply to Gershoff, researchers Diana Baumrind, PhD (Univ. of CA at Berkeley), Robert E. Larzelere, PhD (Nebraska Medical Center), and Philip Cowan, PhD (Univ.of CA at Berkeley), write that because the original studies in Gershoff's meta-analysis included episodes of extreme and excessive physical punishment, her finding is not an evaluation of normative corporal punishment.

"The evidence presented in the meta-analysis does not justify a blanket injunction against mild to moderate disciplinary spanking," conclude Baumrind and her team. Baumrind et al. also conclude that "a high association between corporal punishment and physical abuse is not evidence that mild or moderate corporal punishment increases the risk of abuse."[/b]

Your anecdotal trip to Gbajiland aside.

Don't take things I say in an adversarial argument personally, I sure as hell don't mean them that way.

As far as I'm concerned, if Jr. asks, she spits moonbeams and unicorns.

"Until researchers, clinicians, and parents can definitively demonstrate the presence of positive effects of corporal punishment, including effectiveness in halting future misbehavior..."

"Until researchers, clinicians, and parents can definitively demonstrate the presence of positive effects of corporal punishment, including effectiveness in halting future misbehavior, not just the absence of negative effects, we as psychologists can not responsibly recommend its use," Gershoff writes.

Yep. That's a fine line to walk.