Depending on where you live it many also be a criminal offence - I agree with the policy here that "Children have the same legal protection from assault as adults."
The child hasn’t had the opportunity to develop their reasoning faculties or learn to weigh the needs or desires of others with their own and circumstance.
As parents we have the choice to use reason and patience. We can understand that children are developing and need support from adults to do so effectively. To hit them would show a lack of understanding, control, reason, and temperance. These are bad things to teach.
> To hit them would show a lack of understanding, control, reason, and temperance. These are bad things to teach.
This is true, certainly.
> The child hasn’t had the opportunity to develop their reasoning faculties
You're mistaken if you think that poor self-control is predicated on a lack of logical reasoning.
But anyways, point is that no trust is lost when a parent hits a child; children don't apply that kind of transactional logic to personal relationships. We only learn that much, much later when we get to the politics that underlie school and work environments.
There is. Children might grow up to despise their parents, like I do with mine. They won't see them as more than a nuisance, and will wish the parents were dead.
Please do remember that children are humans who still learn how to interact socially. They often lack ways to express feeling and don't yet have full impulsive control.
Last but not least, they live as their parents are.
Hitting is abuse only if it's frequent and the child becomes fearful of it, but this is not nearly as sexy as hijacking the word "abuse" self-righteously.
Isn’t the whole point of hitting your kids to make them fear it and therefore not do whatever it is that made it happen? (whether or not this works or wouldn’t be accomplished in a more humane way is a different story)
At some point, you are going to have to use some sort of force to confine or constrain to prevent the child from engaging in unwanted behavior.
No matter what flowery language or loopy logic you use to avoid the subject, you are applying force.
Is it better to have well-thought out uses of force instead of just hitting the kid when they make you angry? Of course. But don't pretend that living in the world requires no discipline at all.
"well-thought out uses of force" was certainly a part of school life in the post-war years, yet it couldn't stop teenagers, rock'n'roll, mini-skirts and hippies.
We are not talking about "no discipline at all", we are talking about violence against your children. Humans you brought into the world and you shouldn't have done that if you hit them.
It is abuse. As a parent you are in a stronger position and your child will will trust you because you are their first and primary focus of this new world their are growing into. Violence against children (and most of it happens in families) will destroy this trust.
