| Well, you are trying to add unearned emphasis with No, it's fully earned. I am a parent. I have witnessed first hand the moralizing, judgement and mutually contradictory universal expectations that random people have about how childrearing should be done. You don't know how much though I have put into the subject and calling it political correctness is incorrect... Fair enough, you may have put substantial thought into how parenting should work from a theoretical perspective. ...unless careing about whether or not people use pain and fear to shape children is just political correctness Reframing the debate in terms so negative that anyone would appear insane to disagree with them is classic political correctness. I don't know if "irretrievably", but I think almost everyone is psychologically damaged in some way or another. Which raises the question, is your duty as a parent to prevent any and all psychological damage to your child? If the goal is to minimize suffering, then is it better to indulge your child and raise an entitled spoiled individual that will never be satisfied for the rest of their life. Or is it better to "use fear" (the fear of consequences, whatever they may be) to raise a child that has some notion of negative cause and effect? |
While I grant that there are lots of people who are against corporal punishment as a matter of political correctness, there are also very good reasons not to use corporal punishment that have absolutely nothing to do with political correctness.
The first, and simplest, is that children model their behavior on ours. If you hit your kid, your kid will try hitting other kids. And, according to statistics, they are also more likely to hit other people in their lives, including spouses and their own kids. If you don't want to encourage that behavior, you need to not model it.
The second is that children who experience corporal punishment become more focused on avoiding the punishment than on internalizing the lesson they were supposed to learn. The classic example is the kid running out on a street looking around to be sure that mom isn't watching, and not looking for the car that is coming. Other forms of discipline have much less of this problem.
Corporal punishment also toughens the child's response to punishment. This makes them much less likely to respect alternate forms of punishment. Which makes them less likely to respect attempts at discipline in other child care settings, such as detentions at school.
Now you can try to solve problem 3 by supplementing others' punishment with your own corporal punishment. But only at the cost of worsening problems 1 and 2.
All of this wouldn't matter much if it weren't for the fact that other forms of discipline have been observed to be just as effective in altering children's behavior, and do not have the same drawbacks. Luckily those forms of discipline (and in many cases alternatives to discipline!) exist. And therefore there is no good reason to use corporal punishment.