I agree that children need to be disciplined, but I don't know whether smacking is often the right way to go about it. You talked about "crossing the line" when referring to beating a child, but I think that line is difficult to place. Where is the line between smacking and abuse? This is what worries me, a parent could claim that he or she was simply disciplining the child when others could see it as beating; this difference in opinion is what is dangerous.
There is also another point. When a parent believes their child to have done wrong when they in fact haven't, the child faces injustice at the hands of their parents and looses trust. When children are smacked undeservedly the child begins to resent its parents, so I think that smacking should be a last resort and that other forms of discipline (ones that don't include violence, such as taking away the child's favorite toy, or grounding them etc) should at least be tried first before resorting to smacking.
No comments:
Post a Comment