The long, intermittent debate about whether parents should be allowed to spank their children has erupted once again with the finding by an American research team that it doesn’t do children any harm provided it is tempered by love. Whether it does them any good is another matter, and it’s not really the point; for in this country it is the right of parents to spank children if they feel like it, and not the consequences for the children themselves, that has always been the main issue.
This doesn’t mean that there aren’t people who believe that corporal punishment is the best way of disciplining a child, and Dr Liam Fox, as shadow health secretary, spoke for them some years ago when he said that ‘smacking children to teach them the difference between right and wrong is often a necessary, if painful, task’. But opinion polls have shown that the vast majority of British parents are as strongly protective of their right to spank as Americans are of their right to bear arms, and they probably regard any threat to it as another example of intolerable interference by the goody-goodies of Brussels.
The research carried out at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York concluded that spanking a child was all right provided it came from ‘a good place’, meaning that it was done in a loving way against a background of solid parental affection.
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