I'll confine myself to observing what a calamity it was when women were allowed out of the kitchen to vote.

As a generalisation, this is nonsense, and I offer my own experience as a counter-example. Nobody I know makes a practice of smacking their children, and few of those kids would qualify as brats. Children are badly behaved because of poor discipline, not spanking practices.

“The child realizes they can't/won't do anything to him, and you're left with parents begging and pleading for good behavior.”

Again, poor discipline. I also question the implication that unless the parents can “do something to” a child, it will turn into a little shit. I think once you’ve reached the stage of having to do something to a kid, it’s probably too late, anyway.

There is an enormous confusion in this thread over the use of the term “force.” There are two major issues here: 1) keeping children safe; 2) punishing bad behaviour. In the first case, we can use restraining force, in the second, retaliatory force. The two uses are aimed at different types of behaviours.

The vast majority of parents use restraining force on their children at different times, the hot stove case being the obvious example. But slapping your child’s hand away from the stove, or forcefully restraining it in traffic, are not punishments, because those behaviors are not bad. They are normal childhood curiosity and thoughtlessness.

Hitting your sister, on the other hand, is bad, and should be punished. The parent can choose to return violence with violence, if they wish, or can choose other ways of dealing with the problem.

Brendan

(Edited by Brendan on 1/19, 12:25pm)

I think that human children do have a right not to be subjected to actions that are deliberately designed to inflict pain on the child. And I think that I have a right not to be subjected to the consequences that predictably happen when a child subjected to such treatment, takes to practicing on his neighbors the lessons that he learned at home. But, given the governments that we have now, I think that immediate enforcement of these rights would be so destructive of our other rights that I don't want it to happen.