I hold a strong anti-spanking position. It's absolutely wrong. There is no possible way that you can rephrase "hitting children" to make it right or take away the harmful effects of it. It almost always leads to physical abuse because parents use it as a chance to take out their frustration and anger on the child. The kind of people who fight for the right to hit their children are the kind of people who shouldn't be allowed to come within 100 meters of children.
There are countless other ways of disciplining children than using physical violence - not only does it set a bad example (violence in return for misbehaviour), there is no need to cause fear and sometimes extreme pain in the name of getting a child to behave the way YOU want. Spanking causes psychological trauma and emotionally alienates the children from the parents. In families where one parent spanks and the other doesn't, the children will always get along better with the parent who doesn't use physical discipline, and will resent the one who does.
Asking for the right to hit children who misbehave is like asking for the right to punch someone in the street because you don't like something they just said to you.
"Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason."
Thomas Paine, from Introduction to
Common Sense, 1776
"As long as the child will be trained not by love, but by fear, so long will humanity live not by justice, but by force. As long as the child will be ruled by the educator’s threat and by the father’s rod, so long will mankind be dominated by the policeman’s club, by fear of jail, and by panic of invasion by armies and navies.”
Boris Sidis, from a lecture on the abuse of the fear instinct in early education in
Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 1919
"It has been proven that children have a greater sensitivity to pain than adults. This is something that people may deny; it is, however, attested by neurological studies on neuronal stengthening and pain in brain development."
Wikipedia.
www.nospank.net - go here.