Right: University of Texas School of Human Ecology associate professor Elizabeth Thompson Gershoff: "... corporal punishment is indeed effective in securing short-term compliance.".
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Arguments in favour of parents using corporal punishment on their children
1. Most parents use physical discipline in a reasonable and appropriate manner
It has been claimed that the vast majority of parents who use physical discipline as part of educating their children and regulating their behaviour do so in a reasonable and appropriate manner.
In a submission to the Victorian Parliament the Presbyterian Church and National Committee stated, 'Many Australian families use reasonable physical discipline from time to time.'
Psychologist Elizabeth Thompson Gershoff, PhD, of the National Centre for Children in Poverty at Columbia University, 'The act of corporal punishment itself is different across parents - parents vary in how frequently they use it, how forcefully they administer it, how emotionally aroused they are when they do it, and whether they combine it with other techniques.
Each of these qualities of corporal punishment can determine which child-mediated processes are activated, and, in turn, which outcomes may be realized.' Supporters of corporal punishment for children argue that as not all corporal punishment is the same, a blanket prohibition is inappropriate.
2. This is an area outside the control of governments
Critics of attempts to ban the smacking of children argue that governments would be over-reaching their authority by attempting to tell parents how they should rear their children. According to this line of argument, though the law should offer children protection from obvious abuse, the responsible use of physical punishment is not abuse and governments have no right to interfere.
Gold Coast commentator, Robin Wuth, has stated, 'Governments need to stop interfering with parents who are actually parenting their kids and spend more time and money trying to help the kids who need it -- the kids who are being abused, shaken, tied up, locked in their rooms and starved to death.
Adolescent psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg agrees that it is over-reaching for governments to attempt to prevent children from smacking their children. Dr Carr-Gregg has stated, 'I don't think we should be criminalising people, who when their children run across the road they give them a tap on the bum.' Dr Carr-Gregg has also noted that laws attempting to ban smacking would be largely unenforceable and had worked nowhere else.
It has also been noted that in some jurisdictions where parents have been prohibited under law to physically punish their children there has actually been an increase in such punishment.
After a spanking ban was put in place in Sweden child abuse rates increased by over 500 percent, according to police reports. One year after the ban took effect, and after a massive government public education campaign, Swedish parents were apparently beating their children twice as often as parents did in the United States.
3. The corporal punishment of children is sometimes necessary
It has been claimed that sometimes a simple smack may be either the only possible parental response or the only one likely to be effective. It is claimed that where immediate compliance is required then a smack may be the best way to achieve this.
It is argued that moderate corporal punishment may be the best parental reaction when a child's physical safety is at issue or when the child's misbehaviour might injure others.
In 2002, Columbia University published a research overview conducted by Elizabeth Thompson Gershoff. Gershoff stated, 'The primary goal most parents have in administering corporal punishment is to stop children from misbehaving immediately.
Laboratory research on learning has confirmed that corporal punishment is indeed effective in securing short-term compliance.'
It is claimed that as a child's brain is only developing and full adult capabilities are not achieved until people reaches their early- to mid-twenties, reasoning with a child is unlikely to be immediately effective and a more direct way of shaping the child's behaviour may be required.
4. Physical punishment either does not harm children or advantages them in later life
A number of recent studies have either suggested that physical punishment either assists children's subsequent development or does not result in harm in later life.
A study entailing 2,600 interviews pertaining to corporal punishment, including the questioning of 179 teenagers about getting spanked and smacked by their parents, was conducted by Marjorie Gunnoe, professor of psychology at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Gunnoe, whose findings were published in 2010, has stated, 'The claims made for not spanking children fail to hold up. They are not consistent with the data.'
The study found that those who were physically disciplined performed better than those who weren't in a whole series of categories, including school grades, an optimistic outlook on life, the willingness to perform volunteer work, and the ambition to attend college, Gunnoe found. And they performed no worse than those who weren't spanked in areas like early sexual activity, getting into fights, and becoming depressed. She found little difference between the sexes or races.
Another study published in the Akron Law Review in 2009 examined criminal records and found that children raised where a legal ban on parental corporal punishment is in effect are much more likely to be involved in crime.
A key focus of the work of Jason M. Fuller of the University of Akron Law School was Sweden, which 30 years ago became the first nation to impose a complete ban on physical discipline and is in many respects, Fuller claims, is 'an ideal laboratory to study spanking bans.'
Fuller has stated that 'enlightened' parenting had produced increased violence later. Fuller noted, 'Swedish teen violence skyrocketed in the early 1990s, when children that had grown up entirely under the spanking ban first became teenagers. Preadolescents and teenagers under fifteen started becoming even more violent toward their peers. By 1994, the number of youth criminal assaults had increased by six times the 1984 rate.'
5. There is no necessary causal link between corporal punishment and later criminality
It has been argued that claims that physical punishment leads to adult criminality may well be inaccurate. It has been suggested that the causal connection may be being inverted.
According to this line of argument, people with antisocial personalities and poor impulse control may attract physical punishment as children and later develop into adults who commit crimes. Supporters of corporal punishment consider that adult criminal conduct may not have been caused by physical discipline but may spring from the same problems of personality and temperament that cause these people to be punished as children.
Similarly it has been claimed that the development of personality disorders in adulthood may not be the result of corporal punishment; rather that the early physical discipline was a reaction to the behaviour prompted by the personality disorder. This point has been made by Robyn Wuth writing for Goldcoast.com. Wuth states, 'Perhaps... the more impulsive the child, the smaller the attention span, therefore the more naughty?'