There are many ways of ensuring children remain safe and smacking them is not the choice I would ever make. If a child is too young to ‘reason’ with then simply distract them until they are old enough to begin to understand the dangers. Smacking a child’s wrists when they go near a fire, for a child who is unable to yet reason out why that has happened is pointless.

Children do need praise, but they also need very firm and clear boundaries; that does not mean allowing them to do as they please…. far from it. Children respond far better to clarity of boundaries and expectations than total freedom. That doesn’t mean they need to be smacked.

The parent who smacks a childs legs if they run near the road does not do it BECAUSE they love them; they do it because they have a momentary lapse of control due to their fear of the consequences.

In many countries where smacking is banned (such as Sweden) we do not see children behaving in the way that many UK children and young people do. The children who have the most challenging behaviour tend to be from families where they have limited means of setting boundaries, for whatever reason.

It is rather simplistic to state that the parent who abuses their child is doing that to take control of their lives; it is a control issue, but it is more about someone exerting control over someone more vulnerable than themselves.

It took many years before other forms of physical discipline were recognised as wrong; employers used to beat their staff to ensure submissive behaviours and this was reasoned as being appropriate as the staff were not intelligent enough to understand anything else. In the past, a man whose wife was perceived to be not ‘well controlled’ could be expected to keep her in line by physical punishment and it isn’t that long ago that rape within marriage wasn’t recognised.

In many such cases, it may have been simply the equivalent of a ‘smack’ that was used… but the reasoning is the same… (and you used it in regard to the coal fire scenario) you use the infliction of pain to exert control over another person.

In our society smacking is not illegal…as long as you don’t mark a child you are within the law. That is a very grey area. Many countries banned smacking a very long time ago… and research would indicate that many of the children and young people who present with particularly challenging behaviour have experienced or witnessed violence.