Nope....I do not believe in physically striking a child. I have and have had the ability to raise children and dogs who all turned out to be relatively happy, well behaved, productive youngsters as well as adults. I don't believe in painful physical aversives. I do have other means of training. Even back when I had young kids, before I learned much about the science of behavior, I still used a lot of what I use now....wish I had known more about it then. I made some mistakes to be sure.
But no....I don't believe in physically hurting another living being as a way of teaching. There are other ways.
A lack of spanking is not the cause of ill behaved children or dogs. That concept is something very much like something in behaviorism called ...."superstitious behavior." There can be several things going on at once, but you pick one of those things and attribute it as the conclusion. This is unparsinomious or scientifically illogical. You can't draw conclusions by taking a multitude of factors and arbitrarily choosing one of those factors as the cause of something without proofing, which obviously has not been done. You can not randomly single out one aspect of all the many other aspects.
No....it is not a lack of spanking which causes ill behaved children. Its a lack of effective training skills. Hitting, spanking, causing pain stops behavior. But there can be horrible fall out for both dogs and children. There are many known detrimental side effects to physical or harsh aversives. If it turns out all right for some people, then there may have been other factors which compensated for it. But you do not know all the other factors which may affect your child. The risk of fall out is greater than the value IMO, of spanking.
Simply stopping behavior, (or supressing it...stopping the signs or symptoms of an underlying issue) isn't all I'm looking for when teaching an animal or a human child. Teaching is my goal and harsh aversives, IMO have no place in teaching.
So, after reading this whole thread, mostly all I saw was talk about what kind of punishment. It was all about punishment. There is a whole lot more to teaching and training than punishment. I still don't know why everyone puts the emphasis on punishment. That's the first thing everybody thinks of....what kind of punishment shall I use? What can I do when Johnny does this particular rotten behavior? Wait for the rotten behvavior to develop into a full blown problem and then whamo...spank him.
If people, in general..... would take some time to learn something about the science of behavior, they would discover ways to set things up so many of these "spankable" behaviors don't manifiest themselves in the first place. There are ways to prevent many problems. There's positive reinforcement. There's giving alternatives. There are many, many techniques to train a child or a dog without using painful physical punishment.
There are laws of behavior, like laws of physics. Many of the things I talk about are not just my opinion, something I dreamed up.... and they're not just anybody's opinion either. They are based on proof and behavioral law.
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