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Comment by minikites | Hacker News Reader

Hitting a child is abuse and it's not effective.

Depending on where you live it many also be a criminal offence - I agree with the policy here that "Children have the same legal protection from assault as adults."

https://www.mygov.scot/smacking-children/

And yes, I am a parent.

As a parent you are simply betraying the unconditional love and trust your child has in you.

So what is the child betraying when he/she hits the parent?

The child hasn’t had the opportunity to develop their reasoning faculties or learn to weigh the needs or desires of others with their own and circumstance.

As parents we have the choice to use reason and patience. We can understand that children are developing and need support from adults to do so effectively. To hit them would show a lack of understanding, control, reason, and temperance. These are bad things to teach.

> To hit them would show a lack of understanding, control, reason, and temperance. These are bad things to teach.

This is true, certainly.

> The child hasn’t had the opportunity to develop their reasoning faculties

You're mistaken if you think that poor self-control is predicated on a lack of logical reasoning.

But anyways, point is that no trust is lost when a parent hits a child; children don't apply that kind of transactional logic to personal relationships. We only learn that much, much later when we get to the politics that underlie school and work environments.

There is. Children might grow up to despise their parents, like I do with mine. They won't see them as more than a nuisance, and will wish the parents were dead.

Please do remember that children are humans who still learn how to interact socially. They often lack ways to express feeling and don't yet have full impulsive control. Last but not least, they live as their parents are.

Hitting is abuse only if it's frequent and the child becomes fearful of it, but this is not nearly as sexy as hijacking the word "abuse" self-righteously.

Isn’t the whole point of hitting your kids to make them fear it and therefore not do whatever it is that made it happen? (whether or not this works or wouldn’t be accomplished in a more humane way is a different story)

You don't need violence to reach this goal.

I agree, but to say it’s not abuse until fear exists means that hitting kids is always abuse, which seemed to contradict OPs point.

My kids got to play in the front yard because I knew they wouldn't run out into traffic.

They didn't run out into traffic because they knew that doing that was stupid and dad would swat their butt.

Consequently, my children got to meet people walking on the sidewalk. They got to explore the neighborhood and walk to school at a young age.

A reasonable trade - a bit of dicipline that opens up their world. It has served them well.

It is not abuse, if it used for the kids own good. Yes it is not always effective but in some case it is.

From what I understand physical violence towards children has been universally panned on research.

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/04/spanking

In some case it can be appropriate

https://time.com/3387226/spanking-can-be-an-appropriate-form...

It is abuse. As a parent you are in a stronger position and your child will will trust you because you are their first and primary focus of this new world their are growing into. Violence against children (and most of it happens in families) will destroy this trust.

That depends on how you hit your kids. It could be abuse but not always.

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