That's what parents say.
Parents hit their kids because they're angry with no impulse control, or assholes.
Doing the same thing to an adult can get you an assault charge, or a punch in the face.
I think the punishment for corporal punishment should be jail and corporal punishment.
Kids aren't adults and they can't reason with logic or words. Therefore, if a child does something like bite, hit etc. (which they do often) an equal response teaches them immediately that committing those acts leads to a negative outcome. Of course, modern mentality is that this is an awful abusive way to treat your child. I disagree, I don't think a spank is akin to full on abuse and there are times when it's appropriate.
Additionally, adults that do act the way children do and start violently attacking people often get a quick response either from the individual they were attacking or the cops. Maybe they never learned consequences for their actions when they were young?
Have you ever been around a group of young men or boys when someone started something? Typically the quickest way to end it is a swift physical reaction that immediately shows you won't tolerate stuff.
I could say just as logically and with the same lack of evidence say that hitting kids to control them teaches them that violence is a good technique to get your way.
Putting out cigarettes on a child or punching them? Yea, that is assault or worse.
Only people in a capacity of authority do the same thing to adults all the time when they're hard to control / reason with: imprison them, beat them and pin them down when they are unruly, restrain them, taze them, some countries have corporal punishment, and several other things besides.
What many modern parents did is exchange some slap and/or light hitting (which is not the same as abuse) with an arsenal of psychological manipulation, negotiation tactics, and guilt-inducing talk to get the kids to cooperate. Or, perhaps worse, giving up and letting kids having free-reign and ending up as horrible unsufferable me-me-me adults who think the world is there to serve them.
And let's look at the correlation: countries focused on rehabilitative justice e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_Norway#Histor... tend to have the lowest recidivism.
Meanwhile countries focused on punitive justice (e.g. the US) have high incarceration rates and high recidivism.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison%E2%80%93industrial_co...
One can e.g. compare Singapore (which does that) vs USA crime rates (the former's being almost non-existant, the latter's being the worst in the developed world), with most other things (like development and infrastructure level, education, per capita income, etc) being very close.
It’s also lack of education. I’ve travelled 3rd world countries and spanking is quite normalized, however, it appears that for parents it’s a normal reaction.
So this is a cultural thing and change follows education.
Would that not entrench and perpetuate the harm that occurs with corporal punishment and in turn replicate the cycle of violence?