Personally, I’ll take the memories of violence over being medicated for life any day of the week.
Oh, and it generally worked - fear of retribution is quite the motivator.
Having spent my formative years being motivated by avoiding beatings, rather than seeking praise, made it very difficult to adjust to adulthood in a world that relies on positive reinforcement for motivation.
For every "...and I turned out just fine", there are many who didn't. Your "memories of violence" aren't the alternative to "being medicated for life", they're often the very cause of it.
Not that current time is perfect, but statistically it has better results.
Hard to judge quantitatively - but TBH as fucked up as my childhood was I wouldn't want to grow up in the modern system and working with the zoomer generation I'm not impressed with the outcome.
> if your only goal is to prevent negative outcomes might as well put everyone in a coma and tube feed them - bound to get 0% crime, violence, addiction.
This is fairly absurd jump.
Also, beating kids into obeisance makes them more likely to beat others onto obeisance. Which has no repercussions if against a kid, but has large ones if against adults. And even if not physical, leads to bullies. The more authority they get, the more coercive bullying happen.
But my point was more about comparing generations, I feel like a lot of struggles like having to learn how to control your temper or focus, are wiped away with drugs, and in general society is very good at removing historic hardships you had to overcome. On the flip side a lot of artificial stress and challenges are introduced with modern life (grade chasing since preschool, social media) - I don't feel like this would have felt meaningful to me so I don't envy the current generation of children.