re: Spanking is no different than hitting

My dad always waited and gave me a spanking before bed so he would be calm.

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As if that ever happens during a spanking.

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Part of the problem is that it is often done out of pure emotion, which leads to parents hitting too hard and in the wrong place, or parents completely forgetting to explain why the kid was punished in the first place. Parenting is a long-term investment and you are shaping and molding your children to be productive and responsible adults. Parents can't take that lightly.

I was spanked as a child by my father. Not often, but often enough. I was sent to my room to await my punishment (sometimes the anticipation was worse than the event itself) and my dad would take his time to think about what he was going to do and what he was going to say before and after the spanking. This also gave him an opportunity to calm down if he was particularly upset by what I did.

The result was me getting a painful consequence for something I did wrong and having a thorough explanation of what I did, why it was wrong, and why I shouldn't continue to do it.

I loved and respected my father, though, so a punishment from him was always worse because I upset him. It was just another thing that helped keep me in check when I was younger. I think it was because he wasn't my best friend, he was my dad. He loved me, but he was training me to be a man, like him. When I became an adult, I thought that if I could be half the man he was, I'd be doing OK. I still view him that way. He wasn't and isn't perfect, but he took his job as a parent seriously and I feel blessed to have been raised the way I was.