Corporal Punishment of Children Should be Illegal

Australs was a pretty average result, but it was a lot of fun and I was the best speaker on my team. I'd like you to imagine a 5 year old boy who's very naughty. He's ruined a $5000 TV that you just got on hire purchase, smashed all of your best dinnerware that has been passed down from your grandmother, and then in a fit of rage he throws your laptop onto the road, endangering road users, himself, and your laptop in the process. The boy has cost you $10,000 in damage, and could have gotten himself killed several times along the way. By destroying your laptop, you also lose valuable work files that almost get you fired from your job. You are the parent of this child. How do you respond? Bear that context in mind as I make my points. We're not talking about bullying and humiliating innocent children. We're talking about situations where children need to be taught a lesson. My case: Children are not rational actorsNiether of us in this debate are children. Children's brains literally work different to ours. Treating children as adults doesn't work for the simple reason that children are not adults. Rather, children undergo a process of cognitive development, where they gradually learn to be able to rationalise things and work things through. To understand child behaviour, we need to understand how children think. There are two ways children learn something. The first is to do something and see what reinforcement you get. If the reinforcement is good or neutral, you might do it again. If it's bad, then you probably won't. This is called classical conditioning (. http://playlearnparent.com...). The second is by watching what other people do and the kinds of reinforcement that they recieve. It's a bit more complicated than pure imitation - children will imitate only when the other character did not recieve negative reinforcement for their actions. So when batman beats up a bad guy and is seen to "save the day," children might beat up their enemies too. However, when cookie monster has to say sorry for stealing cookies, children learn NOT to steal, rather than imitate cookie monster. This is called observational learning (. http://www.livestrong.com...).We adults have more sophisticated modes of learning available to us, although we learn much slower. Note that both methods rely on reinforcement - for a child to know an action is good or bad, they must observe or be aware of the good or bad outcome. Reasoning would obviously be ideal and most conductive to that child's development. However, between the ages of two and six, children haven't learnt to reason yet, thus some other form of corrective behaviour is necessary (although it can be a good oppertunity to teach reasoning by association with the reinforcement). Since children are not rational, some other type of reinforcement is required. Most parents practice positive reinforcement in this style, such as giving good children a lollypop or a pat on the back. If that's good parenting, then I suggest that negative reinforcement (light spanking, for instance), to avoid undesirable behaviours, should also be classed as good parenting. That's why corporal punishment is sometimes required - the little boy, given only rational reinforcement, will not understand it and thus be tempted to do it all again. I see the harm of corporeal punishment as going deeper than that, however, as removing the power from parents to determine how to do good upbringing - which inevitably means good upbringing often does not occur. Children recognise this and that undermines a parent's position as an authority figure. There is no "one size fits all" solution to child discipline. As Ruby Harrold-Claesson writes "In Sweden we have had a blanket prohibition against smacking children since 1979. Since then hundreds, maybe thousands, of parents have been prosecuted for "child abuse" and their children have been taken into compulsory care and placed in foster homes - where in fact they have been severely abused mentally, physically and even sexually. .. Since the beginning of the 1970s, parents have been indoctrinated in the modern philosophy that children should have free upbringing. Free upbringing came to mean "freedom from upbringing". The state agencies took over and parents have been forced to abdicate from their positions of authority for their children - on pain of prison and the loss of their children to the state. "(. http://www.scoop.co.nz...) By not being able to teach children these valuable lessons through the only way we can get through to them, they're either likely to repeat the behaviour (putting themselves and others in danger again), or have the state punish the behaviour that corrects it, leaving the children in the state's hands where they are often abused. RebuttalMy opponent brings up four really important points that I'll deal with in order. The next four paragraphs correspond to his four points. First he argues that children learn aggression from watching parents correct their children. The answer is that children from about the age of one can distinguish between themselves and their parents. That's why they know that they can't drive a car, but their parents can. In the same way, they know that they cannot punish other children, but parents can. Spanking teaches not aggression, but that parents may discipline their children. This is played out in the evidence as well - most studies, like those pro cited, do not separate out the degree of corporal punishment. The only study to do that over the long term found that there was no significant negative difference (in fact, there was a slight positive one, in the sense of reducing aggression) in terms of children's aggression between a control group and a group with light smacking (. http://www.nzherald.co.nz...).Second he argues that striking on the bottom is just as bad as elsewhere. This is medically false - the buttocks are the least likely to result in damage to the body. Elbows can be easily dislocated, stomachs and backs contain all kinds of vital organs, but the bottocks are literally the largest and most developed muscle on young bodies making them the safest place to hit. Once again, the reason why children are treated differently to adults is because they're not adults. Once they learn how to rationalise and understand the consequences of their actions, then a loving parent will cease to administer corporal punishment, but before that it may well be required. Third he argues that harsh physical punishment is really bad. I agree. Not all corporal punishment is harsh. Just because some people abuse children does not mean you should ban broadly good parenting behaviours. I would further argue that parents should not punish children (or indeed attempt to resolve any issue in life) while angry, and would thus argue for a "calm down" period for both the parent and the child. His fourth argument is that violence is bad for society. Again, I agree - but as I've already argued, light corporal punishment does not teach violence. -What this debate is about is whether we treat children like adults or not. Children are not adults, and treating them as such makes them more defenceless, not less. The resolution is negated.