Parents who use spanking to control children enter into a lose-lose situation. Not only does the child lose respect for the parent, but the parents also lose out because they develop a spanking mind-set and have fewer alternatives to spanking. In addition, hitting devalues the parent-child relationship because it puts a distance between the spanker and the spankee. It's hard for some children to feel loved by the hand that hits them. Hitting May Lead to Abuse.
Punishment can escalate.
The danger of beginning corporal punishment in the first place is that you may feel you have to bring out bigger guns. Eventually your hand would become a fist, the switch would become a belt, the folded newspaper would become a wooden spoon. What began seemingly innocently escalates into child abuse. Parents who are programmed to spank set themselves up for punishing harder, mainly because they have not learned alternatives and click immediately into the punishment mode when their child misbehaves. Hitting Does Not Improve Behavior.