Obeying authority was never a great child rearing strategy. Violence as a control measure is not effective and definitely not a way to engender respect.
I've been hearing this since the rise of pop psychology, and it never gets any less wrong. The facts of life simply disprove it to me, every day.
The people who think spankings equal violence have obviously never actually performed the act of a controlled, limited, information-laden spanking NOT done out of or in any type of anger - which the child can well sense.
For anyone who still hangs on to the notion that spankings create abusers and sexual disorders are completely genetic and unavoidable, let's take my family.
We were all raised in loving Christian homes, disciplined by our parents. We'll call this "the strategy".
My great grandpa and great grandma raised all their children like this. It worked. All of their children were happy, relatively healthy, and very hard working - respected people. My grandpa raised his family like this too. It worked too. All of his children, bar none, were exactly the same.
My father raised us this way, and (I bet you're guessing now!) - magically, all of his children worked out this way too. Zero abuse, lots of hard working respectable members of society. My dad have 5 kids. 4 of them have children - and actually mature families. Zero abuse, lots of hard working respectable members of society. They range from vice presidents in the education field to CEOs of companies to defense lawyers; their families are close knit and happy. Now let's go to the last section, our kids (my kids, my siblings' kids). Raised exactly identical. All of our kids, ranging from 14 to 27, all happy, healthy, zero abusers, hard working, growing to become respectable people. Never hit a human being in our lives, and do not suffer from any identity confusion type of disorder. (NOT to say we never had any mental health issues; we certainly have to the extent 50 people might normally have - and everyone deserves compassion and kindness no matter what they're struggling with).
Coincidentally (of course), zero of them have any sexual identity other than the way they were born.
(Contrast that with celebrity or showbiz children, raised by people in you know what kind of environment and beliefs, who seem to end up more along the 20% area).
But, sure - that's all just a gigantic coincidence against the
supposed "spankings create abusers". If that was actually true, I'd certainly think at least one out of the 50 of us wouldn't be so lucky. But it's only true for people who have never contemplated the different ways to have spankings. They imagine a spanking means an angry father punching a child or some such nonsense that obviously is awful and certainly does not engender respect.
The explanation is fairly simple. The detail often overlooked is whether spankings are done out of anger, or in a loving, controlled way and as the very precise fulfillment of promises and fair warnings. Done intelligently and out of love (which a child can easily sense the difference), it doesn't turn out anywhere near what you are thinking. Done violently and in anger, I'm sure it creates monsters. It takes a lot of self discipline and good character to actually punish a child in a loving, controlled way that the child fully expected due to fair warnings and promises kept going in both directions. Most people nowadays don't have that discipline, so they just abandoned the whole thing altogether. (They just assumed that every time they spank their kids, they'll probably just do it in an angry way in the moment, which yes, that's very easy and tempting to do, and probably does create monsters. A child can easily tell whether you are angry or happy with them from infancy. As we all know the difference between a baby's reaction when you are loving with them versus if you're screaming at them.)
Unfortunately, most people never recognized this difference, so we now have wild, uncontrollable, spoiled kids, who turn into entitled, lazy adults. Not all of them, of course. Pain causes change eventually, for most normal people.
The problem with just asking Johnny politely to do the right thing and leaving it up to him is that that's not actually the way the world works. You're preparing your child for a world that does not exist and never will. When he gets to school he'll be required to do things, not just requested. All his life all the way up until death he'll have an authority figure in his job and virtually any other group he's a part of. He'll have to learn how to respect authority for the first time after graduating from college rather than the parent having taught him properly. That's a terrible preparation for the real world, never learning how to obey authority and respect them just because, whether you agree with them or not.
Of course there will be some exceptions to these rules on all sides. For my part, I want my children to have the best of both worlds. An environment where they engaged in loving and explanatory conversations and were respected, and also understood the discipline required and appropriate for real life. There is a balance, and it is possible to strike that balance.
BTW, everyone I mentioned in our family respects their parents greatly.
Yes, they have done "studies" on this. Because they came into it with such a strong bias hoping for a particular outcome, and because they generally were unfamiliar with how spankings are done right, they never thought of a way to differentiate a drunk, angry man slapping a child vs. the nearly opposite scenario I have described. If they had, their studies might reflect the useful information demonstrated by those 50 people in my family tree.
