Let’s talk: Is it still OK to smack your kids?

Is it still okay to hit your kids? According to high-profile journalist Mia Freedman, the answer is an unequivocal no.

In an attention-grabbing opinion piece on her news site Mamamia, Freedman used hypothetical examples of physical assault against adults to drive the point home, including one of a co-worker who repeatedly did something they were asked not to do.   

“How can you make her understand she’s done something wrong?” Freedman writes. “So you walk over to where she’s standing near her desk and hit her. On the bottom. Through her clothes. Not too hard. Just enough to teach her a lesson.”

If this happened in real life, the person who hit their co-worker would be charged with assault, she points out, asking why we don’t hold ourselves to the same standards when dealing with our own children.

Does making certain types of violence acceptable within the home send a strong message to children about how they should treat others? Can physical discipline perpetuate the normalcy of domestic violence? These are all issues she raises in her comment, dismissing the common arguments that people use to justify smacking their children, including “my parents smacked me and I turned out fine”, “there’s a big difference between smacking a child for discipline and hitting to hurt them”, and “I smack my kid and I’m a good parent”.

In an age of rampant technology use, banning kids from using any kind of screen was a more effective punishment than anything our parents or grandparents devised in our youth, she reckons.

“It’s time for smacking to be relegated to the category of ‘things we thought were fine but now realise are not,” Freedman writes, noting that we no longer accept passive smoking or sexual harassment. “Just because something happened in the past does not justify it happening in the present or the future.”

The story got a mixed response on Mamamia, with some users defending smacking as a way to discipline children when they’re too young to be able to reason, while others argued that smacking a child and hitting an adult were not comparable. 

“Not loving a child, being verbally cruel, can destroy a soul so much more then a smack,” one reader commented.

“I can only imagine the whopper of a smack that would be waiting for me if I behaved the way kids do these days, lazy, so disgustingly rude to teachers/adults/elderly and no respect for property that doesn’t belong to them,” said another. “I’m grateful I was given such strict manners to live by and the odd smack to scar me from misbehaving again because it’s guided me to being someone who knows the difference between right and wrong.”

But others were behind Freedman all the way. “Hitting is not the only form of discipline, it’s lazy parenting,” said one, while another reader commented that smacking was “outdated and abusive”.

Do you think children need physical discipline to learn right from wrong?