@April I think you're right in that this cuts through cultural ground in a rather serious way.
I think it depends upon the kind of
morality you want to promote in your children, actually.
It's like the difference between shame (other people disapprove of me) and guilt (I disapprove of myself), and the role that negative reinforcement plays in this.
For instance, I'm always creeped out by the people who say, 'don't do that, you'll get punished'. I'll give you an example:
Do you want to rob this shop?
1) No, I'll go to prison.
2) No, it's wrong.
Do you want to rob this shop? You won't get caught.
1) OK then, why not.
2) No, it's wrong.
This is a hugely more complex issue than has been discussed so far, I think. The social psychological work done after WWII which tried to explain the Holocaust (e.g. Theodore Adorno is the big one) seemed to bear this out - Adorno himself concluded that the fascist and antisemitic tendencies of the Nazis was ultimately caused by disciplinarian parenting styles.
It's the difference between:
Child makes a mistake, because it's a child:
1) Smack. Just because. I'm in charge and you're wrong.
2) Explain why the child was wrong in a way that he understands. Get him to make amends, &c.
One is about internalising
authority, the other is about internalising
morality.
Now you may have noticed that smacking can be used as part of the second strategy, so you're right, there is no, singular 'spank'. What it
means - as someone pointed out - and what it
achieves can be hugely different depending on the context.
