I think the great kids of posters who spanked are great kids because they got the attention and guidance and example setting required, not the spanking per se.
It's a very personal choice. My cousin and here husband did the non-emotional, formal, spanking thing and they have fantastic kids. But the kids are great because they had a parents that paid attention, are deeply involved, and don't let their kids sit in front of a doggone TV every waking hour.
TV and leaving kids alone to their own devices, or constantly with daycare/babysitters is bad juju.
I agree with a lot of what you say. But I don't think that daycare/babysitters are necessarily bad, and more than spanking is in itself necessarily bad or good. As you said, the way the kids turn out depends a lot on parental attention and involvement.
My own son (only child) started going to day care at an early age. At first my wife worked while I finished school. After that, we both needed to work. One swat on the rear was all the spanking I ever had to do. He was no angel; in fact he pulled off some stunts behind my back that I had to laugh about when I learned of them. I stayed very much in his life when his mother and I split. He was a great kid, and now he is a fine young man, a parent, breadwinner and homeowner. He is also smart, witty, and excellent company.
But as has been said, every situation is different. Sure, there are lots of people who got whupped regularly and they turned out fine. But the prisons are full of people who were abused as children, often sexually, but often "just" physically. In fact, some kind of history of abuse is an almost universal common denominator in the prison populations.
I too am dismayed by what I see going on in our society, and what I see going on is a much higher frequency of physical and sexual abuse than most people suspect. Sometimes I think that if all you do as a parent is to refrain from beating and sexually abusing your kids, they will turn out pretty decent however else you raise them. I tried to do a little better than that, but i don't claim to have any special skill or theory about how parenting should be done.
and whether Conrad Murray should be keelhauled or simply flayed alive for giving drugs to Michael Jackson. [removing tongue from cheek]
