In our society, personal business has become less and less personal and more public. The way families live is scrutinized by the public eye everyday, especially the way parents discipline their children.

When parents punish their children for wrongdoing, those around them, such as faculty and staff in the school system, neighbors and other family friends, closely watch the actions the parents take.

The decision on how to raise children should be ultimately and solely left to the parents of that child. The usage of corporal punishment as a form of discipline should be more widely accepted.

Researchers would like you to think that corporal punishment does no good to the child, that it has only an immediate effect and that no long-term changes in behavior will be seen.

In a 2002 meta-analytic study that combined 60 years of research on corporal punishment, researcher Elizabeth Gershoff found that the only positive outcome of corporal punishment was immediate compliance, but corporal punishment was associated with less long-term compliance. 

The thing is it isn’t the researcher’s place to determine what works and doesn’t work when it comes to how parents discipline their children.

I would agree that there is a line that shouldn’t be crossed. Corporal punishment shouldn’t leave permanent marks on the child or break skin by any means, like in the recent case involving Adrian Peterson of the Minnesota Vikings.

Peterson was indicted for hitting his child with a switch. He left marks on the child’s legs, buttocks, scrotum and head. In this situation he most certainly crossed the line of corporal punishment.

However, the alternative punishments that psychologists believe work better give the child a sense of entitlement where the child then believes he or she is deserving of everything.

Jan Hunt, director of the Natural Child Project, has a degrees in psychology and counseling psychology. She has come up with 22 alternative forms of punishment. One of her forms to prevent unwanted behavior is to meet “your child’s needs when they are first expressed. With [his or her] current needs met, [the child] is free to move on to the next stage of learning.”

With that method, many things can go wrong. By giving into your child’s wants when he or she develops an emotional yearning for them — which is also known as a temper tantrum — the child will then learn that by acting that way he or she will receive what he or she wants every time.

Another example Hunt would like to express as an alternative form to discipline is to “give your child time. A statement like ‘Let me know when you’re ready to share the toy, climb into the car seat or put on your jacket’ will give the child a sense of autonomy and make it easier for him to cooperate.”

By giving your child the sense of autonomy they begin to feel as though they do not need to answer to authority. Who is the adult here? If the parent does not take control of a situation, like deciding for the child when to climb into the car seat, then all respect for the parent is lost.

As a child you are supposed to grow up with boundaries and sets of rules that parents make to ensure that the child will be able to survive a society with permanent boundaries where the repercussions are a lot worse than corporal punishment.

Society’s boundaries were set up long ago and still hold true today. There are rarely second chances, and the option to throw a temper tantrum to get what he or she wants is undoubtedly unacceptable.

If you don’t learn boundaries at a young age and don’t get punished when those boundaries have been crossed, you end up learning in society the hard way which ends up being worse than the corporal punishment a child could have been raised with.