shakran

Because it was irrelevant. First, unless you neglected to include something the swing did not connect, and you did not mention anything about any follow up swings from your daughter. In other words, when you hurled your daughter into the fridge, your wife wasn't being attacked. Plus, from the way you described it, your actions were not to defend your wife, but to punish your child for attacking your wife. There's a big difference. Finally, if you're gonna sit there and tell me that a fully grown man has ONLY the option of hurling his 15 year old daughter into an appliance to defend people, then I think you're just proving my initial point.

Sounds like a lot of justifying for what is essentially the same act. I've taught my child not to hit anyone unless he is in physical danger and fighting is the only way out. I did not teach him "don't hit anyone unless a) you do it with the palm of your hand rather than the back , b) you do it from the back of the guy you're hitting instead of the front and c) you really want to.

We cannot sit there and tell our kids that hitting is wrong and then hit them when they do something which displeases us. Aside from the opinion that hitting the child is wrong no matter what, we are introducing a logical inconsistancy.

And to those saying the kid doesn't understand any punishment after an hour because of the attention span, but will understand the spanking, well that logic just doesn't bear out. Either the kid has a suitable attention span to remember what he did wrong or he does not. If he does not, then it doesn't matter if I put him in a corner OR I hit him, either way, he's not gonna remember why tomorrow. Besides, I don't buy the attention span stuff. Kids remember endless strings of seemingly random cheat codes for every game they play, yet they won't remember why misbehaving is bad? C'mon!

You can justify spanking all you want, but when you get right down to it there are plenty of punishments that are just as effective as spanking - the only downside is that they all take more parental work than spanking does. Spanking is very very easy. Whack the kid and you're done. Other punishments require follow through on the part of the parent, and most parents simply aren't willing to invest that kind of effort into the punishment.

And I stand by my initial opinion that throwing your kid into appliances or hitting them with sticks, or any other form of violence of that nature IS child abuse, and you SHOULD lose the kid and go to jail.