Smacking children has been a controversial topic in the media over the last couple of years, with many debates and anti-smacking campaigns. Following this many people want to ban the smacking or hitting of children in the UK. With a recent episode of Coronation Street flabbergasting viewers, the smacking debate has been enlightened in the media yet again.
Parents are allowed to smack their children, but a law came into place in 2004 meaning that they could only do so, without causing actual harm or redness to the child. This is perhaps why the smacking scene in Coronation Street shocked viewers so much, because the smack was quite aggressive and would have caused harm to the child, therefore highly disturbed viewers.
From personal experience, being smacked as a child was never quite aggressive, however certain events always remain in your mind from when you were punished. Although I don’t blame my parents from how they disciplined me, personally today, I would never smack a child. I think that in our society there are many other methods to discipline a child, rather than physically smacking or hitting them.
However people argue that in some cases, gently smacking a child can be beneficial to teach them not to do something again but a huge ‘wallop’ isn’t something that will ever teach a child, it’s just something that gives the parent power and control over them. Furthermore the child won’t learn from their mistakes, they will just know that if they do something wrong they will be physically punished.
After-all what does physically harming a child achieve?
Although some people would agree that smacking accomplishes nothing, other parents would disagree and say that smacking helps to identify right from wrong and teach children how to behave in society. However, in my personal view, physically hurting a child doesn’t achieve an awful lot really, other than in some cases children feeling neglected by their parents and perhaps losing respect for them. It doesn’t teach them how to change their behaviour, it just makes them scared of their parents as they associate being naughty, with getting smacked.
Therefore, I think that smacking should be banned altogether, I don’t think it accomplishes very much, and there is a lot of help and advice on how to punish and discipline children without smacking. The website ‘KidsHealth’ has a lot of information about how to discipline children affectively http://kidshealth.org/parent/positive/talk/discipline.html#cat171.
Jade Cragg
Tags: children, comment, coronation street, parents, uk
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