The question of whether corporal punishment is a valid form of discipline for children has been a pressing issue in the circles of many psychologists for decades. Some claim it is detrimental because it directly correlates with adult aggressive behavior. Others find it permissible, so long as it is done mechanically and not used as a first resort.
I call corporal punishment, or punishment inflicted on the body, the laziest form of effective parenting. Think about it. As an adult, when you hit a smaller human being who is clearly not the brightest (on account of them being relatively new to the world), you’re sending the message that violence garners results. Which, while somewhat true, is counterproductive, and only leads to more violence, and as psychologists have found, also leads to adult aggression.
It’s purely a cop-out because children literally don’t know any better. They are walking heads of cabbage, who are hard-wired to curiously misbehave. Corporal punishment is reserved for those parents without the intellectual capacity to actually tell their child why what they did was wrong.
And when they do not act accordingly, what better form of punishment is there than soul-crushing mental torture?
With my would-be children, the concept of a maximum security prison where meals and shelter for inmates are optional will not be a foreign concept. There will be no impetus for them to engage in miscreant behavior because they will have spent 18 years trying to escape incarceration in third world-like conditions. They’ll know first-hand what happens when you screw up in the real world.
But that, of course, is only if they don’t follow the rules.