I'm not saying anyone should hit your child. I'm saying don't act smug because your 1 year old says thank you with this holier than thou "I guess it's just as easy as being a good parent, weird" attitude. You've barely even begun to see the affects of your parenting when your child is 1. There was heavy implications of "if your child isn't as good as mine then you're not as good a parent as me" in your post which is bullshit.
I have older children (they'll be 6 and 3 this year) and this is an unfair attitude that betrays insecurity about your own confidence in your parenting. My kids have both vacillated (at different times) between being perfectly-behaved youngsters that other parents looked enviously at, and disruptive monsters that I was mortified to be associated with. That's just life; we don't even expect adults to be perfectly behaved around the clock, even though most of them have decades' more experience moderating their emotions than children do.
For what it's worth, I routinely doubt my own parenting in the low points, and I occasionally sit back and think "I must be doing a decent job" at the high points. Even at the lowest ebbs, though, I've never hit them. Restrained? Yes. Removed from a situation and isolated? Absolutely. Raised my voice at? More often than I'd like, but yes, absolutely.
Here's something I've openly admitted to people before: I fully understand how parents can get pushed so far they
feel like hurting their children. Our youngest was a hellish baby, and for the first year of his life I was surviving on about an hour's sleep a night, on the landing floor, because my wife had passed her own breaking point. I was a physical and emotional wreck, my business nearly failed, my marriage was on the rocks, and when he started screaming again for the twentieth time that night and I was just about to grab five minutes' sleep, my hands instinctively balled up and my teeth gritted all on their own. That was a bad place to be, and it crept up on me through no conscious process; it was purely reptilian. But when that happened - and it was more than once - I just didn't go into the room. I went outside, into the garden, and stared at the stars until I calmed down.
The thing is, acting on that violent impulse is completely selfish, and it's damaging to both the perpetrator and the victim. Lashing out in anger is a very base instinct, and the few times in my life that I've really
shouted at or confronted another adult, I've regretted it when my conscious mind kicked back in and the adrenaline subsided. No child can properly rationalise the reasons for the anger a parent might be feeling, because that anger is only in the parent's head. And if that anger manifests itself as violence, however mild, then the violence is all the child can see. The only person who gets any emotional "release" from it is the parent - hence why I say hitting your kids is an inherently selfish act.
I was hurt as a kid. Much more than smacking. My mum threw me at a wall as a baby - something she still thinks is wistfully funny today - and my dad gave me a shoulder injury as a toddler that's lasted into my late thirties. None of that did anything to help me understand or moderate my behaviour. It just made me afraid, and resentful.
I turned out ok
in spite of my upbringing. And the older I get, the more distance I can put between the person I am today and the childhood I had - privileged on the surface, but physically and emotionally messed up underneath - the better I understand that nobody's judging you but yourself. And if you feel remorse after hitting your children - which I'm sure everyone who advocates it does, whether they admit it or not - then you already know you're doing the wrong thing - for them and for you.
