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How many smacks would I have to give im to get it to work And how hard?

across the face for a teenager who can? There are many grey areas.

Breaking point

Julia Llewellyn Smith, writing in the British Daily Mail newspaper, recounts that she gave her nearly-three-year-old daughter her frst (and only) smack after one particularly fraught morning of hair-pulling, breakfast-throwing and lunchbox emptying. Julia says, “Of course, beating a child is wrong … To me, the idea of a slap that causes pain is unacceptable, but my smacks aren’t hard enough to even sting – they merely jolt my children into stopping their bad behaviour.” She adds, “I don’t judge other parents who are honest – and brave – enough to admit that they slap, too, because as humans they

ren are uniquely onsider smacking ly better than no

occasionally give out once a month. I n quickly, and we r particularly bad

Another Hong Kong mum says, “I think the decision whether to smack or not can depend on the child. My frst child generally behaved well, and I never came close to smacking, and couldn’t understand how anyone could even consider it. Then my second child came along – she was gorgeous, sparky and fun, but incredibly headstrong, and everything was a battle, from changing her nappy, to keeping the raincover down on the pushchair when it was lashing with rain.

“One particularly bad day, when she was nearly three, we were in the garden and she was pulling the heads off the fowers. I asked her not to do it time and time again. I tried distracting her. I tried moving her away. But eventually, when she just kept on doing it, in utter frustration, I smacked her. She just looked at me, full of defance, and said, ‘That didn’t hurt!’ I then felt so guilty about what I’d done that I apologised. So not only had I demeaned myself by smacking her, I was now showing her that I was weak, too, and that I wasn’t this fountain-of-all-knowledge authority fgure that she thought I

Escalation o Some oppon lead to anoth parent’s only need to beco becomes use a cycle of vio One Ho She says, “I r he was young shocked so it while it didn myself going