Cass Avery: Legislation only way to stop parents hitting kids

If smacking worked, you'd only have to do it once. And I didn't know any kid when I was growing up on whom it worked - in fact, kids had a long list of routine misdemeanours that were worth it, if a whack was all that was coming.

Teachers, as well as parents, were regular belters and some of them took evident pride in their disciplinary work. There was one guy who would do a run-up. He was legendary. If you got the strap from him the punishment was worth more kudos. He was short.

Getting caned, getting the strap or getting a wooden spoon wrapped around the rear was just one of those things that kids put up with.

I never met anyone who had actual scars. Belting was just what parents and teachers did when they lost their rag. And helping them misplace that particular cloth item was what a lot of kids worked hard at achieving. Parents, teachers, the owner of the local dairy (who had only one good eye and the counter was long, so we were out the door with the stolen booty before he could get his walk shorts and long socks into stride) - they all had a breaking point.

And we played to that. We knew where the boundaries were and we ran to them with lemming-like wits, throwing ourselves into the abyss where corporal punishment waited like Gollum.

And all we learned as we watched that short teacher thunder down the corridor, past the window in the classroom door, on his way to a hunched backside in the locker room, was that adults were fallible and we should treat them with wary contempt.

Not one teacher I met who wielded a strap had our respect. Some of them inspired fear. No doubt about it. But fear isn't respect and a fair few grown-ups could do with a reminder of that. The adult who wins you, who keeps your head up - that's someone you still talk about when you're older and you're laughing about the git with the strap.

Teachers had to stop hitting kids eventually - the law demanded it. But for some strange reason this sanity was never extended to the home.

Legislating against smacking is something the Scottish, British and now the New Zealand Government have shied away from. In the face of public anguish over the cruelties meted out to children, we still can't bring ourselves to popularly support a ban on hitting them.

If we make smacking kids illegal what do we risk? Will they run amok and behave like monsters? Only if we let them. But how will we stop them? Now that's a good question.

How will we raise kids who can make their own choices about consequence and accountability?

How will we raise kids who will understand short-term self-denial for long-term gain, who will understand other people's needs in relation to their own and make empathetic choices?

Easy, by being those people ourselves.

"Spare the rod and spoil the child" is a piece of scaremongering from an age when people put kids up chimneys and hung them on hooks in swaddling while the adults got on with gruelling lives. Indulgence isn't the flipside of smacking - it's just the extreme end of a long piece of string with intolerance and brutality at one end and needy parents at the other.

"A smack is just a smack. It's not a full-on beating." So when do you stop? Do you wait for bruises, or are a few welts enough? Is it two good slaps on a bare leg or is a thump in the guts okay too?

It's because outcomes are hard to control that legislation is placed in front of consequences. So rather than just punishing parents who kill their kids, we should legislate to stop them hitting them at all.

There are plenty of simple precedents.

We legislated people into cycle helmets because we can't guarantee a fall off a bike will cause only a small bruise, and we legislated people into seatbelts because we can't guarantee a car will be doing only 25km/h at the moment of impact.

"No one can tell me how to bring up my kids. It didn't do me any harm." Maybe. Are you so happy you can't imagine anything better for your kids? When you had the wooden spoon round your rump it was considered normal. Times change.

"It's our way of doing things - it's a cultural thing." Then your culture is failing. Nobility, pride and courage don't survive in that sort of culture and without those things a culture doesn't survive.

"It's better to educate than legislate." What's the point of teaching people not to hit their kids when the law says they are perfectly entitled to?

If you hit a child you're showing them you can't do any better. You're teaching them a problem-solving technique that will land them in a heap of trouble.

And you are choosing to be part of a culture that kills kids.

Herald feature: Child Abuse