By the time my son Ben reached his third birthday, he was becoming a bit of a handful, to say the least. My wife and I had resisted the idea of introducing smacking for some time, as the problem began well into the ‘terrible twos’ but as we had no ideological opposition to such punishments, he finally began to get the occasional smack.
The problem was that it didn’t seem to be having much of an effect on Ben. I would bend him over, smack the seat of his trousers for a few seconds and he would scream and cry, but before too long I would have to repeat the process all over again. It seemed that smacking just wasn’t teaching him the lesson we hoped for.