Smacking is all of our business

Parenting writer Penelope Leach, in her article "Spanking: a shortcut to nowhere…", says spanking does not offer the desired results.

"I also believe … that far from producing better disciplined people, spanking makes it much more difficult to teach children how to behave," Leach says.

"Spanking is a shortcut to nowhere. To get where we want to go with our children we need to take a longer route, teaching them with our heads and hearts rather than with our hands and belts."

"Spanking has to be wrong because we all agree that hitting people is wrong and children are people – aren't they?"

If we accept only a smidgen of the research and acknowledge smacking is one of the least effective behaviour modification tools and is associated with later violence, then the repercussions are intrinsically a societal issue.

In a law that called smacking fairly and squarely what it is: physical assault, Sweden, in 1979, became the first country to outlaw smacking and thus gave children the same legal rights as adults. Since then eight other countries have followed suit to become anti smacking nations: Finland, Denmark, Norway, Austria, Cyprus, Croatia, Latvia and Italy.

These countries have recognised physical punishment is a community issue. Any disciplinary tactic parents employ on a "stressed-out" shopping expedition is our concern.

Life's general "business" and stress has made depression one of the top illnesses of the noughties. The days of over-the-fence chats, playing in creeks and neighbourhood cricket may not yet be extinct, but there is no denying these idyllic times may be numbered. Everyone's busy and the pace keeps notching up a cog.

Queensland Abused Child Trust executive director Jane Anderson says our changing society has instigated the breakdown of community which, in turn, has left parents alone and isolated with few backups in time of stress. In days gone by, extended family members were always at hand to help with rearing children and diffusing stress. Neighbourhoods were safe places where children could roam and have wide networks.

"It's sad when communities go. We're doing away with society," says Jane Anderson.

"For young mothers it's a lonely time. Being at home with children is a full-time, long job. What are we doing as a community in these difficult times?"

Could the answer lie simply in the offering of a cup of tea to the stressed-out mother in need? Are the small gestures and the random acts of kindness enough to break out of our cocoon and possibly deter potential violent episodes? Can we not act as role models for our peers?

I agree with James Garbarino who argues the way our children are nurtured and the adults they become concerns us all. He reinforces the "it's all of our business" ideal.

"We've erected a cultural superstructure around privacy and autonomy that is fundamentally not in the human best interest because it asks people to do something unnatural to them. If that's true, then we do indeed have a big agenda in changing this orientation, an orientation that says that children are the private matter of their parents. We have to see that every child is a social matter and that being a parent is a social act."