Great article...she sounds like a wonderful teacher. I agree that parents are too eager to give in to their children to avoid confrontation or to avoid temper tantrums and dissent in the house. But we're seeing first-hand how all that giving in ripples out farther down the road...I know one set of parents who are now really struggling with the ripple effect of their earlier parenting mistakes. They now have a child that nobody can tolerate being around for very long at one time. Very sad.

As for discipline strategies, I never had my own children but was an early childhood teacher for several years, and was a live-in nanny to pay my way through college. Every child is different and no one thing works for all. I've seen children respond very quickly to a quiet reminder, so anything beyond that could have done more harm than good. Then there are some who seem not to respond to anything at all. Those are tough, but I guess a parent would hopefully know their child well enough to know what works best for that particular child.

As for me, I can tell you that I was spanked when I was 12, and it was the most humiliating, defining moment of my entire life. That was the night that I decided I didn't want to live anymore, and I struggled with suicidal thinking for the next 40 years. It was the wrong punishment, the worst possible recourse my parents could have chosen at that moment in my life. It sealed the deal, so to speak. I was already struggling with feelings of being an unwanted misfit in the family, and that spanking at that moment in response to my desperate vocalizing of those feelings confirmed everything I had been feeling. It took me forever to move past that spanking. Maybe it would have been the answer for another child, but my experience was horrific enough that I have been and will always be adamantly opposed to spankings. As Yonuh says, it's too easy for a parent to lose control, and there's too fine a line between a well-intentioned disciplinary pat on the bum to life-altering outright physical abuse.

I never felt that I was physically abused by that spanking...but it certainly left emotional scars that have at times debilitated me and taken me to precarious edges.