Be grown up and stop all smacking

WHAT is smacking? Everyone you speak to has a slightly different take on what actually constitutes smacking a child – is it a stinging tap on the back of the legs when a toddler nearly sticks their fingers in an electric socket?

Or a hefty “boxing of the ears” as used to be described in Billy Bunter-type stories of the 1950s? Is it worse, like an assault? Or is a simple smack with the hand a positive way for parents to discipline their young?

I’d argue that you’ve lost control if you strike your child. If you can’t think of a cleverer and morally superior way of dealing with a crisis, you should be ashamed. I’m pretty sure I have never smacked my boys – I certainly can’t remember it and nor can they.

If I ever did, or nearly did so, it would have been when I was tired and exasperated – at the end of my tether. In other words, it would have been my fault, not theirs.

Last week, Scotland became the first country in the UK to outlaw smacking, even in the home. They said it enhanced children’s rights and now made Scotland the best country in the world for children to grow up in.

I applaud it. I reckon that in the 21st century we should be grown-up enough to discipline our children without resorting to violence, no matter how well-intended. We should be clever enough to parent with our brains, not our brawn. No matter how light the smack, it simply teaches children the wrong lesson – that hurting someone is good and even loving.

How bizarre and warped is that?

Watch out, though, for the outcry from some parents who feel that they’ve been robbed of a basic human right and fear criminalisation for simply wishing to curb their unruly brood. It’s already started, particularly from those who fear that England andwales will be next.

The pity is that we should need a law on this subject at all. It’s a given that the vast majority of parents love their children unconditionally. Yet so many still demand the “right” to physically scold them and often in ways they endured themselves and utterly hated when they were young.

We now know that bullies beget bullies, the abused too often become abusers, per■

WE ALL know about fatbergs, don’t we?those disgusting gigantic balls of fat and congealed household waste that clog up our sewers?well, in the tourist resort of Sidmouth in Devon, they have recently had such a problem.

They found a particularly large fatberg – but this was engorged, unusually, with sets of false teeth and incontinence pants and pads.

It formed a 209ft blockage clogging the sewers and is thought to have taken two years to form.

Removing the congealed mass took 36 tanker trucks more than eight weeks.

Experts say that the contents they found within it “reflected the ageing population” of the retirement resort. petuated through the generations. So even though I too resent the long arm of the law reaching too far into our family lives, I welcome a law that quite plainly states – and reminds adults who think, “Well, it never did me any harm” – that it probably did and it will harm your child, and perhaps ultimately even your grandchildren, if you physically hit them.

Scotland was very brave to outlaw smacking. The sheer fact that they have means we as a society will debate it and so bring the subject out into the open.

The very wording is “The Children (Equal Protection from Assault) Act”, and simply gives children the same protection from assault as adults, and their parents can’t use parental right as a justification.

I think most loving parents already imagined a child had the same rights and will be shocked to find they don’t in most of the UK. Scotland’s leaders announced that “Physical punishment has no place in 21st century Scotland.” Quite right – it should be the same all over. Let’s get it done.