Taylor Bartee
Phil 102
TTH 12:30
2/10/2015
Smith and The Case Against Spanking In his initial argument, Smith claims that spanking and other forms of physical discipline can pose serious risks to children. His first premise, says that physical punishment- including spanking, hitting and other means of causing pain- can lead to increased aggression, antisocial behavior, physical injury and mental health problems for children. Smith’s sub-premise states that physical punishment is defined as “legalized violence against children” that should be eliminated in all settings through “legislative, administrative, social and educational measures”. In his second premise, Smith states that physical punishment doesn’t work to get kids to comply, so parents think they have to keep escalating it. He states a second sub-premise claiming that physical punishment can work momentarily to stop problematic behavior because children are afraid to get hit, but it doesn’t work in the long term and can make children more aggressive. Therefore spanking and other forms of physical punishment should not be used when disciplining one’s child. Smith’s second premise states that parent’s think they have to keep escalating their level of physical punishment. This may not be true of some parents, and therefore may not relate or appeal to his everyone interested in this argument. Although this may not apply to all parents, it is a practical rule applying to most punishment cases that you should not escalate the level at which you perform the physical punishment. A second argument that Smith raises is that most studies do not show a causal link between physical punishment and long-term negative effects for children. In his first premise he claims that all research on parent discipline is going to be correlational because we can’t randomly assign kids to parents for an experimental study. He supports this with a second premise that, some researchers disagree about the validity of the studies on physical punishment. This is supported by a sub-premise that states that one researcher said she could just about count on one hand the studies that have found anything positive about physical punishment and hundreds that have been negative. Therefore we accept the claim that there is no causal link between physical punishment and long-term negative effects for children. Smith goes from stating some definitions and trying to explain why spanking is bad, to stating that studies do
