Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, Research-based Parenting Ideas To Help Kids Thrive

I’ve been thinking about producing this episode for several years now, and I always wished I wouldn’t need to do it.  Then every few months I’d see a post in an online community saying something like “Is spanking really that bad? I was spanked and I turned out fine” and I knew that one day I’d have to do an episode on it - so here it is.   My guest, Professor Andrew Grogan-Kaylor, has studied and written extensively about physical punishment of children, and believes spanking should be considered an Adverse Childhood Experience (which is a marker of severe trauma).  I mean, if you think about it, we are actually talking about physical abuse here: hitting another human being.  We only call it spanking because it’s supposed to be controlled and as punishment for an infraction.  But if my husband were to hit me in a controlled way as punishment for something I’d done wrong, would we still call it spanking?  (And as Dr. Grogan-Kaylor notes, if we’re spanking our child we’re almost by definition not doing i