I always associated violence with underdevelopment.

If someone is not smart enough to have a discussion and is incapable of controlling himself, of course they resort to violence. I used to condemn immature parents whose only way of teaching their kids was hitting them. As I did more research, I realized some kids do need spanking.

Recently, I have been doing some babysitting, so I got to witness how kids act. From toddler to age 5, this a period of curiosity. They will touch anything and everything, putting all kinds of objects in their mouths. Monitoring children is a task that can be exhausting. All I can say is God bless the mothers. With all this work, parents do have their way of getting their children in the right direction and this is something that has existed since the dawn of time.

We call it spanking. But the real term in this context is behavioral conditioning. An experiment was performed on dogs in the 1890s by a Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. Essentially, he trained the dogs so that any time they heard a ring of bells, they would know that it is time for them to eat. In the experiment, the dogs associated sound with food. This test has been replicated, and the technique has been used by teachers on students to help in their study. Some years ago, an entrepreneur with the same line of thinking, went on the ABC show Shark tank to present his invention. He named it “Pavlok”. Pavlok is a bracelet that has electric shock you can perform on yourself if you feel like you are not concentrating. For example, if you were studying, and two minutes later you are on your phone, that is the moment to inflict that shock on yourself to break this habit.    

That is the only time physical “violence’’ is warranted: to associate pain with a bad habit. When a kid does something bad, and the parent spanks him, then the kid stops doing what he was  because he does want to feel that pain, then it is a success.

Not everyone needs to be spanked. After a certain age, a kid has the ability to really listen and understand. The only thing is parents should take emotion out of it when they are trying to discipline a child. Spanking is effective as a teaching tool, not a punishing tool.