I suppose I should just tell myself that I've already had my say and leave it at that, but of course that would be too reasonable. This is more or less a rebuttal of jaro's post.

"What the BDSM arena teaches us is the central place of consent. Kids do not or cannot consent to being smacked or belted or slapped on the wrist - they don't have the capacity for it. But I would be wrong to believe that I was able to make that kind of choice for my daughter...especially when being spanked in that kind of setting is all about the wrong kind of power...it's painful, humiliating and disempowering..."

We are talking about punishing your child, aren't we? Punishments don't require consent, although they do demand judicious application. You can't only hand out punishments to your daughter that she consents to. Most children aren't mature enough to agree that they need punishing at all (as you say, they don't have the capacity for it), but then again, most adults also don't consent to being punished, and if they do they're rarely allowed to determine their own punishment (the truth of this statement would depend upon how you categorize plea bargaining, I suppose).

And how is spanking a child whose behavior won't be modified in any other way the wrong kind of power? Bush, Jr. invading Iraq on trumped up charges is the wrong use of power, but Bush, Sr. liberating Kuwait was an enormously appropriate use of power, and Clinton's failure to intervene in Rwanda was at least as important a misuse of power as Bush, Jr.'s . My niece needs desperately to be spanked, and my sister's failure to do so is a terrible misuse of power. The older that child gets, the worse she behaves, and it's my sister's fault for abdicating her responsibility, just as Clinton did. With great power comes great responsibility, and all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing, if I may commingle two appropriate quotes. In the parent/child relationship, the parent has the power, and if they refuse to use their power for good they do the child no favors.

If a punishment is painful, then it's more memorable and more likely to have a lasting impact (less likely to need repeating). Spanking doesn't need to be humiliating; if you do it in the aisle of a grocery store, a hallway in a museum, or in the middle of a church service then it would be, of course, but if you do it in a room with the door shut and just the two of you there, it's far less humiliating than being made to sit in a corner. Disempowerment is simply a given. If a punishment empowers your daughter, it's hard to see how it qualifies as a punishment at all.

So, I looked up "punish" in my Webster's New Universal Unabridged and this is what I found: "1. to subject to pain, loss, confinement, death, etc. as a penalty for some offense, transgression or fault 2. to inflict a penalty for (an offense, fault, etc.)" and a few more that are less germane. I'm afraid there's not much help in here, since these definitions would seem to equally support both of our positions.

At any rate, a spanking is not a beating, nor is it smacking a kid around, and it's always the punishment of last resort. In my experience, guilt is the punishment of first resort, and after the age of five or so, it's usually very effective.

Thank you for reviving this thread.