“Domestic corporal punishment” has been completely illegal in Sweden since <i>1979</i>. It is upheld and anyone caught doing it risks having their children removed, and if you are seen doing it in public, expect several people to react and/or report you <i>immediately</i>. (I.e. it’s not one of those laws which is frequently ignored – it is an established social norm.)<p>I would say that the population of Sweden has <i>not</i> suffered demonstrably from this. Make of this fact what you will.
My wife was arriving at our house. She parked on the street because the driveway was full. Our two-year-old daughter went running out to meet Mommy. Then a car came flying around the corner (since we lived at the top of a T intersection, that means that the car was <i>right there</i>.) We both yelled at our daughter to stop. She did, and the car went past.<p>Two houses later, the car ran over a cat. I went up to see if there was anything I could do. There wasn't, but I got to see what the underside of a cat's head looks like after a car has run over the top side.<p>I will do almost anything to have that not happen to my daughter's head.<p>But the problem is, my two-year-old daughter can't understand what 3000 pounds of car at 30 MPH are going to do to her. It's totally outside of her comprehension. Yes, we can tell her that playing in the road hurts, but there's no way she can really get it.<p>But she can learn that, when Mommy or Daddy tell me to stop and I don't, it hurts every single time. (The consistency is important. Most of the time, it doesn't matter at all if she doesn't stop when I tell her, it merely annoys me. But once in a while, <i>it really matters</i>. It may even mean life or death. And I can't tell which ones it will be in advance.)<p>You could say, "You don't have to do that. Just fence the front yard." And, sure that would work - for that issue. But then there's chemicals. "Well, install child locks on the cabinets." Sure, we did that. But there's still going to be that one time that you had it out on the counter and the phone rang...<p>Now, can this be overdone? Absolutely. Should reason replace it as early as possible? Definitely. But when my children were young, I spanked them to teach them that disobedience hurts. I did this, not because I hated them, but because I loved them and wanted to be able to protect them against a world that has more dangers than they knew - dangers that could hurt a lot more than a spanking.
I was spanked as a child. Not frequently (maybe 5 times over 15 years), but enough that I knew pain was a possible punishment. Me and my brother were very "active" kids (apparently, people called us "the demolition team") so I guess it wasn't easy for our parents to control us; however, the more frequent punishment was "kneeling looking at the wall" - that one was very effective, as it calmed us down <i>and</i> discouraged similar behavior in the future. But, without the fear of pain, I don't think we would see our parents as authoritative figures.