>>>>I think it's interesting that in the 50s, 95% of parents supported spanking their children as a means of discipline. Today, that number is around 50%. I'm actually surprised it's as high as 50% today.
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>>>>I think one of the problems is not that 50% do or do not believe in spanking, but rather effective means of discipline have not replaced spanking globally. In many cases, little or no discipline is used at all. The behavior of kids today is so unbelievable compared to past generations. Perhaps effective means of training and disciplining kids should be taught in school whether or not those kids grow up to have their own kids. I know parenting and childhood development is an elective in most schools and many kids take that course for the easy grade. I know my daughter did. They did not teach corporal punishment.
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>>>>When they asked the kids in the class how many had been spanked by their parents, almost every hand went up. My daughter didn't raise her hand because she didn't remember ever being spanked. She was too young the two times I did spank her to recall it. That doesn't mean it didn't have an effect on her. Funny that she remembers the timeouts though. I guess those were more frequent.
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>>>My daughter Allie had a small wooden time out chair when she was little and she spent so much time in it, it started falling apart (LOL). I am not making this up. She has been a spitfire from birth.
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>>That brings back memories. :o) I remember a time when Haley was about to turn 4. I know it was right before she started preschool. She got upset over something and threw a doll across the room. I looked at her and she immediately walked over to her timeout chair and sat down without a word. I picked up the doll and put it on top of a shelf where I put the things that were temporarily taken away if she didn't take care of them or appreciate them. She was very manipulative in a creative way at an early age. She would wait a little bit and then she would come up to me and give me a long sad story of how her doll missed her and her other dolls were so unhappy that Jenny wasn't there with them (her name for the doll). She would tell me all her other dolls were crying because Jenny was gone. That was the same doll whose hair was a myriad of colors. She would color her hair with water color markers and then show me how pretty she was :o) I probably took the doll away for a couple of hours at the most but to her it must've seemed like a lifetime.
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>We had a whole gallery of Barbies with colorful hair, hair cut off, missing heads, missing limbs, etc.
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>Allie was a big thrower, too. With that radar like ability kids have to identify what you don't want them to do, then doing it, when she was frustrated she would often grab the nearest object and hurl it. Dolls, stuffed animals, blankets, whatever was handy. "Throw," she would announce. It was among her first 50 or so words.

There's a very interesting article here on children (it was published back in Feb 08):

http://nymag.com/news/features/43893/