Is it time to ban smacking your children?
Is it ever OK smack your own children? Does physical punishment ever have a place in parenting? This is a divisive, long-running debate that reared its head again this week, with a definitive report warning that smacking children risks triggering violence and mental health problems in later life.
Unlike in Wales and Scotland, the use of physical force against one’s own children in England and Northern Ireland has yet to be banned. As the law stands, parents in those two countries can cite “reasonable punishment” as a defence for why they hit their offspring, much to the horror of leading health professionals, who this week fiercely condemned the continuing situation.
In its report, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health called for Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, to start the process to change
