Pretty far in the past now, the kid has gotten a lot more resistant to fear over the years.

But, back when they were about 7, ghosts were the big fear at night.

Solution: ghost incense. One of those things I pulled out of my ass in the moment that worked like magic.

The kid didn’t want to go to bed. Was asked why. The answer was that they didn’t want ghosts to come get them.

In a rare flash of genius, I said “Well, I can fix that. Ghosts can’t go anywhere when you burn a stick of a special incense. I keep a box of it around for emergencies.”

We lit some nice smelling stuff, and said the magic words, and that was that.

Now, the next day, we had a nice conversation about how ghosts aren’t real, and even if they were, they’re ghosts, they can’t hurt anything. The kid asked if we could burn the “ghost sticks” anyway, just in case we were wrong lol. So it became the bedtime thing. When the kid would get tired, they’d show up with a stick of incense and ask me to light it.

By the end of that summer, the kid had said they weren’t scared of ghosts any more, but can we use the incense anyway, it smells nice.

Sometimes, trying to convince someone that their fear isn’t based in reality is not only impossible, but counterproductive. For a kid, it’s all about helping them manage the fear, give them control of it.

Ignoring the mountain of evidence that you can find with a quick search that corporal punishment in general, and “spanking” in specific doesn’t work in the way people think/want it to, there’s a giant flaw in logic here.

If a stranger does a thing to your kid, and you would want them arrested, why would you do the same thing?

Seriously. That’s the glaring flaw in the arguments. If I discipline your kid with a single swat to the rear, I have committed a crime. One which most parents would not only insist come with legal consequences, but a significant amount would feel totally justified in using force to protect their child ( and they’d be right in that use of force, imo).

But then you want to do the exact same thing or worse and don’t expect it to affect the child at least as severely as the trauma from battery by strangers. If someone is going to argue that they need to hit their kid to maintain discipline, then claiming that it only works when a parent does it is just stupid.

Worse, claiming that the affects of the trauma of an assault is magically not going to happen because it’s a parent is outright insane.

That’s why, even for the very limited benefits that can come from using spanking as a tool (that are achieved better by other methods) you end up with more drawbacks than it’s worth.

As I said to my parents and my family regarding my kid: if you attempt to use spanking or other violence to “discipline” or “teach” my kid, that means such methods are effective. If that’s the case, then me beating the fuck out of you and never letting you near my kid again is most definitely going to be effective in teaching you to never hit my fucking kid.