This is some flat earth, climate change is a lie, anti-vaxxer stuff right here.
Wow, quite the false dichotomy you've established there.
The thread isn't about choosing between hitting your kid or total laissez faire non-discipline of your child.
It's about physical methods of discipline vs non physical methods of discipline.
Holy shit. Please, take one semester of psychology or something. Seriously, if you go to University to study psychology, it'll quite literally be part of your psych 101 class.
Please.
Proving that you can achieve the same disciplinary effects without the use of physical punishment does not prove that physical punishment
doesn't work. It obviously does, otherwise we wouldn't even be having this conversation.
The problem with this argument is the bias of people suggesting that it's absolutely positively wrong,
under any and all circumstances, to cause physical pain to a child for disciplinary reasons. And seeing that we're talking about psychology, there are plenty of reasons why it's silly to take a rigid, absolute stance like this on such a complex issue.
For example, this sometimes goes beyond simple disciplinary action itself. I know kids who's parents were
deliberately tough on them when it came to punishment because the environment they grew up in simply did not treat soft kids kindly, and the outside pressure to participate in "delinquent" activities has punishments that are worse than in other, more well-off neighborhoods. My own parents definitely went through this, and although i was far better off growing up than my parents were, they did the same to me and my siblings. If
you personally never grew up in such an environment, and instead in one where there's no reason to ever escalate to violence, then physical punishment will sound completely unnecessary to you because you wouldn't know any better. But like in so many of these GAF arguments, people just love to argue from these unrealistically ideal viewpoints about human issues that isn't always as simple as black and white. Life doesn't work that way and children aren't raised in research controlled environments.
Now, none of that is to say that the same lesson couldn't have been taught
without getting physical with your child, or that this is the only (or even most optimal) way to discipline/raise a child. But it's just something you should maybe consider before you point fingers and call well-meaning parents child abusers because they hit their children.