Everything from the family histories of those called "our closest living relatives, the great apes", to the span of human family histories to this day, shows that, for one thing, it is rather provincial (Limited in perspective, narrow, and self-centered) of people today to believe it's an exclusively "modern/enlightened" to attempt raising young children like "little adults" without discipline including the physical discipline of spanking. Indeed both the great apes and human parents today show both the wisdom in including physical discipline in raising young offspring, and the folly of omitting that.

Yes, while it is equally, demonstrably costly and even tragic to go to extreme with "not sparing the rod", the demonstrable fact remains that children need both the constant nurturing (which some mistake as "spoiling") by both spoken (including "I love you")and demonstrated love and encouragement, with positive incentives and rewards, and absolute immovable limits (which some mistake as "archaic") with very swift and certain punishment in equally "tough love" which children will not only "test", sometimes diabolically so, but also respond to in various ways, including their either not becoming or becoming "behavior problems" in direct proportion with how far outside of an "even balance" between affection and discipline their parents go, and how consistent or inconsistent their parents are in maintaining or not maintaining that even balance.

Indeed as also demonstrated by both humans and our "closest living relatives" alike, the younger the offspring is, the more pivotal physical discipline, or the lack thereof, can be in their behaving, or not behaving, although with humans it is true that the older the offspring becomes the more capable and likely they are to respond increasingly better to non-physical discipline, and increasingly worse to physical "discipline". In other words, the older children get, the less central "spanking" becomes to their understanding, and the more of an option other forms of discipline become until spanking can be safely and completely eliminated as even any kind of option by the time they're thirteen years of age.

Besides, countless of us know of examples of those with a parent or parents who so extremely abused and oppressively "disciplined" them that they "couldn't even breathe" as children, and those with parent(s) who wouldn't do anything from the start but "talk" so of course their children quickly learned to just "tune them out", and in both cases the results became costly and/or even tragic, including anything from "chronic failure" to drug and/or alcohol abuse. Yet, on the other hand, those parents who at least learned to consistently maintain an even balance between affection and discipline (including physical discipline as a decreasing option as their children aged), and refused to be so provincial as to follow any supposedly "modern and enlightened" psycho-babble to the contrary, virtually invariably raised at least reasonably happy, well-adjusted children, thus indicative of "emotionally intelligent" offspring.

The key word here is "balance", which is itself emotionally intelligent, and will thus help develop children's emotional intelligence.

Learn more about this author, Thomas Edison Jefferson.
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