Over at Bloomberg, I side with the vast majority of Americans who believe spanking is sometimes appropriate.

Robert Larzelere, a professor at Oklahoma State University who researches human development and family science, tells me that the studies on which the anti-spanking journalists rely have two great flaws.
The first is that many of them don’t account for the possibility that it’s the kids who act out the most who draw the most frequent punishments. They observe that kids who receive corporal punishment have more behavioral problems than kids who don’t and conclude that the punishment caused the difference.
The second is that they lump together very different kinds of parental behavior. . . .