Smacking gets you a quick and easy fix but builds up years of resentment Persuasion is more

Smacking gets you a quick and easy fix, but builds up years of resentment Persuasion is more exhausting but pays off in the end I know I’ve done both.We deserve to celebrate the 1960s more. Then along came the new thinking: John Bowlby and Donald Winnicott researched a child’s need for love and understanding. Benjamin Spock told mothers to listen to their children, understand the reasons behind tantrums and rages, to put more emphasis on explanation and persuasion.Fathers got involved, too, and new generations at ease with each other suddenly made family life more relaxed and appealing. However, there should be other ways.Thus argued the child-centred revolution of the 1960s.

I grew up before then, and knew the severity of the old ways. My mother’s major precept for child-rearing, which she shared with me when my own were small, is “you must first break a child’s will”. In fact, her regime of smacks and silences simply strengthened my own and made life hard for us all. Mothers need a swift and effective way of defusing the situation, and a smack often seems to clear the air, though why smacking a child should stop it from crying seems to defy logic.

The screaming child rolling around on the floor of the supermarket, or the noisy three-year-old snatching another’s toy and then raising it high to deal them a hefty blow. Suddenly there is panic on every hand that “little smacks” will land mothers – it’s usually mothers, they’re the ones who have to cope with check-out tantrums – in court. But this is no more likely than that fathers who bath their small daughters will be charged as paedophiles.I take the “little smacks” issue seriously. I am familiar with it, both as a victim who throughout my childhood regularly got a clip round the ear for minor offences, and as a perpetrator, because I too have known that exasperating rage when a toddler has got completely out of control. There are always cries of outrage when this is suggested, and the Government is cowardly in not confronting them. I, of course, was on the other side, my case being that stigmas are repulsive at any time, but also that in the 1960s some really remarkable things happened to the institution of the family.
This enlightened view of family life will soon get another boost when a cross-bench alliance of peers forces a vote on an amendment to the Children Bill to give children the same protection from assault in their home as adults In other words, to outlaw smacking. It has taken the case of Victoria Climbie, whose catastrophic injuries issued within her own family led to her death, for us to ask once again for a definition of what constitutes what the law defends as “reasonable chastisement”.

I was their victim last Wednesday when the issue was whether the legacy of the 1960s had been a fine social revolution that swept away deference and repression, or a social disaster that laid the way open for the collapse of civilisation that we are seeing. The case for the collapse was urged by Melanie Phillips, whose biggest regret seems to be that there is no longer a stigma attached to single parenthood, thus leading to the decline of the family, that bulwark of all that is worthwhile. The Inquisition may not be what it was but The Moral Maze still packs a punch. With the Vatican arguing it didn’t torture and kill as many as we’d all thought, the four inquisitors on Radio 4’s fight for the true faith still get the thumbscrews out. Anyone who thinks it gives us control over planning our fertility and especially the ability to leave it late could be in for a rude awakening.Last week Anthea Turner gave a moving interview on why, after five failed attempts, she was giving up on IVF and concentrating on her marriage to Grant Bovey At 43 she, like many women, thought she had time.