It's come to the point where even if the male is present, there is no method for appropriate punishment. Spanking your child is grounds to have them removed from your home and placed with some foster family.
My father taught me a great deal of respect for action-consequence pairs. It gave me a proper compass to judge my actions by.
My father, although strict, never once abused me. Did I get spanked? You betcha. Was the level of spanking excessive? As a *child* I thought so, as an adult I look back and you know what? It wasn't as bad as I thought. It helped keep me well-grounded, even now in adulthood.
Heck when I was 6, I got spanked in the middle of a supermarket for acting up. No one even batted an eye.
Corporal punishment, like anything else, is best taken in medium dosages. Too much, it loses its effect;too little, it has no effect. The problem with today's environment is that I'm surrounded by people who think that their parents were just being abusive. They didn't LEARN anything from the experience. Maybe their parents did it differently, and didn't have the before-spanking and AAR to help them understand WHY they got spanked, so they could build themselves a proper judgement tree. Who knows? All I know is these people are the vocal minority who get their will pushed upon the unsuspecting populace. And their will is to coddle the child for misbehaving. Speak to them, make them understand.
I'm sorry, but most 6-year-olds have no capacity for logical reasoning. You cannot sit down with a 6-year-old and logically explain to them why its a bad thing to do whatever it was they did.
People are decent because of fear. Fear makes and breeds decent people. Fear of God, their parents, punishment, whatever. Every human needs a fear of SOMETHING to keep them in line in their daily routine. Once you have nothing to fear, you have no north pole on your moral compass, and you forget which way is which. As a child, I feared my father's disapproval, and of course I feared getting spanked. That alone probably saved me from doing a ton of stupid stuff in and of itself.
As the child progresses, however, there does come a point where spanking no longer has its place. For me, that was the age of 11. At that point my father started having logical conversations with me about my actions, and grounded me rather than spanked me. So the punishment continued but the need for a physical reinforcement wasn't there. Of course by that points my infractions were so slight none of them would have deserved a spanking but still.
Anyhow, to close out my book, I agree with Bucket that there needs to be some sort of secondary presence in the child's life. I just think we often misplace that as a need for a two-person raising of the child. One person can accomplish it, if society leaves them be and lets them raise their child (within reason) how they see fit.
