Should childeren be hit by parents for discipline?

I assume you're talking about spanking. What we accept as a defintion of hitting would imply something else, which is flat out illegal. It's called child abuse. The issue with spanking is ... you're still hitting a child, just in a predefined location. I still consider it child abuse. I have five kids. They're all good kids, good grades, well behaved and well mannered. I have never spanked them, not once. Spanking is a scare tactic, plain and simple. I don't want my children to be afraid of me, I want them to respect me. My parents did believe in spanking. I was terrified of getting in trouble, not because I was scared to disappoint them, but because I was scared of physical reprecussions. No child should be afraid of their parents in that way. If you do your job as a parent properly, by instilling proper parenting techniques, laying boundaries, setting goals and consequences, then there IS no need to spank your child to begin with. Spanking is done for the parents, not the child. When you get down to the heart of the matter, they eventually admit "nothing else would get through to them, so it was a last resort" .... which roughly translates to "I didn't know what else to do, so I hit them instead." It's a copout for lazy parenting. Simplify it. Smacking a kid across the head is child abuse. Why should smacking them in the butt be any different?