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In my 2007 article Young Children Should never be spanked, I reported that "Physical abuse does not teach your children good behaviour any more than sticking a dog's nose in urine trains it to be better behaved. It only makes for badly socialized dogs..."

And now here comes Adrian Peterson who was abused by his father and so became a particularly badly socialized dog, who follows in his father's footsteps to continue the family tradition of mercilessly beating his children as well. Peterson whipped one son so mercilessly that he left cuts and bruises on the boy’s back, buttocks, ankles, legs, and scrotum and another 4-year-old son from a different mother, was left with a scar over his eye.

There is nothing a 4-year-old may do to deserve a thrashing, even running into the street. The only chance you have of preventing your child from doing that again is to associate danger to the bad behavior. Beating your child to a pulp will not make him remember anything but how brutal of a beast you are.

If you do a web search on spanking children you will find no shortage of parents savages who proudly boast they spank their children and often, because the kids "need to learn a lesson." Obviously spanking does not work, since if it did, one would only need to spank once and not every single day.