A boy is rude to his parents and gets a clip round the ear. A girl has a meltdown in the cereal aisle, then hides so that her mother flies into a panic and gives her a smack on the bottom when she eventually turns up. Did punishments like these ever actually do anybody any harm?
“When people say, ‘But a clip round the ear never hurt me,’ well, actually it does hurt you,” says Emma Citron, a consultant clinical psychologist who works with children, young people and adults. “You may deny that. You may say, ‘I knew my parents loved me.’ Fine, but they still shouldn’t have been clipping you around the ear. That was still a moment of poor parenting.”
