Personally, I see all forms of hitting one's child as being negative. Part of parenting is teaching your children appropriate ways of acting and managing their behavior. People like to hit because it gets the child's attention and stops the immediate behavior, which is easier for the parent. Sometimes a child's behavior really can be infuriating and leave the parent to feel there's no other options.

However, hitting controls through fear. It doesn't teach a child appropriate alternative behavior, and it leads children to have more fear of their parents. I remember being spanked after 'warnings' and the like. On the few occasions which there was a 'message' afterward, I didn't really listen and hear it. I was just willing to say whatever I needed to in order to avoid more pain. Later, when I was a teenager, I didn't tell my mother things it really would have benefited me to share, because I didn't have that trust in her. I had learned to get around authority and be sneaky about something they'd consider bad, because I was afraid. Even though it wasn't obvious from her perspective, our relationship wasn't the same.

I think it's also important to realize you're building your child's expectations and teaching them how to interact with the world. When you spank, you're teaching your child that if they're bad enough, it's okay to be hurt. This can lead to enabling of abusive relationships later in life. You're also teaching that if you love someone enough, it's okay to hurt them. I really think parenting should be about discipline rather than punishment, but that takes a lot more time and mental energy - particularly in the hard cases. This can be even more difficult for a parent with a mental illness, but I still think it's important for the child's well being.

Now, I can't say for sure that there's never been a child who could benefit more than they suffered from being hit. I surely know that I was thought of as one and definitely wasn't one though. If one feels it's necessary to hit in order to get their point across, I'd suggest they first take a parenting class and learn alternatives. In my household, other forms of discipline were lax and it was made up for by brute force when my parents couldn't stand our behavior anymore. They couldn't see it, but looking back on the events, I can. If your child really requires that level of physical force to discipline, it might even be beneficial to get a professional in the household to assess it and see why that might be. We're all just human, and it's easy to miss other choices we might have along the way, which could curb behavior. Sometimes it takes only an ounce of prevention to take the place of a pound of cure.