Instead of the parent telling the kid what should be done, or how to correct the behavior, maybe the parent resorts to just being a bully and hitting him instead.
I don’t mean to sound like a whiny liberal, but that’s usually what happened to me. My mom would just go off into a rage instead of telling us what the problem was and how we could do things correctly.
The abuse is something that definitely stays with you, so I can see how the results of the study were what they were.
I think spanking is appropriate in extreme situations where a child is willfully disobedient, physically attacks other children without provoction, or delibertely damages or steals the property of others. Beyond that, it’s a very bad idea and often a case of inadequate, otherwise powerless, parents bullying the only people they think they can do it to without consequence. My parents were very much that way and it created a permanent emotional barrier between us, particularly beween my enthusiastically punishing mother and me, one that lasted until only a few years before she died. Parents, by creating that kind of barrier, often lose much of the loving relationship they’d otherwise have with their children, especially after the children grow up, and painfully discover “what goes around comes around.” It happened to my parents and I’ve never felt any great compunctions about it.