"when a parent heaps vicious insults on the head of his or her fourteen-year-old kid, it's not a "fight," it's just abuse"

Beating is the worst, and therefore the last means to be us'd in the correction of children, and that only in the cases of extremity, after all gently ways have been try'd, and proved unsuccessful; which, if well observ'd, there will very seldom be any need of blows.

I never yell at kids. I just hug them hard and threaten them not to do something again. I would never be aggressive with a woman or a little child. I would rather die before I raise hand on a little kid or a lady.

If an infant commit an assault, or utter slander, God forbid that he should not be answerable for it in a Court of justice.

One of our children when he was two or three years old used to rush at me when he had been naughty, and beat against me, and what he wanted by this monstrous behavior was an affirmation of love. And I would put my arms around him and hold him very tight until the dragon was gone and the loving small boy had returned.

[A] child smacking an adult across the face is not funny. It is, in fact, one of the last things society should tolerate.

[when he finally attacks the child] "No - aw, no, no, no! Aw, no! Auh, I feel so bad! But remember, guys: this is just a game…" [nerves himself, then puts the child out of his misery, to put it bluntly; palms his forehead in shame] "Nhhhh… That's awful!" [turns to find the ghost woman standing behind him again] "Jeezus! Stop that, lady!"

Somewhere, always, a child is being beaten.

Because I don’t know how to hit a white child,” she said. “A black child, I understand. A black child, you hit them and they stay black. Trevor, when you hit him he turns blue and green and yellow and red. I’ve never seen those colors before. I’m scared I’m going to break him.

The tragedy of old age, when a man’s too weak to hit his own child.

“Tcha! Tcha!” cried Poirot irritably. “You argue like a child.”

The worst was when adults really call you names as a child you don't understand and you know this is a person who looks like my mother or my father where they laughing at me.

"A couple of years ago, I read the findings of a study on the effects of divorced and separated parents talking negatively about their exes in the presence of their children. What I remember about the study most vividly is really just one thing: that it's devastating for a child to hear one parent speak ill of the other. In fact, so much so that the researchers found it was less psychologically damaging if a parent said directly to the child "You are a worthless piece of shit" than it was for a parent to say "Your mother/father is a worthless piece of shit."

I don't remember if they had any theories about why that was so, but it made sense to me. I think we all have something sturdier inside of us that rears up when we're being attacked that we simply can't call upon when someone we love is being attacked, especially if that someone is our parent, half of us-the primal other- and the person doing the attacking is the other half, the other primal other."

[P]ain is a marvelous purifier. . . It is not necessary to beat the child into submission; a little bit of pain goes a long way for a young child. However, the spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely.