NZ outlawed smacking kids in 2007.
Here is an article from 2018.
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As the UK debates whether anti-smacking laws will criminalise ‘good’ parents, Lucy Corry asks whether the 2009 New Zealand ban changed Kiwi families.
If her two pre-schoolers are naughty, Maria* uses a kind of three-step process to sort them out. "We go from saying 'no', to putting them in time out, to smacking them on the hand," the Dunedin stay-at-home mother says. "If my 2-year-old is hitting his brother, or doing something dangerous, smacking is the only way to make him understand."
Maria, 30, is matter-of-fact about her attitude to physical discipline. Her husband and other family members are also pro-smacking, as are most of her friends with kids.
Spend a bit of time on internet parenting forums and you'll find plenty of mums and dads who share her views, which seems shocking in a country where parents lost the right to physically discipline their children 11 years ago, reports The Wireless.
"I don't believe that putting children in time out is enough for some kids," Maria says firmly. "It's not enough of a deterrent to stop them doing something wrong again. Smacking helps them learn."
After all, she says, it didn't harm her: "Of course I remember being smacked. If you did something really naughty back then you knew what was coming. Some people say it creates fear of the parent but that's rubbish. I was scared of being smacked, but I never felt my parents wanted to hurt me."
Even so, Maria didn't want her real name used in this story. She's not afraid of smacking her kids, but she avoids doing it in public because she doesn't want to be a social pariah. "Some people are just ridiculous over it and I don't want them to call the police on me," she sighs.
"I don't think they were right to ban smacking," she says. "Parents need a bit more leeway. I honestly don't consider a smack on the hand or the bottom to be child abuse."
'A THIRD OF NZ PARENTS STILL SMACK'
Smacking - or using "reasonable force" to discipline a child - has been outlawed in New Zealand since 2007. The repeal of section 59 of the Crimes Act, championed by former Green MP Sue Bradford, caused a massive furore at the time with many claiming that it would criminalise 'good parents'.
Many misunderstood the intent of the legislative change, which was designed to remove the defence of "reasonable force" in cases where parents and caregivers were being prosecuted for assault on children. In other words, if you were in court for savagely beating your child, you could no longer claim that they deserved it because they'd been naughty.
A 2009 review conducted by clinical psychologist Nigel Latta, then-police commissioner Howard Broad and Ministry of Social Development chief executive Peter Hughes found that agencies were not hunting down smackers and that the fabric of family life was not deteriorating because parents had become too frightened to discipline their kids. Then prime minister John Key said the review showed that light smacking was "acceptable" and that parents were free to choose whether they did it or not."
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12085272
