I can add to it that children tend to have an amazing capacity to rationalize things to fit what their like, instead of reasoning in terms of cause and effect. For example, children age 7-16 often the "it's not fair" argument if something does not go to their liking. Thus, your 11-year old will see it as the greatest unfairness and injustice in the world if you punish him for annoying his 9-year old sibling, but it would be only fair and just if you punish the sibling for bothering him. As I recall a developmental psych class I took many years ago, thinking that involves multitasking, causality, multiple relations and abstraction develops quite late, around 16 years of age or so.
>From that stanbdpoint, reasoning in terms of cause and effect with a 9-year
old would be tantamount to trying to explain the danger of a sunburn to an
Innuit. Inflicting physical pain is a form of the body language, a way of
communicating the danger (i.e. a vicarious experience of what the children
can actually experience if the rule is broken) by directly appealing to
child'personal experience, instead of using abstraction-based persuasion.
Given that the ability for abstract reasosning develops quite late in human
development (it does NOT mean it is a higher or better form of cognition,
however), abstraction-based persuasion would miss the point entirely -
something that the scribbling class has difficulty understanding. But that
should not be surprising, the scribbling class (from which helping
professions are drawn) has the general tendency for admiring the mental and
the ideal, while loathing the material and the corporeal.
Of course, I fully agree with the point made earlier by joanna that there is a big difference between punishment and inflicting fear. There are ways of communication that philosophers have not dreamed of - that includes inter alia tactile or olfactory stimuli that many egg-heads miss altogether. Physical punishment is acceptable as long as it stays within the realm of communication without transgressing to the realm of intimidation.
wojtek