Verbal abuse = do something or be psychically abused.
Physical abuse = do something or be physically abused.
These two methods emphasize avoidance of a proximate harm first and foremost. As such, I would argue that neither are beneficial.
You cannot teach critical thinking skills when certain actions are met with a slap or verbal abuse; the fear of a proximate harm motivates behavior.
One could try to argue that providing a reason behind the punishment prior to either form of abuse can teach good behavior; however, there is a pedagogy in the punishment itself which indoctrinates a child to learn that coercing others through threatening or implementing harm is the best method for addressing others. Moreover, the child is being coerced into accepting right and wrong rather than being convinced. No parent has complete moral knowledge. If the goal is to teach contemplation and reasoning to our children so that they are able to understand their own actions and belief with respect to others and continue toward progressing social knowledge, we cannot tell them what is right or wrong and encode them with this knowledge through conditioning them with proximate harms.
As someone who lived in two households. One employed proximate harms and the other did not. I can attest to being better behaved and conscientious of others when I was in the household that did not employ those methods. The punishing household did nothing but make me do as I was told and accept a set of ethics that often led to conflicting practices in real situations. The reason why is that coercion itself is built into that system of punishment; it is diametrically oppose and NOT conducive with intersubjective ethics. Essentially, treating others with respect and understanding how people are coerced and assisting others and navigating a social circumstances to make the right decisions that do not contribute to oppression and coercion of others.
In many ways, being an enforcer of coercion often means one is also being coerced. This chain of coercion is not built upon a foundation of intersubjective knowledge or right and wrong. Teaching morality and its practice requires individuals to understand principles and applying them flexibly as to navigate a complex social reality. The proximate harm method is often stringent and does not provide the ability to know right or wrong, but rather to just blindly execute right or wrong (without knowing whether or not it is actually is right or wrong.)
Of course no person can ever completely know right and wrong, but we can at least be reflective of the principles we strive to abide by, for instance non-coercion and empathy. Empathy just means, understanding an other person's behavior. People with a coerced sense of right and wrong often are lacking the ability to get underneath to the nuts and bolts as to why someone is acting in the way they are acting. Without empathy, we resort to being coercive. In many ways, we cannot even understand or empathize with ourselves when we coerce others. Therefore, within this very pedagogy of coercion we lose our ability to understand right and wrong since we cannot even empathize with ourselves. As Foucault articulates in Punishment and Discipline, we get punished, and then we discipline ourselves, as such, we lose the ability to have any autonomy. Without autonomy, it is a pointless and meaningless exchange of coercion.
Teaching coercion as a principle is self-defeating, period. For the most part, this principle is not practiced in the education of children by both parents and schools because of larger systems of discipline and punishment often devoid of meaning. Though, there are instances of resistance against these forms of coercion enforced through religion, traditionalism, norms, capitalism, and other things that coerce what things we value through proximate systems of punishment.
We need to learn how these very systems are oppressive rather than implement them.
We need to learn pragmatically ways in which we can resist such punishment, in order to balance navigating a punishing society and practically applying values of non-coercion and empathy.
And before we can do any of that, we cannot be barbaric and hit our children.
Societal norms oppress genuine human individuality and human collectivism by imposing value systems, often only a few people participate in establishing these norms. Thus, these values are highly subjective because the concern is of the few and not the many -- true meaning is derived intersubjectively or incorporating the human interests that apply to all persons universally.
However, most people participate in being disciplined and punishing other defectors in a rather blind manner. Resisting these forms of oppression is often difficult and stressful, but actually gives an individual a sense that they are actually participating in creating meaning rather than having meaning coerced upon them.
This is what I was taught in my other household. I literally never was grounded, hit, yelled at, or punished in any way. I had long discussions and was talked to as an adult rather than talked down to. It seems counter-intuitive at first glance, until you think through the pedagogy of punishing and why it fails to "teach" anything of meaning. Being able to create meaning with others is really what a progressing society looks like. In some ways, we see this happening more and more. As such, when society has meanings and values established though autonomous individuals we can actually be both collective and be self-disciplining rather than being disciplined.
I'd rather assist my children in being able to discipline themselves rather than learning being coerced and disciplined by others is somehow to their benefit or livelihood.
