We don't know for certain whether the kids who are not beaten are smarter because they were raised in a violence-free environment, or whether they are smarter because their parents are smart enough to resolve their problems without resorting to violence.
So I would not say that refraining from hitting your kids will make them 10 IQ points smarter than they otherwise would have been if you had beaten them. But the fact that you are even considering it at all probably means you are already smarter than most other parents.
That's a bit scary, when you think about it. Spending even a single moment thinking about how you could be a better parent already makes you a better parent than some parents. And that is the reason why child abuse is a problem.
That leads into a philosophical question. How willing would you be to allow a possible pedophile to stop parents from hitting their kids? How willing are you to possibly lend a pedophile encrypted space on your hard drive to maybe stop a government from performing suspicionless dragnet surveillance on hundreds of millions of innocent people?
What if that surveillance included inspecting all the sexting messages that teenagers send to each other over Snapchat? How badly does the government have to act before we finally decide to rank Pedobear lower than Big Brother on our enemies lists?
We don't know for certain whether the kids who are not beaten are smarter because they were raised in a violence-free environment, or whether they are smarter because their parents are smart enough to resolve their problems without resorting to violence.
So I would not say that refraining from hitting your kids will make them 10 IQ points smarter than they otherwise would have been if you had beaten them. But the fact that you are even considering it at all probably means you are already smarter than most other parents.
That's a bit scary, when you think about it. Spending even a single moment thinking about how you could be a better parent already makes you a better parent than some parents. And that is the reason why child abuse is a problem.
That leads into a philosophical question. How willing would you be to allow a possible pedophile to stop parents from hitting their kids? How willing are you to possibly lend a pedophile encrypted space on your hard drive to maybe stop a government from performing suspicionless dragnet surveillance on hundreds of millions of innocent people?
What if that surveillance included inspecting all the sexting messages that teenagers send to each other over Snapchat? How badly does the government have to act before we finally decide to rank Pedobear lower than Big Brother on our enemies lists?