I have this friend...

But I'll come back to that later. Right now, I'd like to focus on spanking, an issue that can quickly produce heated debate among parents. I could cite the words of famous psychologists and pediatricians who are on both sides of the issue, but I'm not sure how much good that would do. We humans are not easily swayed on such personal family issues; we tend to take what fits and discard the rest.

So I've decided to go with logic and just say flat-out that spanking does not compute. It's illogical.

Yes, it has short-term effects that fulfill certain goals; it can stop a child from doing something a parent does not want that child to do. When repeated, it can show that child what will happen if he or she continues this behavior. That part of the scenario is quite logical.

But there's a glitch in this reasoning when we start thinking about long-term effects. There's a lesson not learned. If the child stops the behavior primarily out of fear of punishment, what has he or she learned, and how is corporal punishment going to stop that child from taking up this behavior once he or she is too big to be spanked?

There are some pretty nasty unintended lessons that are taught by spanking. One of those lessons is that it's OK to hurt people who are smaller than you.

Let's take a very applicable scenario. Parents often spank a child who hits another child, which is a ludicrous punishment. "How dare you hit your little brother!" <Smack!> Might is power. The bigger and stronger will always control the smaller and weaker.

Proponents of spanking often argue that corporal punishment fosters respect for one's elders. These people confuse respect with fear. If a parent only has to raise a hand and give a warning look to subdue a child, that's not respect. It's fear.

I'd like to get back to my friend now for a bit. My friend has no children of his own, but he was once a child, of course. A child without much of a childhood.

He was physically battered and emotionally abused for the first decade and a half of his life. He sees no sense in spanking, even though conventional spanking bears little resemblance to the level of violence he experienced in his own life.

But both involve parents hurting their children. True, abusive and non-abusive parents have radically different motives, but I think it's important to note the reaction of the children. When a child is spanked, he or she is likely to react to the pain of being spanked, rather than to what the spanking is about. On the other hand, a logical consequence that is related to the infraction gives the child something real to consider and allows him or her a greater opportunity to explore his or her own feelings about the incident.

When parents say it hurts them more than it hurts their children when they spank, I always wonder how they know this. Because they can't know what that child feels.

And often, that not knowing is a big part of the negative messages (intended and unintended) a parent leaves a child to carry around, sometimes for life. This brings us into the murky area of defining emotional abuse. It's not abusive to tease a 13-year-old about his or her first love, but it can be if that child is clearly upset by it and the adults in her life don't let up. It's not abusive to tickle a child, but tickling can be extremely abusive if taken to an extreme.

This brings me back to my friend. He received many negative messages from his parents, particularly his father. He once made a list of "rules" from his childhood; the first was "Everything bad that happens to you is your fault." Number two: "Everything good that happens to you is a mistake, because you don't deserve anything good. And you will pay later for accepting goodness under false pretenses. And three: "There are no accidents. It's your fault. As above."

Picture an 8-year-old who strangers noticed for his quietness. Now realize that the reason he was that quiet was it was safer. To speak up risked being smacked for some infraction he could not predict.

This boy grew up to have an intriguing history with violence. He learned to embrace it, to enjoy it, on some level, for a while, but not with those smaller or weaker.

In fact, he once discovered a man raping a woman and he coolly and calmly threw him down a flight of stairs, then picked him up and threw him down another set of stairs and then out the door. The guy was in the hospital for two weeks. Beneath that cool exterior was, I think, anger too strong to express in other ways.

That cool exterior has for decades been a mask, a safety net for a 55-year-old man who has never been able to fully trust anyone or to rid himself of the irrational feeling that there is evil at his core. I believe (and I doubt he would argue the point) that what he senses as evil is composed largely of his own anger, which he has been unable to face.

What I find particularly troubling about my friend is his difficulty in determining his own worth, a feeling obviously imbedded by years of being treated as if he had none. He has always measured his worth by how worthy he was to other people; he seems genuinely surprised when someone points out things that define his basic worth in ways that are not dependent on his doing something to earn it.

I realize that it may look like I'm comparing apples and oranges, and I must point out that I am not comparing my friend's experiences with the experiences of a child whose parents administer light spankings and verbal lectures. What I'm saying is that there is a gray area. Everyone has his or her own feelings about where the line should be drawn between punishment and abuse, so there is no real boundary.

That's the logical side of it. On the emotional side, people get caught up in feelings. Staunch pro-spanking parents want to protect their right to discipline their children as they see fit, while staunch anti-spanking parents want to protect the rights of children to not be hurt by those who hold power over them.

Both sides have merit. While I lean more to the side of the non-spankers, I'm not terribly anguished over a parent who lightly swats his or her kid on the butt now and then. But pro-spanking parents have sometimes criticized me for not spanking my own kids (and pointed out that my kids would be spanked if "necessary" while in their care), which I consider an intrusion.

And I'm not claiming to have never spanked, although except for one frustrated swat this fall it's been a handful of years since I've done so. It was never something I felt comfortable doing. I'm also not claiming to have never said things to my kids that hurt their feelings; I have done so and am not proud of it.

I've heard it said that when dealing with one's children, one should ask the question: "Would I treat my friend this way?" That should make any parent stop in his or her tracks and weigh the importance of authority against the importance of respect. I think we can find a healthy balance between the two. Clearly, children need guidelines and boundaries, but they need to have input in these guidelines and they need to be respected and encouraged as individuals.

And yes, my feelings about this are colored by knowing my friend, who has reached a stage in his life where he is looking back at decades of opportunities not taken and needs not met, and feeling a certain sense of emptiness and detachment from a world in which he has never felt in step. It's frustrating, and sad, to witness this, yet I continue to believe that he has within himself the strength to get past his own obstacles. He's often told me that I believe in him more than he believes in himself.

Well, sometimes that's exactly what a friend needs.