I keep seeing these really stupid Facebook groups in my friends’ feeds these days. Some make me smile, some make me want to vomit, and some are just plain monstrous. One of the ones I’ve been seeing fairly regularly is “When I was your age, parents spanked their kids and not gave them time-outs.” Not only did this spanking apparently affect your ability to use proper grammar, people who join this group—it also mutilated your view on how to discipline children.

There is nothing about being spanked—or spanking—that merits bragging rights. There is nothing about spanking that people should be proud of. It is not a right of passage. It is not even natural. It’s violence wrapped up in a twisted explanation of “parenting.” Of course, if you spanked your dog, a mentally handicapped relative, a neighbor, a friend, or even a prison inmate in order to “discipline” them—or to make them see to your point of view, to get them back for telling you “No!” in public, or to laughably teach that hitting is wrong, which is just asinine—you would be arrested for assault. In twenty states, however, it’s perfectly fine to do this to small children.

I simply cannot wrap my head around this obsession we have with spanking! As my sister says, it’s pretty much ingrained into us as kids, and we just repeat what our parents did with us, thinking if it was good enough for us, it’s good enough for them. But so many studies have been published about its harms. Kids who are spanked are now proven to become more violent on average.

While so many of my friends justify their spanking by saying it happened to them and they’re okay—it happened to me, too, by the way—that doesn’t mean it’s okay. My mother smoked with me in the womb, and that was certainly not okay, though I did not die. (I did, however, end up with asthma, allergies, low birth weight, prematurity, etc. etc.)

 So many people end up with sexual disorders due to being spanked as children; many men become sexually violent or controlling while women become submissive and masochistic. We normally try to embrace some of these characteristics as “lifestyle choices”—and I’m not about to control what goes on in anyone’s bedroom and don’t think that anyone else should, either—but the fact remains that much of it is due to a person’s experiences with their erogenous zones manipulated as children. The confusion associated with parental love and abuse creates this desire for violence, just as many molested children grow to become molesters.

Please stop bragging about spanking your children and being spanked as a child. It’s just as sick as bragging about kicking dogs or blowing up frogs with firecrackers (hello, former president Bush). And until we stop implementing violence into our children’s lives, we cannot expect them to not be violent, let alone for peace in our communities—both at home and abroad—to be realized.