Slapping is disrespectful but hitting with a paplepel isnt? Could you elaborate?
How restrained were your folks? I wont go all analytical here but that, too, is a major issue. Emotional Neglect and abuse is on the same side of a coin.
Really, its truly moot, we arent issued with training material and nobody is fit to be a parent. We are all damaged by our experiences as children.
I don't know how restrained, but my father wouldn't hesitate to grab us right there in public if we persistently misbehaved. I cannot remember more than two or three incidents though - we tended to behave precisely because we knew there would be immediate consequences if we did not. And other people constantly remarked on what polite kids we were. :-)
Thing is, through all of that, I never for a single moment doubted that my father would also cheerfully sacrifice his own life for me if it ever came to that. In first grade I was bullied on the school bus; one afternoon he got on the bus himself, grabbed the bully, shook him like a terrier shakes a rat, and told him in no uncertain terms what the results would be if he ever so much as looked at me again in a way that displeased me. The bullying promptly stopped. My father then went to see the school principal to arrange for the obvious solution, namely that kids on the school buses be separated in age groups instead of sitting anywhere.
And thus, on the whole, I have very fond memories of my father, which is why I think the whole corporal punishment thing is kind of irrelevant.
Then he went and died on us when I was twelve. My mother hit the bottle hard, and for the the rest of my teens I effectively had no parents. Predictably I went off the rails. Thank ye gods they still had corporal punishment at school at the time, or I would have ended up in prison. :-)
Nowadays our solution appears to be to let the kids run wild until prison is the only solution left.
Now you are right that no one is fit to be a parent. There are no proper textbooks. No one is really fit to be a school teacher either. In my days, discipline at school was perhaps too strict. Or at least, some teachers were genuinely sadists and used the strict disciplinary code as instrument for their own gratification. And nowadays, in many schools, this has been replaced with no discipline at all, so not even the kids who want to learn can do so.
After careful consideration I have concluded that I have no answers. Blessedly, I have no kids either, so the whole thing isn't really my problem.