IT’S Christmas, and your wife is helping you cook the family dinner. She has a weakness for cranberry sauce, and sticks her finger into the bowl. Before it reaches her mouth, you snatch her hand and smack it hard. It stings. She yowls. That’ll teach her. But of course it won’t. Not only have you just committed an assault but the day has been ruined, and your relationship too.

So why would it be any different for a child? When parents chastise their children with a smack or a slap, it is far worse than hitting an adult. Grown-ups can defend themselves, or walk away. A partnership or marriage can end, but childhood lasts forever. Unless parental force is so extreme that the authorities have to step in, young children cannot escape their punishers. They simply have to grow wary, and hope it doesn’t happen again.

Proposals to outlaw smacking, to be brought before Holyrood in a member’s bill by Green MSP John Finnie, might become law within the year. It will be a historic day, a signal that we are among the most civilised of nations, committed to caring for those who can’t protect themselves.

When you look at the levels of anger and violence in our own society, let alone the world, this change of culture can’t come soon enough. Yet the prospect of the ban has caused protests. Less than a third (30 per cent) of respondents to a survey support it, and more than half (53 per cent) believe smacking should still be allowed.

Their main worry, it seems, is not the welfare of children but the potential for so-called respectable adults to be criminalised for raising their offspring as they see fit. For some, as for their own parents and countless generations before them, teaching right from wrong involves tough love. How else can a toddler be prevented from running into the road? Surely a short, sharp lesson will make the point and potentially save their lives?

Well, perhaps. But to judge by the number of times I’ve watched little ones yanked by the arm, thumped on the bottom or the back of the legs and even on one occasion slapped hard on the face – all without modifying their behaviour – it would seem the message isn’t getting through. Pain and humiliation do not result in obedience and docility. When used too often, or fiercely, smacking causes resentment, rebellion and fear. A woman thwacking her spaniel to bring it to heel would be universally viewed with horror. Some might even dare to remonstrate. But when it’s a child, we are schooled to walk on, since it’s none of our business.

In previous ages, when people were less educated, families large and money tight, physical punishment was deemed perfectly acceptable. Now, however, it looks uncomfortably like brutality. Since time immemorial the British attitude to children has been punitive, telling them to keep quiet, and allowing them to become the butt of unfeeling or sadistic schoolteachers as well as parents. Yet a teacher today who clipped a pupil over the ear or brought a ruler down on the back of their hands would be queuing up at the JobCentre before nightfall. Such acts were outlawed decades ago. By introducing a smacking ban, government will thus be calling time on the harsh treatment inflicted on children at home, where privacy no longer hides them from the reach of the law.

Most parents will admit that smacking is not a sign that they are in charge, but that they have lost control. The signal it sends to youngsters is that aggression is a normal response to a situation. To the old argument that “it never did me any harm”, take a look at the levels of depression, addiction and anxiety around us. Coming under physical attack from the people who love you most is deeply and sometimes permanently scarring. It can lead to self-harming, to abusive relationships in adulthood and, since they have experienced it from infancy, to lashing out when under duress.

It’s half a century since Bob Dylan wrote his prophetic song in which he tells mothers and fathers: “Your sons and your daughters/Are beyond your command/Your old road is/Rapidly agin’. Please get out of the new one/If you can’t lend your hand/ For the times they are a-changin’.”

They are indeed changing, and for the better. Rethinking how to educate and control children requires time, effort, and bottomless reserves of patience and self-restraint. It involves talking to youngsters, and reasoning with them, once they are old enough to understand, and drawing lines beyond which there will be consequences – but none of them violent.

I know several young mums with demanding families, one with four boys below eight. She and her husband have acquired the sort of negotiating skills that could win us a brilliant Brexit deal. Explaining, being firm but kind, finding distractions, and never losing it are the new rules. Indeed, if countries and international diplomacy were run on the same principles the world, like our children, would be in a better and happier place.