WHAT parent out there hasn’t, in the madness and stress of the frontline, at least flirted with smacking their children?

I don’t think I’ve ever actually done it, but I’ve come close, and at times done things I feel are equivalent.

But I’ve dragged them across the floor, forced clothing onto them, and held them in the air, with the force of my rage only just contained in my fingers.

Parenting is a physical affair. Put big strong people as carers to unruly small people, who don’t always know what’s best for themselves, and the question of appropriate force is always going to arise.

This is not to defend smacking – just to acknowledge that one of the problems with the so-called smacking ban is that we all know how hard parenting is.

In fact, I’m broadly in favour of the new Scottish legislation that was published this week and looks set to be passed, making ours the first country in the UK to have such a ban.

But it has to be said I don’t like the widely-used term smacking ban. The word “smack” has a sadly casual feel in our culture – so normalised it almost sounds like a regular, family leisure activity. It’s often used to belittle legislation.

If we instead focus on the key wording of the legislation – which is to remove the defence of “justifiable assault” – things start to seem less ambiguous. Those words “justifiable” and “assault” are rather shocking.

As many have pointed out, in our law adults have more protection from assault than children.

Of course, some would still argue that in certain circumstances – say to teach a child not to get into situations of danger, or not to attack another child – such assault is justifiable.

But we all also know that there are other ways of dealing with such circumstances.

This kind of legislation isn’t a popular one. Poll after poll comes back saying that the majority of the public don’t want it.

I don’t think this is just because that many people want to reserve the right to give their children a round of physical punishment, though some may.

I think for many it’s because they are nervous. I suspect most of us have felt the fear that we might hurt our children.

One of the good things about the law is it removes ambiguity. Most of us think smacking is wrong, but there’s always the odd person out there who will advocate it as a sound tool for bringing up healthy children.

The truth is there’s no longer any real argument over whether smacking is bad for children.

There have been five meta-analyses of the research and what they showed was that parents who spanked their children were less likely to have a good relationship with them, and that children who were smacked were more likely to experience emotional and physical abuse and neglect.

One of the loudest arguments against the legislation is that parents who inflict some light smack on their children will be criminalised.

There is a fear currently that the laws around abuse and assault are not sensitive enough to allow for distinguishing between serious violence and more subtle physical interactions.

Yet, while I do feel we need some subtlety in this – children need physical contact and we don’t want a world in which people are scared to touch them – I think this is an exaggerated fear.

After all, in spite of current domestic abuse legislation, the chief problem is not people crying wolf or being convicted for a playful cuff, but that abuse remains underreported.

There are still big questions to be asked on this issue.

One is where we go from here, not so much with the law, as with our parenting culture.

For whenever I’ve researched discipline it’s become clear to me that there’s barely a method of child correction which some research hasn’t found to be harmful to the child or ineffective.

How we get children to do what is best for them is a key issue. Getting rid of smacking is just the beginning of that conversation.

AH, the Booker Prize. There we were, thinking that there was something definitive about it, and that these absolutely were the best novels out there, decided by consensus by the best of minds. Then come along a bunch of juicy tales from the Booker archive about how disputed some of the winners were. According to a new British Library film, David Storey’s Saville won it, back in 1976, only through the toss of a coin ¬ there was a stalemate in which the judges could not agree. Joanna Lumley, a judge when Keri Hulme’s The Bone People won in 1985, regarded the novel as “indefensible” and “over-my-dead-body stuff”. Rebecca West, who judged in 1969 and 1970 seemed to despise all the contenders. What does this tell us? What we always knew – that the relationship with a book, particularly a novel, is a highly personal thing. Next time you find yourself not enjoying that much-lauded, prize-winning novel, don’t feel bad about yourself – probably some of the judges didn’t like it either.