Kelly Clarkson didn’t hold back. In a 2018 radio interview, the American Idol winner said she wasn’t against spanking and didn’t see anything wrong with it.
Her argument was personal: her own parents disciplined her that way during her childhood and, she said, it never affected her. A mother of two young children at the time, she said she warned her daughter River Rose, 3, that she would get a spanking if she didn’t stop misbehaving.
She said that warning had made the girl repeat certain behaviors less often. She acknowledged that she knew many people disagreed with that method.
And they did. Social media was split: some defended her right to raise her children as she saw fit; others called physical punishment harmful and outdated. The issue even reached the experts, because the American Academy of Pediatrics discourages it and recommends other forms of discipline.
A valid parenting method or a legacy that no longer has a place?