> But appropriately, rarely applied, I can say with certainty it worked for me.
No, you can't. Maybe it did, but you don't know how you'd acted if they'd just talked to you instead. It's easy to think we can untangle how a given event shaped us, but we really are horribly bad at it.
It ignores that people who never were spanked regularly can tell similar stories about just having been talked to (that's how I learned not to stuff wires in outlets). You can't tell if they are right about how it affected their behaviour either. In either situation we're guessing based on how it made us feel.
I don't think the very occasional spank is likely to be massively damaging, but I also don't think its necessary - I grew up around the time it was outlawed in Norway in the 80's. It was publicised enough that the one time my mother slapped me when I was a child, I threatened to call the police because I'd heard about it on the radio.
People insisted the change in the law would be a disaster and that children needed to be spanked, and it'd be all doom and gloom.
It was largely a non-event, apart from some pastor that made a big point of protesting and telling everyone how he still spanked his children.
Children still learn not to put wires in electrical outlets whether their parents spank them or not (as I'm writing this, I've had flashes of recollection of scary scenarios that feel like they may have been things I was told about as a child, but I really has no way of knowing if that's a real memory or "fabricated"). There was no massive rise in badly behaved children, or sudden surge of people electrocuting themselves. Of course, nor did it make us all magically better adjusted.