I know you mean well. But your words will have zero power over parents who are at their wit's end and have tried everything else to no avail. When parents are at the end of their rope, they care nothing about whether a Supreme Court Justice considers a punishment "cruel and unusual" or whether a psychologist considers a punishment to be "emotionally damaging", and they care everything whether or not that punishment works in stopping the bad behavior they want to stop.
Kids are not carbon copies of each other like the cars that roll off an assembly line. They don't come with instruction manuals, and what succeeds with all the other kids in the world may fail with their kid. The knowledge that parents have about their kids, kids that they have lived with day after day, week after week, month after month for years is enough to be used as a catapult to launch the knowledge of all the anonymous armchair quarterbacks who know little to nothing about their kids (their knowledge is often limited to a newspaper article or a sound byte or a photo or a isolated video clip, if that) miles and miles and miles away. Perhaps if those anonymous armchair quarterbacks had to put up with the kids they pity day after day, week after week, month and month for years, they'd reach the same conclusions and find themselves doing the exact same things those desperate parents did.
Sometimes the only way to bring out the best in someone is to become that someone's worst nightmare.
